During every gauntlet of E3 press conferences, there's always one. One moment that stands out above the rest; the kind of experience you look back at fondly, long after the game it was tied to has come and gone. It could be a hilarious line, like "Attack its weakpoint for massive damage" or "one million troops... WOW." Or maybe it's that moment when months of hype pay off with a spectacular reveal, or a seemingly impossible announcement totally blindsides you (in a good way).

Whatever it ends up being, that memorable moment is something to treasure. Now that the press conferences are in the books, it's time to reflect on the moments that wowed, shocked, and delighted us. Stay awhile and reminisce with us about these less-than-a-week-old events, won't you?

Back in the early days of Xbox, then-president of the Interactive Entertainment Business division at Microsoft Don Mattrick likened backwards compatibility to backwards thinking. "If you're backwards compatible, you're really backwards," the Wall Street Journal in a 2013 interview, stating that only five percent of users would utilize the feature anyway.

If only Mattrick could have heard the thunderous approval from the crowd at Microsoft's E3 press conference, when it was announced that that backwards compatibility will arrive on the Xbox One this fall.

Guerilla Games doesn't have much of a reputation to those who haven't played a Killzone game, but their next game on PS4 offers the kind of world that'll command anyone's attention. As with Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, this post-apocalypse isn't a barren desert; it's a lush, overgrown jungle resting atop a collapsed metropolis, and it's absolutely gorgeous. There seems to have been some kind of robot rebellion leading up to this strange future, because wildlife like deer and birds have been replaced by metal simulacrums (that use car alarm noises to call for help).

The trailer gives you just enough time to fall in love with the female protagonist Aloy, who seems as tenacious and capable as Lara Croft. Her arsenal is an interesting mix of old and new: arrows with bullets for heads, spears made from sharpened machine parts. And then BAM - in charge some colossal cyborg dinos, complete with blue lasers and primal screams. Watching Aloy take down one of the beasts with some metal tethers and a stab to its robot heart is enough to make Horizon shoot to the top of your 'most anticipated games' list.

It was pretty great to recognize Angela Bassett as boss Six in the trailer for Rainbow Six: Siege; her likeness was so accurate that it even recreated her distinctive mouth movements perfectly. An actress of her stature joining the game’s cast was announcement enough, but when the woman herself walked out to share the stage with Aisha Tyler to discuss her role, we kind of lost our minds.

Bassett is an Oscar-nominated actress with a 20-year career that’s included turns as Betty Shabazz and Tina Turner, who (unlike so many others) regards her role in a shooty video game with the same craftsmanship that she does any other acting performance. She treated her appearance on Ubisoft’s stage with elegant, effortless grace, giving her digitized role - and the audience that would be enjoying it - respect. Her appearance at Ubisoft’s press conference also put two women of color on the same E3 stage, a sight practically unicorn-like in its rarity. It was a moment of true class in a sea of hype and awkwardness, and we loved it.

I don't know about you, but I spent the first few seconds of Sony's press conference saying, "No, no" with intense disbelief, and the three minutes that followed watching a boy and his giant bird dog explore a temple while trying not to cry. After years and so, so many vaporware jokes, we not only saw The Last Guardian emerge from obscurity, but there was a release date attached to its fuzzy, feathery tail. Does anyone else hear a triumphant music number coming from nowhere?

The trailer itself was fairly calm, showing the unnamed little boy we all remember from 2009 shouting to call his towering Falcor-like guardian. Most of the gameplay involved him moving onto different platforms, manipulating objects to make a new path, and making death-defying leaps of faith with the belief that the guardian would catch him, oh lord please catch him! Yet it was so charming, so beautiful, so lost to us for so long that even that simple bit of gameplay was enough to get us making incomprehensible noises of joy at each other. And then they followed it up with a splash image that simply read 2016, and the tears were unstoppable.

Let me take you on a journey back in time to PlayStation Experience 2014, where Sony and Square Enix pulled one of the greatest bait-and-switch moves in game conference history. In the middle of a long evening of new game announcements and trailers, a trailer was shown filled with the nostalgic images of Final Fantasy 7. 'This is it,' thought literally everyone watching at home. 'This is when that Final Fantasy 7 remake finally gets announced.' The trailer continued: Cloud fighting Shinra's grunts, the Highwind taking flight, and Sephiroth stepping through the fire. Any moment now those visuals were going to change into something new, something modern. A new FF7 was right around the corner.

Except it wasn't. Instead it was a port of the PC version to PS4. We all died a little inside that night. But at E3 2015, Sony and Square Enix redeemed themselves by finally, at long last, announcing the remake Final Fantasy fans have been clamoring for. A new Final Fantasy 7, redone with a fresh visual style, is on the horizon. The internet's reaction can be summed it with one phrase: 'NO WAY!!' followed by 'WAIT, WAIT, NO WAY!!' It was a huge surprise, tempered only by the fact that Sony's press conference was filled with huge surprises.

Nintendo’s been getting pretty good at having some fun with their Directs and Digital Events, but the E3 transformation of Reggie Fils-Aime, Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto into muppets - and then into muppet versions of characters from Star Fox - was their most delightful move yet. Nintendo didn’t take the gimmick too far, but did let the muppet hosts stick around for a while, mostly just to dance. It was pure, unfiltered happiness, which is basically Nintendo’s shtick.

It was a perfect reminder amongst the gore and guns of other press conferences that not everything has to be gritty or mature to be fun. Nothing wrong with a well-placed headshot, of course, but the muppets of Nintendo channelled childlike joy that left us grinning. : “You know and I know the warmth you feel whenever there’s a muppet around.” Everything really is better with muppets.

Sony's press conference was filled with games we had long-suspected of being vaporware, but arguably more surprising was Yu Suzuki taking the stage to reveal Shenmue 3. Okay, so it was to reveal a Kickstarter for Shenmue 3, but still. While The Last Guardian and a Final Fantasy 7 remake were at least churning in the rumor mill, the revival of Shenmue came completely out of left field.

Chills are still running up the arms of Dreamcast diehards and Shenmue supporters the world over, and financial pledges for the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter have poured in at a rate that's shattered records (and looks poised to overtake Bloodstained as the crowdfunding platform's most-funded video game project). Hearing that beautiful orchestral theme again, it's hard to blame fans for getting swept up in the moment.

When Bethesda finally pulled the lead-lined curtain off of Fallout 4, I was satisfied. It looked great, but after years of waiting to hear even the slightest peep about the next game in one of my favorite series, I was ready to keep waiting until next year to actually play it. After all, there was a ten-year wait between Fallout 2 and Fallout 3, right? Waiting ‘til spring or fall 2016 would be nothing next to that.

But Bethesda decided to get the whole thing out of the way at once, announcing a Fallout 4 release date of November 10. It makes sense in retrospect, since Skyrim, Bethesda Game Studios' last big project, shipped three years ago. That's plenty of time for a big, seasoned studio to get another project together, I just… just wasn't ready to get my hopes up for it. Sniffle.

When Nier New Project director Yoko Taro took the stage at Square Enix's press conference, it felt like a fractured dream after hours of restless tossing and turning. Square Enix's press conference was easily the most boring of the lot, long on time and short on announcements that weren't already announced the day before, but then… there was that helmet. And everybody watching who hadn't played Nier - which was a cult hit at best, so a lot of them - had no idea what was happening.

See, the helmet was a replica of Emil's weapon-form head from the original game, but nobody said anything about it. They didn't even acknowledge it was there, letting Taro deliver a standard "please look forward to it" speech as if he didn't have a terrifying Majora's Mask reject sitting on his scarf-wrapped shoulders. Which he did... unless it was just a mass delusion. Actually, it might have been a mass delusion.

Destiny’s elegant construction as game and machine has kept players in a lovely loop of gunplay and character improvement. Its structure has bounds, though, and can eventually start to feel static when hours of Raids and Strikes start blending together. Developer Bungie wants to bring a ghost into Destiny’s machine now, and earn the “expansion” label for its next project, The Taken King.

The Taken King will pull up to Destiny on September 15 like a dump truck and unload a rattling avalanche of new guns and armor. There will be no shortage of MORE, but that’s to be expected. What we want is more different.

Your successful mission to kill Crota in the previous DLC has consequences, beyond the rewards that spill out of him. Bungie essentially casts Crota’s body into the foundation of The Taken King, connecting the premise not to an uncontrollable galactic event, but to something you accomplished yourself. Crota’s god-like father is furious in the aftermath of your deeds, swiping a ghostly hand across the galaxy to wipe you and your regicidal guardian out. Also, his name is Oryx. Has there ever been a nice person with that name?

As Oryx lands his “Taken” armies on the rocky Martian satellite of Phobos (no stranger to demonic invasion in games), your perception of the Cabal changes. They’re hit hard by the corruptive effects of Oryx; their defeat shaking their standing as a strong faction in Destiny and making Bungie’s new villain appear even more threatening. The actors are shifting positions, albeit subtly, in Destiny’s story.

Destiny: The Taken King introduces three new sub-classes as ‘lost Guardian arts,’ with a standout going to the Warlock. Bungie’s knack for on-the-nose naming still thrives with Stormcaller, which lets you summon maelstroms of electric energy and charge forward, blue lightning flowing from your fingertips, just like Emperor Palpatine leaning forward on a Segway. Do we really need to go over the appeal of that?

The Titan gains Sunbreaker, which lets you hurl a big ol’ hammer like a boomerang, while the Hunter obtains a support class in Nightstalker. Summoning a glowing bow from the ether gives the Nightstalker a quick step up in combat, but the utility of the power isn’t as cool as the flashy looks. Between your transformation into an electric wraith as Stormcaller, and the Nightstalker's ethereal magic bow, I feel like Destiny is subtly tilting its sci-fi/fantasy balance, and maybe even making a case for guns not being as cool as instant storms.

The regular enemies in Destiny are so numerous and so effortlessly destroyed after a certain point, they all start blending together. Knights and Phalanxes can’t escape Oryx’s influence, returning in The Taken King as his corrupted thralls.

This is bad news for you, a Guardian, but good news if you’ve long stopped thinking of aliens as anything more than snarling sacks of XP. Their appearance is striking and creepy at the outset, forcing you to face a perversion of the old and familiar.

Destiny’s Crucible matches get a distinct air of intergalactic sports with the Rift game type, which Bungie sees as the long-awaited answer to a capture-the-flag style objective mode. It’s simple: get the spark and dunk it through a space-time rift (video games!), or do a backflip dunk to get extra points.

Meanwhile, “Mayhem” mode amps up the silliness by boosting the recharge rates of supers. The resulting fireworks, especially with the flashy new sub-classes in the mix, is meant to be thinly veiled chaos. The mechanical basics of Destiny’s PvP combat are still there, but they feel heightened to an extreme degree in Mayhem - perhaps to the point where more balanced matches seem mundane in comparison.

Oryx’s quest for revenge initially brings you to Phobos, where you’re sent into a crumbling Cabal vestige to investigate. The interior is pockmarked with explosions and strange slices of three-dimensional distortion, with debris weightlessly suspended in the moment of impact. The hmm-what-happened-here setup is eerie and well executed, eventually leading to your first glimpse of Crota’s big bad dad.

Bungie says it wants to drive players into further environmental discovery in The Taken King, later sending them into Oryx’s dreadnaught, a “giant, evil mausoleum.” If the developer follows through, it’ll resurface one of Destiny’s most romantic concepts: the guardian rummaging through mysterious, fantastical places, his or her footsteps bringing otherworldly machinery to life.

During every gauntlet of E3 press conferences, there's always one. One moment that stands out above the rest; the kind of experience you look back at fondly, long after the game it was tied to has come and gone. It could be a hilarious line, like "Attack its weakpoint for massive damage" or "one million troops... WOW." Or maybe it's that moment when months of hype pay off with a spectacular reveal, or a seemingly impossible announcement totally blindsides you (in a good way).

Whatever it ends up being, that memorable moment is something to treasure. Now that the press conferences are in the books, it's time to reflect on the moments that wowed, shocked, and delighted us. Stay awhile and reminisce with us about these less-than-a-week-old events, won't you?

Back in the early days of Xbox, then-president of the Interactive Entertainment Business division at Microsoft Don Mattrick likened backwards compatibility to backwards thinking. "If you're backwards compatible, you're really backwards," the Wall Street Journal in a 2013 interview, stating that only five percent of users would utilize the feature anyway.

If only Mattrick could have heard the thunderous approval from the crowd at Microsoft's E3 press conference, when it was announced that that backwards compatibility will arrive on the Xbox One this fall.

Guerilla Games doesn't have much of a reputation to those who haven't played a Killzone game, but their next game on PS4 offers the kind of world that'll command anyone's attention. As with Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, this post-apocalypse isn't a barren desert; it's a lush, overgrown jungle resting atop a collapsed metropolis, and it's absolutely gorgeous. There seems to have been some kind of robot rebellion leading up to this strange future, because wildlife like deer and birds have been replaced by metal simulacrums (that use car alarm noises to call for help).

The trailer gives you just enough time to fall in love with the female protagonist Aloy, who seems as tenacious and capable as Lara Croft. Her arsenal is an interesting mix of old and new: arrows with bullets for heads, spears made from sharpened machine parts. And then BAM - in charge some colossal cyborg dinos, complete with blue lasers and primal screams. Watching Aloy take down one of the beasts with some metal tethers and a stab to its robot heart is enough to make Horizon shoot to the top of your 'most anticipated games' list.

It was pretty great to recognize Angela Bassett as boss Six in the trailer for Rainbow Six: Siege; her likeness was so accurate that it even recreated her distinctive mouth movements perfectly. An actress of her stature joining the game’s cast was announcement enough, but when the woman herself walked out to share the stage with Aisha Tyler to discuss her role, we kind of lost our minds.

Bassett is an Oscar-nominated actress with a 20-year career that’s included turns as Betty Shabazz and Tina Turner, who (unlike so many others) regards her role in a shooty video game with the same craftsmanship that she does any other acting performance. She treated her appearance on Ubisoft’s stage with elegant, effortless grace, giving her digitized role - and the audience that would be enjoying it - respect. Her appearance at Ubisoft’s press conference also put two women of color on the same E3 stage, a sight practically unicorn-like in its rarity. It was a moment of true class in a sea of hype and awkwardness, and we loved it.

I don't know about you, but I spent the first few seconds of Sony's press conference saying, "No, no" with intense disbelief, and the three minutes that followed watching a boy and his giant bird dog explore a temple while trying not to cry. After years and so, so many vaporware jokes, we not only saw The Last Guardian emerge from obscurity, but there was a release date attached to its fuzzy, feathery tail. Does anyone else hear a triumphant music number coming from nowhere?

The trailer itself was fairly calm, showing the unnamed little boy we all remember from 2009 shouting to call his towering Falcor-like guardian. Most of the gameplay involved him moving onto different platforms, manipulating objects to make a new path, and making death-defying leaps of faith with the belief that the guardian would catch him, oh lord please catch him! Yet it was so charming, so beautiful, so lost to us for so long that even that simple bit of gameplay was enough to get us making incomprehensible noises of joy at each other. And then they followed it up with a splash image that simply read 2016, and the tears were unstoppable.

Let me take you on a journey back in time to PlayStation Experience 2014, where Sony and Square Enix pulled one of the greatest bait-and-switch moves in game conference history. In the middle of a long evening of new game announcements and trailers, a trailer was shown filled with the nostalgic images of Final Fantasy 7. 'This is it,' thought literally everyone watching at home. 'This is when that Final Fantasy 7 remake finally gets announced.' The trailer continued: Cloud fighting Shinra's grunts, the Highwind taking flight, and Sephiroth stepping through the fire. Any moment now those visuals were going to change into something new, something modern. A new FF7 was right around the corner.

Except it wasn't. Instead it was a port of the PC version to PS4. We all died a little inside that night. But at E3 2015, Sony and Square Enix redeemed themselves by finally, at long last, announcing the remake Final Fantasy fans have been clamoring for. A new Final Fantasy 7, redone with a fresh visual style, is on the horizon. The internet's reaction can be summed it with one phrase: 'NO WAY!!' followed by 'WAIT, WAIT, NO WAY!!' It was a huge surprise, tempered only by the fact that Sony's press conference was filled with huge surprises.

Nintendo’s been getting pretty good at having some fun with their Directs and Digital Events, but the E3 transformation of Reggie Fils-Aime, Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto into muppets - and then into muppet versions of characters from Star Fox - was their most delightful move yet. Nintendo didn’t take the gimmick too far, but did let the muppet hosts stick around for a while, mostly just to dance. It was pure, unfiltered happiness, which is basically Nintendo’s shtick.

It was a perfect reminder amongst the gore and guns of other press conferences that not everything has to be gritty or mature to be fun. Nothing wrong with a well-placed headshot, of course, but the muppets of Nintendo channelled childlike joy that left us grinning. : “You know and I know the warmth you feel whenever there’s a muppet around.” Everything really is better with muppets.

Sony's press conference was filled with games we had long-suspected of being vaporware, but arguably more surprising was Yu Suzuki taking the stage to reveal Shenmue 3. Okay, so it was to reveal a Kickstarter for Shenmue 3, but still. While The Last Guardian and a Final Fantasy 7 remake were at least churning in the rumor mill, the revival of Shenmue came completely out of left field.

Chills are still running up the arms of Dreamcast diehards and Shenmue supporters the world over, and financial pledges for the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter have poured in at a rate that's shattered records (and looks poised to overtake Bloodstained as the crowdfunding platform's most-funded video game project). Hearing that beautiful orchestral theme again, it's hard to blame fans for getting swept up in the moment.

When Bethesda finally pulled the lead-lined curtain off of Fallout 4, I was satisfied. It looked great, but after years of waiting to hear even the slightest peep about the next game in one of my favorite series, I was ready to keep waiting until next year to actually play it. After all, there was a ten-year wait between Fallout 2 and Fallout 3, right? Waiting ‘til spring or fall 2016 would be nothing next to that.

But Bethesda decided to get the whole thing out of the way at once, announcing a Fallout 4 release date of November 11. It makes sense in retrospect, since Skyrim, Bethesda Game Studios' last big project, shipped three years ago. That's plenty of time for a big, seasoned studio to get another project together, I just… just wasn't ready to get my hopes up for it. Sniffle.

When Nier New Project director Yoko Taro took the stage at Square Enix's press conference, it felt like a fractured dream after hours of restless tossing and turning. Square Enix's press conference was easily the most boring of the lot, long on time and short on announcements that weren't already announced the day before, but then… there was that helmet. And everybody watching who hadn't played Nier - which was a cult hit at best, so a lot of them - had no idea what was happening.

See, the helmet was a replica of Emil's weapon-form head from the original game, but nobody said anything about it. They didn't even acknowledge it was there, letting Taro deliver a standard "please look forward to it" speech as if he didn't have a terrifying Majora's Mask reject sitting on his scarf-wrapped shoulders. Which he did... unless it was just a mass delusion. Actually, it might have been a mass delusion.