First Person shooters can make you feel the experience, associate yourself with the character and feel a part of the action better than any other genre of game.  Here are my top 5 first person shooter experiences which make an impact on the player and add a bigger and better level to the gaming experience.  Feel free to add any suggestions for your top 5 in the comments.  It's not exhaustive – but off the top of my head these are the ones that come to mind.  These aren't the best first person shooters or even favourite first person shooters, they're events in first person shooters that I consider an experience in themselves and which in some way define games or gaming.

- Storming the Horde's lair on the back of a Brumak.  Gears of War 2 is, without doubt, a brilliant game.  Quite apart from looking and sounding great, it has managed in many ways to re-invent the FPS with a completely new feel to it via it's style of control, duck and covers, running and reloading.  Everyone I have spoken to about the game in their first 10 minutes of playing it says something along the lines of “the controls feel a bit sluggish and a bit different”. Within an hour it feels completely natural and you don't know how you did without covering in other games.  They don't come much bigger than Brumaks, the ultimate enemy and pain the armoured ass of Marcus and Dom. After spending several levels of the game killing them, the chance to ride and control one is an awesome experience. It is in this list because (apart from being very, very cool) having spent 2 games worth of time fighting against Brumaks, the biggest symbol of the terror and power of the Locust, riding one in to the enemy base fills you with a genuine sense ingenuity.  This is a testament to the quality of the story/script and story telling ability of the GOW games.

– Shooting Zakhaev in the final scene of COD4.  COD4 championed radical and different uses of first person cameras and character movement to tell the story and better immerse  you in the game. A great example of this is the first level in the sinking ship as it slides and starts to stink.  The final scene wins the potential COD 4 moments because it combines these in-character cameras and movements with an ending and style-of-ending I'd never seen before.

- Using a sniper rifle for the first time in Goldeneye N64 on Surface.  GoldenEye is a cutting edge console first person shooter.  Often cited as one of the best ever N64 games, it featured many aspects that we consider a feature of modern games: non-linear levels, multiplayer games, stealth tactics and alarms, varied and scaled objectives for different level settings and 3D environments creating a very close representation of the Goldeneye film.  The sniper rifle, always an FPS favourite, was great on Goldeneye not just because of it's zoom but because it showed off the quality and size of the levels and animation – watching an enemy soldier approach out of the mist for the first time on Surface seconds before picking him off is still an impressive sight and when it was released in 1997, astonishing.

- Detaching a floor-mounted turret in a Halo 3.  Halo 3, the first Xbox360 outing for the franchise  looked great, played great and sounded great.  Detaching a floor mounted turret for the first time really gave you a sense of freedom within the game and, apart from looking great during standard play, the game seemed to set you up for awesome looking cinematographic sequences.  Defending a landing bay on top of a raised platform with Halo's music playing, with a film style camera angle is about as close to feeling like you're “playing a film” as you'll get.

- Readers of some of my other articles will know that I am a big fan of Bioshock. The release of Bioshock 2 is on my radar as a major gaming event!  There are A LOT of first person shooter experiences in Bioshock (if you haven't played it – play it) and the harvest or save option has become somewhat of a cliché in video game circles for the increasing moral, ethical and dilemmas in video games. None-the-less the kill or save question in Bioshock makes it into my top 5 FPS experiences.