When you play as many video games as game journalists do (purely for business reasons, of course), a certain smug awareness can creep in. That's a good thing, really. Being a little jaded separates the enthusiastic fanboy from the opinionated professional. New announcements generate excitement, but a hands-on session translates to "dissection time." We keep seeing the same mechanics, graphics, levels, guns, and enemies once removed that a certain detachment happens naturally.

So when I tell you several of my fellow journalists and I audibly gasped while playing a private demo of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 -- Vietnam at Electronic Arts' Redwood Shores campus, I want you to fully grasp what we experienced.

Effective range of Bad Company's flamethrowers: half a mile.

It sure as hell surprised us, and if you want that surprise to remain intact when it releases for download tomorrow on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (it's already live for PC players), now might be a good time to stop reading. But before you go, let me add one more thing: Moments like this are quickly becoming a very important part of how we experience a video game.

EA's actually made a point of having big showcase events turn up in every action-oriented game they do for several years now. Usually they're splashy, pre-scripted moments where something terrifically awesome happens. The bombing of Shanghai in Army of Two: The 40th Day, or a mission in Medal of Honor where you're pinned down, running low on ammo, and Taliban fighters just keep coming until everybody's down to pistols...and then pistol ammo starts dwindling. Showcase events might or might not advance the story, but the real point is they're memorable.

So just because Vietnam's a downloadable pack, don't think it gets exempted from the policy.

Its showcase moment happens on the Hill 937 map -- better known to history as Hamburger Hill -- in Battlefield's multi-control-point Rush mode. Starting on offense, our team sweated through an uphill assault off the beaches and into a lush jungle. All the greenery made for a lot of close-quarters gunfights, navigated straight up a treacherous mountainside.

After running face-first into an immovable defense, we eventually hit the enemy control point and detonated it. On to stage two: we charged up to the crest of the hill...and stopped.

A dead world stretched out below us.

Welcome to your nightmare.

Where we'd just fought through a jungle, now we saw a barren, burned-out husk where our military napalmed a forest into a graveyard. Fires still burned. We went from green to pitch black in one unexpected moment. I actually heard someone in the room say "Whoa."

Of course, in the next moment we grabbed tanks and flanked defenders and got on with the business of destroying another control point. But the contrast between what we conquered and what we gained...well, it staggered us. Graphically impressive? Sure. But psychologically, I got the definite sense we'd just expended an incredible amount of blood and effort to win a place not worth fighting for. Much like the real Hamburger Hill, where our military committed an incredible amount of men and resources to take a location they completely abandoned two weeks later.

I enjoyed playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 -- Vietnam, and it carries a lot of nice touches (Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" gets a lot of airtime), but that sudden change of scenery made it memorable. More memorable, I'd argue, because it happened organically rather than as a forced cutscene -- and most games would've thrown in a map flyover, breaking the immersion. Not Bad Company 2. It simply lets the moment happen as it should.

And that's important. When we talk about favorite movies, television shows, songs, books, or plays, we talk about the moments that stick with us. Games should be no different. Instead of mechanics, graphics, levels, guns, and enemies, our very first instinct ought to take us right to that split second where everything changed.

Increasingly, it does.