Saints Row (series)/Awesome

The end of each chapter in the first game, the only times that the protagonist speaks, generally saying kick ass things in a cool-sounding voice.

Julius: That was a hell of an explosion. You okay, playa?
Protagonist: I got ran over by a mothafuckin' truck, what d'you think?

- A Shut UP, Hannibal moment to Big Bad Alderman Richard Hughes. "Can we hurry this up? I want to go to Freckle Bitch's."
When Action Girl Lin is murdered by Smug Snake William Sharp, you get a chance to get some well deserved karmic justice by chasing the bastard down.
- You do this after breaking out of a locked car trunk after being tied up and tossed in a lake. Unfortunately, you can't save Lin.
Tanya Winters gets one in the way she pretty much systematically plays the Vice Kings against one another, all the way being dismissed as a piece of fluff.

Warren Williams: Girl, what the fuck are you doing?
Tanya Winters: *Holds gun* What does it look like?
Warren Williams: Bitch, you better not m--
Tanya Winters: *shoots Winters dead* Thanks for the advice.

The Playa's final battle with Price forces him to battle against a Car Transport while he's being chased down by seemingly an endless number of Rollerz.
Benjamin King. What does he do when his entire gang betrays him and his former lieutenant tries to have him killed on the spot? He jumps up on the boardroom table, grabs a gangster's bat mid-swing, runs across the table while beating another gang member down, throws the bat to take out another, slide kicks another gangster at the end of the table and gets out the door with only a bullet in the arm. All in about ten seconds. And after that, he holds his own for a good three minutes in the middle of a courtyard filled with what might be the highest concentration of enemies the game has shown yet, all while the player races across the city to get to him. That Warren betrayed this man could qualify him for a What an Idiot! moment.

Saints Row 2 gets a couple good crowns in awesome.

The Power Walk finale of SR 2 qualifies.
You fight a pitched gun battle in Johnny Gat's living room. It's just the Boss and Johnny Gat against perhaps a dozen Ronin--and of the two, only the Boss has a gun, and even that is only a semi-auto pistol, while many of the Ronin have machine guns. The Boss manages to kill a dozen or more Ronin with his pistol and a stolen SMG while Johnny has a fucking sword duel with Jyunichi. It ends with Johnny being completely impaled by a katana-only to wind up whacking Jyunichi on both sides of the head and forcing him to release the sword he's currently got Johnny skewered on.
- It's 7 counting Jyunichi, with the Boss getting 4 and Gat 2. Still pretty sweet all the same.
Gat's "get up" sequence with Shogo Akuji at the cemetery.
- Specifically, at his girlfriend's funeral, Gat beats the hell out of the Ronin leader's son for giving the order to kill Aisha. He finishes the kid off by emptying a nearby casket and stuffing him inside, proceeding to bury him alive.
How about Johnny fighting off an army of Ronin to protect Wong? The man is a literal walking, talking, crowning moment, enough so to make glasses badass.
The climax of the Ronin mission where you go with Johnny to storm a Ronin hotel and blow it sky high. After clearing all the floors and setting all the charges, how do you get out quickly enough without being caught in the explosion? Simple: You do something straight out of a James Bond movie and base-jump off the top floor's balcony and parachute down as the place explodes all around you.
The fact that, thanks to the second game's custom radio stations, everything in the game can be done while The Final Countdown plays in the background.
The whole mission "The Siege". You finally decide to cut the bullshit and go take down Maero and the Brotherhood in an attack on their compound at the docks and confront a minigun wielding Maero on the roof. The cutscene that follows is a brutal, relentless brawl between the Boss and Maero, which even if it isn't playable, is one of the most epic moments of the game, especially considering that both characters have extremely valid reason to hate each other's guts.
A smaller one before that is the mission The Enemy of my Enemy, in which Boss sneaks on board of the ship containing Maero's shipment. After killing the Ultor secruity personal the ship is attacked by waves of Brotherhood enemies from boats and boats. Boss has to fight them off.
The entire premise of Saints Row 2 is a Crowning Moment of Awesome. Basically, you don't have a penny to your name when you escape from prison and proceed to dismantle three of the most powerful gangs in the world along with their mega-corporation sponsor. It's like the Kingpin's version of Born Again.
The entire escape from Stilwater Penitentiary is a Crowning Moment of Awesome as you fight your way out of the prison hospital bay and end up fending off helicopters and police boats with a boat-mouned machine gun.
Your character makes the Brotherhood leader, Maero, unintentionally run over his girlfriend, Jessica, with a monster truck.
- It's even more impressive when you recognize the context. The main character is avenging the death of his surrogate son Carlos. It's Poetic Justice when you realize that Maero forced you to Mercy Kill Carlos so you force him to kill his girlfriend.
The entire Brotherhood arc is just brilliant. What makes it so good is how quickly it degenerates. It starts out looking like it's going to be the most "civil" gang war in the game, as in a "may the best gang win" kind of thing, as Maero tries to form an alliance with the Saints. Then you hear the terms of his proposal. He gets 80% of the weapons shipment and the Saints get 20%, and by extension, about 20% of the city. From there it degenerates into the most violent, personal, brutal, and outright vicious gang war in the entire game, if not the series. The Boss responds to the insulting offer by blowing up Brotherhood trucks and putting radioactive waste in his tattoo ink, burning his face. Maero and his girlfriend, Jessica, respond by chaining the Boss' protege, Carlos, to the back of a truck and towing him through Stilwater face-first. When the Boss rescues him, s/he's then forced to put him out of his misery. The Boss gets revenge by locking Jessica in the trunk of a car and placing it in a monster truck rally Maero is participating in, then taunting him about it. S/he also cripples his best friend's hand and so and so forth. It's part of what makes the fist fight between them in The Siege so brutal and awesome, they both absolutely despise each other and with perfectly legitimate reasons on both sides.
Dane Vogel gets his when Maero comes around a second time, trying to threaten him and demand more favors from Ultor. What does Vogel do? He calmly insults Maero (a man who had nearly dropped him out of the window and into his death in his prior visit) to his face, and then reveals that squad of heavily armed security have Maero in their sights. And just to put cherry to the top, he reveals that Ultor has hijacked shipment of Brotherhood goods Maero was expecting before practically shooing him away. The man can be annoying, but that moment was full of awesome.
In reaction to an ambush by the police at a night club, your character dives behind a bar using the bartender as a shield. As the police approach the bar, he/she throws a lighter in the air and ignites the spilled alcohol in a small explosion to disorient the cops and begin to get out.
Missing an obvious one here; the Sons of Samedi mission "Bad Trip" sees you fight off a massive Samedi attack on your hideout while so stoned you can barely see what you're doing.
- The best part is that when you're stoned out of your mind, you actually pretend to be useless to get the villains to drop their guard long enough to escape. Yes, even when you're baked out of your mind, you're capable of being a Magnificent Bastard.
A lot of the minigames are built around Crazy Awesome. Vehicle surfing, Insurance Money, and more.
- The final level of Fight Club has you beat off six guys at once. You have to finish each and every last one of them off by breaking their neck.
You have the option of seducing the reporter Jane Valderamma from her day job into becoming your psychotically obsessed homie, who says she loves you during her battles with you. What do you have to do to accomplish this? Mug fifty people.
A potentially amusing one for a male main character is the fact that he can get women to pay him to have sex during the Ho-ing diversion. This isn't a Crowning Moment of Awesome yet. However, one of the locations for this mini-game is the Barely Legal strip club. The implications? You're getting the strippers to pay to have sex with you.
The entire Secret Mission of Saints Row 2 is one long Crowning Moment of Awesome. You and Julius get a chance to go on one final team-up together, taking on what appears to be the entire Ultor Corporation military. The tragedy when you avenge yourself on Julius, only makes the entire mission more awesome.
The Ultor Exposed mission may just be a vehicle for porn star Tera Patrick, but it has you face down a huge number of Ultor goons. The final battle has your character versus a fleet of military helicopters that he has to personally down with a rocket launcher.
- Jane Valderama's handling of the story is so obvious that you have to wonder if the Boss was in on it.
  - She strongly implies s\he is, but then again she might just be spoiling for a fight.
Mister Sunshine's moment has to be when The General cuts his ear off. Hardly sounds awesome, but his reaction to The General drawing a machete? He stands there and takes it, making only a single grunt as his best friend saws off his ear with the blade. It just cements the fact that this guy is nobody to mess with. It also leads to this strangely heartwarming, but still badass exchange between the two.

The General: I took no pleasure in this, my friend. But a price needed to be paid for failure.
Mr. Sunshine: Don't worry. I need only one ear to hear the whispers of the Loa.

Saints Row the Third may just flat our shatter the awesomeness meter when it hits stores in November.

It was revealed that Saints Row The Third has a sprint button, but the company calls it the Awesome button. Why, well, if you hold the button to hijack someone, you dropkick them out of the car. Yes, sprinting to the side of the car will have the player fucking dropkick the driver, sending said driver out the car through the other side. Doing it in front has you hijacking from the front. Awesome indeed.
- And hey, if you get tired of that you can use one of the new weapons to control cars remotely just by pointing it at them! Even better, halfway through the story the army is called in... and they bring with them quite a few tanks...
The Saints escape from the Syndicate by jumping out of a plane; with Boss catching Shaundi mid air, looks normal, until it comes around to attack them. Boss abandons Shaundi in freefall and jumps back onto the plane to stop it from killing them both, before again falling and catching Shaundi, proving his credentials as a fucking asshole.
There's a button dedicated to nothing but Groin Attacks. You heard me.
- And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Saint's Row in a nutshell. A button that's only function is to hit people in the nuts. Truly we are living in a glorious, utopian society.
One of the first missions has you protecting Pierce. Using a rocket launcher from a helicopter had been done, but then The Boss needs to snipe from a building. Simply shooting from the roof isn't good enough, so s\he bungee jumps off the side and uses a sniper rifle while hanging from a building.
How about the fact that it had a spot here without even being released yet!
The early mission "House Party". You need to acquire a new headquarters, and a large penthouse owned by the Syndicate would be perfect. How do you take it over? By parachuting out of a helicopter, landing on the roof during a pool party, and shooting the place up while making your way to the elevator to let your homies up. The kicker? You do all this while "Power" by Kanye West plays in the background.
In a second-act mission, you have a mid-air battle in a tank.
The mission where you kill Jessica in the second game was controversial... and it's also the event Cyrus Temple references (leaving out the reasons the Boss did it, of course) in order to make his point as to why the Saints must be eliminated.
The Power Walk you Pierce and Shaundi take as you go to take on Philippe at his skyscraper.
- Not to mention how you manage to kill Loren without even trying by dropping a giant ball from the ceiling to cut off his escape route
Oleg jumping on top of a V-TOL jet and taking it down with his BARE HANDS!
Listen to Boss comments during the Eye of the Tiger escort mission. He or she goes from extremly terrefied over it to actualy being more and more unfaced by it the more courage you build up to making comments like: "Well aren't you a little kitten!".
The credits after beating the game has every one of the boss's voices singing along to What i Got.
One of Zimos missions can be seen as call back to the Sons of Samedi mission "Bad Trip" in which you have to fight hordes of enemies while stoned. Only this time you have to fight them stoned and naked in one of their strongholds.
- The Mission Ho Boat can also be seen call back to the Brotherhood mission The Enemy of my Enemy, in which you have to sneak on board of a ship and steal a shipment after fighting of waves of enemies. Only this time you can do it with an oversized minigun.
After the Zombie Island mission we get a cutscene of Cyrus and some STAG soldiers inspecting the island, being attacked by a horde of zombies. Cyrus is constantly shooting them while having a heated argument with the Senator over radio, without even showing a sign of stress, except at the end when Cyrus is concerned that Monica Hughes is coming to Steelport in light of STAG's lack of results.
The last mission in the game: A three way war between the remnant of the Syndicate, the Saints, and STAG is raging on the streets of Steelport. You, Pierce and Oleg hit the roads doing what you can where you can to save as many Saints as possible, racing between several locations with combat all around. Then you come to the Sadistic Choice. Regardless of which you choose, you have to drive across town, through a war zone, at high speed, dodging tanks, squads of gang members or soldiers, and airstrikes, with Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out For A Hero" blaring. In any other situation, that song would be high octane Narm, but after the insanity of the past several hours, it's the only song on the soundtrack you want to hear.
- Magarac Island is rigged with bombs, and a missed shot while you fight your way up might set them off. With the right DLC, you can make this moment all the more awesome; suit up in some medieval platemail, and fight your way up the statue with nothing but a sword.
If you choose to kill Killbane instead of saving Shaundi, the ending has your character stage a press conference. In your speech, you make Steelport a freaking city-state.

Boss: I got a message for Monica Hughes and her stooges. Dear Bitch: Steelport is under new management, and we don't answer to you. This is foreign soil now. Come at my city again, and you'll go home in a fucking box.

The mission "http//deckers.die" is reminiscent of Tron. Granted, if Tron included toilets, blow-up dolls, lags, system failures, and giant phoenix-like bosses that can only be defeated by button-mashing.
The "Trouble With Clones..." DLC actually gives the Boss SUPERPOWERS! Super speed, strangth, and the ability to shoot fireballs! Even better is that the mission that gives you the powers sends a whole squad of brutes for you to One-Hit Kill with your bare hands! The cherry on top is that the game lets players make their own superhero costume or Badass Longcoat at the clothing stores to wear for their supercharged rampage!