The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

Great topic, FLAE.

I only have 2 games that would qualify.

2. Okami

I guess it's mainly because of the sheer, eye-boggling beauty of the art style that I would love to experience it again for the first time. Sure the story is wonderful and the characters are memorable, but the art was a revelation that led me to a new-found appreciation for classical Japanese art.

1. Shadow of the Colossus

Simply because it's unlike any other game ever. Of course it's beautiful, but it's also much more than a game. There aren't too many video games where what happens to the player over the course of the game is just as important as what happens in the actual game. It's an unforgettable experience, even (dare I say it?) life-changing.

Was going to reply to this earlier, but was on my phone at the time. I am not going to type all of this out on my tiny keyboard.

5. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

The game that launched not only Patrice's successful Ubisoft career, but also later inspired Assassin's Creed. I first saw this in commercial form. It was the Prince leaping across a huge gap only to seemingly fall to his death. The DJ (yeah, it was DJ-themed) rewound the album he was scratching, which then rewound time and the Prince flew back up to safety. I knew it had to be mine.

A few months later, my oldest brother came to the house with a new game he bought. He said he wanted to show it to us because of it's "amazing new thing". I didn't realize what it was, so I didn't care. after eating a family dinner, he, my other brother and my father went to the living room and started playing it. I peeked around the corner to see the same baggy-pantsed prince leaping across beams at the beginning of the game. When I finally sat down, it was when he first used the sands to turn back time. I was amazed. I never saw this in a game before. Who wouldn't want a device like that to make each decision perfect?

The ending was one of those "full-circle" moments. The first I'd experienced in a game. At the time, it blew my mind.

4. Shadow of the Colossus

I can't help but agree with Lisa on this. It was as if Sony took a collection of beautiful paintings, had them make the most passionate love with a PS2, and give birth to SotC. This was undeniably my first game love. The most simple idea: find giant creature, stab repeatedly, pass out, repeat. At first, I thought this only happened on Friday afternoons for me, but I guess not.

The environment was so vast and seemingly endless. It also had tons of replayability with the time attack mode and unique tools to use (parachute, invisibility, more damage). This was also the first adventure game that I attempted stunts. Once you get the physics down, you can easily make the colossus whip their hand upward so you can grab their head for a killing blow. So satisfying. I still hate those damn dog-colossi.

3. Assassin's Creed 1 & 2

The only reason I even considered buying AC1 was because I saw the Ubisoft logo in the first trailer and remembered how they made me a time-conquering Prince. I thought this company was run by Jesus. When I first saw Altair standing on that bell tower only to disappear in a split second (it was slow-motion, so it was technically a split second!!!) I knew that this would be a game I wanted. Then, he unsheathed a hidden blade. My first thought: "Wtf?! Crusader Wolverine?!"

Mesmerized, I tried to keep up with the fast paced camera and amazing graphics my first viewing. Seeing him disappear in the crowd made me go, "Ok, I need this game now."

My first time through, I actually came to believe that the game meant for the Templars to be the good guys, as Al Mualim turned against Altair. I didn't pay much attention to the dialogue back then. I kept replaying so I could get the story better. I found new things each and every time. It was like an Easter egg hunt, but with narrative and lessons one could actually live by!

AC2 was a romantic tale. Much more cinematic like a movie than a test subject being experimented on. I loved the new Assassin. He was new to it all. There were tons of targets compared to the first game, and now you can assassinate from anywhere. This was really the episode in the series that gave the player more options when it came to killing and fighting.

2. Red Dead Redemption

Sorry FLAE, but I also have to agree with you on this one. My girlfriend (not FLAE) let me borrow it a few months ago because she knew I wanted to play it badly. Like you pointed out, I assumed it would just be GTA - cowboy edition. Now, I love GTA writing. They do a fantastic job, but usually make fun of themselves in the process. RDR only did this at a few key points when the player wasn't meant to feel stressed. The ending blew me away. I loved the game throughout, but all of it building up to that point just made my jaw drop. It's truly one of the greatest endings I've ever seen in a game. I'd do anything to relive that moment again and again.

1. Batman: Arkham Asylum

The most nerdgasmic sh*t I've ever seen. I've read comics since I can remember. Rocksteady cared so much about this game. Every detail has some tie to the comics. They didn't put down or make fun of any character or idea. They took it seriously. When things are taken seriously and with respect, people will love it. Many people don't realize that comics aren't about guys in tights flying with their teenage "friends" to defeat a villain from robbing a bank, supposedly with no police force around. Comics represent something. The villains represent the evil in the world and the heroes represent what we as humans strive to be, but can never truly become. The reason why these heroes are practically impossible to truly exist is because we make them immortal and never at fault. Of course they can never exist. They're made up by us to give us a better image of things to come.

Arkham Asylum nailed it, and Arkham City looks to nail it harder (yep). The freeflow fighting, detective work, collectible riddles and free roam make this the greatest comic book thing ever made...until the sequel.

i only have 2

ACII: well i first heard of AC when my friend at school started to tell me about it...so i got it a day before brotherhood came out and loved it. i completely fell in love with it then like a week later i got AC1 in which i got bored of because the gameplay wasn't that good. i liked brotherhood but the only thing that kinda dissapointed me was stuck in roma.

BATMAN ARKHAM ASYLUM:

bacislly what joey said

Really? No one else has games they'd want to play again with that first experience feeling? This is a fantastic topic idea! Share, people!

1 ac1
2 ac2
3 acb
4 batman aa
5 eh.... l.a. noir

... and why... (this is the problem I was talking about)

That sums it up.

1) Assassin's Creed 1. I played AC2 first, so that spoiled my experience of the original. I went around in awe of the beauty and the storyline (which I already knew), but I was stuck wishing I had Ledge Assassinations.

2) CoD4: MW. Nuke. Enough said. MW2 and Black Ops are cheap rip-offs where they tried to recreate the same set-ups rather than following the natural story to their own beautiful conclusions. They thought the bang made the game great, when it was the characters that made you care when they died (I still wish Griggs survived).

3) Mass Effect. Same reason as AC1, got spoiled by playing the sequel first.

4) Shadow of Colossus. I got it, but then got frightened by the thought of taking on Colossi with only a horse and a sword. Then, I kept hearing how wonderful and beautiful it was. So, I finally tried it. I was bored to death by the intro, so I hit the skip button about 10 mins in, and obviously missed something important. Then I wandered a desert for a while before I figured out the sword-light thing. Then, I ran into an unclimbable cliff in the direction I needed to go, so I haven't touched it since.

5) Portal. Such an amazing game for such a small package. Nothing can compare to how I was disappointed by Half-Life 2, so I tried Portal, and I was just in shock of how wonderful it was. It lost a little of its charm on the second and third playthroughs because I knew how to complete the puzzles, but it was still really good to catch every snide comment. Portal 2 came close to catching this feeling, so I guess in the end I really did get the point of this thread; except that greater things were expected of Portal 2 at launch time than Portal 1.

5. Pokemon silver

It was the first Pokemon game I actually understood. I had original red but my brother mostly played it and glitched it making so it deleted my game never to able to save again. But the whole game I didn't really catch what i was supposed to do besides my animals fight to the death.
Silver was a total new experience for me.

4. Super Smash bros.

Me and my friends spent hours playing this and even one or two years ago I played it and miss it. The SSB series are just the best fighting games i think and this one was best.

3. Modern Warfare 2

I never really finished this haha so I would of liked to but my game broke, so never got too beat it.

2. Pokemon Ruby

When Pokemon ruby came out that's when everyone started playing it. by trading records on it we could all fight each other even when far away by going to each others "secret houses". Literally all the kids at my school had it and at lunch we'd trade, fight, ask how to get this or that. It was the high point of Pokemon before it got lazy.
(like timbur, the Pokemon who carries woods? or gurdur the pokmeon who carries a beam of steel or some shit? I just heard of this, I stopped after diamond.)

AND THE FINAL ONE

1. The Sims 3 for xbox 360

This was a great game, I was just a expert fisher man making close to $5,000 a day working when I wanted to. I had all the items I wanted, did my life goal, had almost max stats. Then I made a mistake, I got a family. immediately after marrying I had a child (later named Retard, because I hated it so much.).

The problem was is that I like turning my guys control to "puppet" so he would not go and do dumb stuff like eat when not hungry. so when I Married i realized EVERYONES control was on puppet and they all had to be a puppet or go do random stuff.

So I could either let my sim do things I didn't want him to do or let my wife and son starve to death.

I did what had to be done...
I left my baby at a park and made my wife divorce me.

soon my Sim and I became depressed after realizing I could never have my family back, so i killed my self then sold the game.

I wish I never sold it

Not as "mature" as some other posts on here, but I respect your list.

I just wanted to say that your Sims story was very sad. Haha

Who cares, its mostly games from when I was a kid, I keep most of my favorite "mature" games so I constantly replay them, No need to say I want to replay something I already can play this instant instead of talking about it.

Wtf? I think you missed my meaning there. Calm down.

i was a pretty late bloomer when it comes to games, so not a very big or old list for me.

1. my first choice will have to be Final fantasy IX. it's the game that got me into gaming. i was completely mezmerised by the story, the characters, the atmosphere, the music.
it was unlike anything i had seen before.

2. after i had finished FFIX i was getting curious of the rest of the series and noticed that FFVII was a fan-favorite.
while it didn't have the great atmosphere that made me fall in love with 9, it did have a great story and mystery that had me wondering till the end.
this is the first game i ever started to read analysises of the story after i had finished, due to not everything being said outright

that's all i got for now, but after reading the responses i might just look up this Shadow of the colossus, just to see what it is

Shadow of the Colossus should be experienced by all gamers, whether experienced or inexperienced. Even on PS2, it's gorgeous and yes, "epic".

Re: Shadow of the Colossus. If you have a PS3, wait just a bit and you can get an updated version for the PS3 - along with Ico, its companion game. I believe the current release date is 27th September. I recommend the game as well and would love to hear what you think if you decide to play it.

1) Assassin's Creed Series - Unfortunately, I started the AC series with ACII. As a result, I missed out on the experience of the first game's story. The twists, plot, game-play, and origins of the first game are lost after reading articles in Assassin's Creed Wikia. It's one of my many biggest video-game blunders of all time. *sigh*

2) Batman: Arkham Asylum - The FreeFlow combat. Hanging from a gargoyle. Planting Explosive Jell under an unconscious guard. Good times...

3) Shadow of the Colossus - The music. The exhilaration of climbing a Colossus and stabbing his weak spot while black blood squirts at the screen is a phenomenal experience. I miss the traveling times and atmosphere that the game first brought to me. Now, I know where to go, how to kill, and were the fruit locations are.

4) GTA ChinaTown Wars (iPhone) - It's a portable GTA on a cell-phone. Do I need to elaborate any further?

5) Pokemon (series) - I miss the experience of raising your Pokemon. I miss the fear of a Gym Leader, as you had no idea what their battle tactics were.

me too probably why i did'nt like AC1 much

5. Cave Story
When I was younger, I had no money to buy games because my family had just moved to Canada and we were still more or less poor. So what I did was play through a bunch of.. bad freeware games. But among the masses of pure badness I stumbled upon a game about a robot scout from the surface of the Earth that gets sent to an island of creatures called Mimigas and an evil scientist trying to use certain red flowers to turn them into monstrous bio-weapons. The story follows the male robot, Quote and his female ally, Curly Brace (who he meets later in the game), fighting through hardships, forging friendships with the Mimigas and even experiencing moments of evil-turning-to-good. The gameplay was very clever, much like Castlevania/Metroid/Zelda, and it had an interesting RPG element that I hadn't seen before: You level up your weapons rather than your actual character. This meant if you are bad at using certain weapons, only the ones you're good at will be powered up, similar to real life in some way (you do something a lot, you get better at it).

The story was beautiful, it had several endings, and at one point in the game, something happened on my second playthrough that made me start crying, delete my save and start again. I couldn't bear to let Quote live without one of the characters he had befriended. Best part is, this game is still free, but someone, somewhere saw the genius in it and now it has been released for Wiiware, DSiWare, and it's about to be released for 3DS under the name Cave Story 3D as well.

Definitely check it out, but you might need to get the English patcher if you can't read Japanese.

4. Trauma Center: Second Opinion (WII)
A lot of the games I play.. hmm.. How should I say this? The thing is, a common pattern with games I like, especially games that I LOVE is the following: The game has a story that can move me emotionally, or freak me out, or mess with my mind (The Matrix, Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia etc.) Also, these games have to have proven gameplay mechanics and level design norms, while also introducing something new, or tweaking something old to make it appear new. I also have some kind of.. attraction to certain art styles.

Usually if a game has any of these elements, it has already won me over.
Trauma Center: Second Opinion however, had all of them at the same time.
On top of that, this surgery simulator type game had a very believable romance between the two main characters that actually kind of starts off with the two of them being annoyed with each other. You can really see the two grow close over the course of the game, and if you fail a certain mission, one of them actually starts crying in a really devastating way at the loss of the other one. I still ship Derek x Angie really hard these days haha.

The gameplay of this game was very fast paced and there was really no room for error on harder difficulties, and even on lower ones you didn't really feel like messing anything up, because you ARE cutting open a human being and trying to fix stuff up inside them. I was coming into this game, from StarCraft: Brood War (more on that later), a real time strategy game where every button click counts and your hands need to be extremely fast to be any kind of competitor in online gameplay.

In this game, I think it was 16 years in the future, when society's medical expertise is so advanced that AIDS and cancer are fully healable and removable from anybody, and nobody really dies of disease. A new doctor named Derek Stiles has started working as an intern surgeon, plagued by the sorrow of his father's death to an incurable disease in the past. He does manage to kind of put that behind him though, and tries his best all the time. At Hope Hospital, the place where he works, the nurse resigns and a new one, Angie Thompson is introduced. She is to work as Derek's Assistant during surgery. The two are slightly irritated with each other immediately. Obviously, as the story goes on they both realize they're actually pretty swell people and they more than get along.

One day at Hope Hospital, a suicidal girl named Linda appears and complains of chest pain. She collapses right after, when Derek and Angie open her up, they see lacerations on her lungs that could NOT have been made by anything outside of the body. This is their first encounter with GUILT (Gangliated Utropin Immuno Latency Toxin if I remember correctly), a super-disease created by the terrorist organization Delphi.

The gameplay is amazing, the story is awesome and I love Derek and Angie. It was one of the few Wii games I could calmly say were actually GOOD when the Wii first came out.

3. Assassin's Creed (whole series)
Do I really need to say anything about these games? I mean come on, the whole site is dedicated to them, if I were to start writing about these, I would honestly never stop. I bought Assassin's Creed 1 for PS3 before I had a PS3. I had to wait another 2 months to get one. The gameplay is so good, it reminded me of my top game (further down the list at number 1), it was made by the same guys and it had parkour and stealthy killing. But mostly the parkour was the selling point for me. I wanted to see if a video game could accurately represent parkour like traceurs could do it in real life. If you do parkour in real life and do it well, everything feels so easy and fluid, you just FLOW. And these games had the exact same feeling.

Now if we get into the story of the Assassin's Creed series, it was just so.. It was like Prince of Persia mixed with The Matrix. And that even fails to describe it. I've always wanted to.. be someone like Desmond. Desmond is just a regular guy, he's caught in a mess and people reluctantly respect him, on both sides of a war because he is the only one with such tremendous power: the power of his memories, the power buried deep within his average-joe DNA. The storyline gave me my current definition of the phrase: 'blows my mind'.

It had everything I loved in a video game. Furthermore, Desmond x Lucy. Yeah. I never really felt particularly attached to any Ancestor relationships (EXCEPT Altair x Maria, for some reason). I felt that the friendship and brotherhood between Ezio and the Assassins was more powerful than any romantic relationships he could ever have. Maybe Revelations will change that.

Maybe.. maybe Revelations will change what happened between Desmond and Lucy at the end of Brotherhood..

2. StarCraft: Brood War/StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
The first RTS game I have ever played in my life, the best RTS game I have ever played in my life, and the best I will ever play. This was pretty much all about gameplay, culture and my personal growth. This game boosted the bond between me and my older brother TREMENDOUSLY because it is his favorite video game of all time. He introduced me to it when I was like... 10 or 12, I think? It was SO HARD! GGGGGRRRHGRHGRHGHG!

I sucked so bad when I played this game. I saw my brother as some kind of god, being able to execute actions without losing, keeping his entire game fluid and smooth with no hiccups. Meanwhile, I was struggling to survive against a single Computer opponent for TWO YEARS.

StarCraft is one of those games where you need to put in a huge time investment in order to actually be good at it, but once you do, you feel like the biggest badass. The storyline is pretty good, and in following the tradition of my fave games having some romance, Blizzard (the creators of StarCraft) themselves have stated that the whole StarCraft series is based on the love between Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan. Really, they actually said that. You wouldn't believe it by playing this fantastic game of extra-terrestrial humanoids, gods of light and psionic energy and insectoid, slimy swarms of mindless abominations but it's the truth.

1. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
This is my favorite video game of all time. To be honest, the Prince of Persia SERIES is TIED with the Assassin's Creed series right now, and I feel as if AC is about to usurp Prince of Persia's power and sit on my throne of favorite games of all time.

This game was the one to make me google "How to run on walls".
This game was the one to make me discover parkour existed.
This game changed my life.
This game, a hobby of mine (videogames) introducing me to a NEW hobby of mine (Parkour) is something very beautiful in my opinion.

The level design in this game is superb, the story is amazing, the art-style is like an energy drink for my eyes, the atmosphere is probably that one thing this game does better than most other games I've seen (Assassin's Creed is struggling for control of that respect right now and is slowly getting it.)

Can you imagine seeing a person fall to their death, after which they uttered the words "I won't even let my own Death stop me!"

*PWOOO-AAAAAAHHHHHHHH...*

You can turn back time to negate your own death in this game. And that's just the FIRST time control power you get, but also by far the most major one, the most well-known one, and the most frequently-used one

-----------------------
Man. Writing this made me think about how much I love video games and that they're not just something to waste your life on. They are in some ways, huge works of art. So much time and effort go into making a game as legendary as these and when you really let the game sort of.. flow through your veins, heart, mind and soul you feel a kind of connection to the characters, the story and even the developers who created these wonderful worlds.

~ DarkAlphabetZoup, Disciple of Desmond Miles

i agree with you FLAE ocarina of time is a awesom game i have the gamecube version of it i beat it twice

@DAZ

Trauma Center in a nutshell:

ok f*ck drawing ima be a doctor

i wish i could play

5.TWILIGHT PRINCESS-because it was easy

4.RESISTANCE FALL OF MAN-awesome game

3. RESISTANCE 2-different controls but still awesome

2. GEARS OF WAR1,2-kick ass game

1. HALO REACH-better than the previous games

@FLAE
Egoraptor FTW!

serious you think reach is better than odst serious .... serious okay the story is good but after the update the controls are f upped so....serious gash

you could do more things in reach than the previous HALO games like rolling,sprinting and dodging

ODST was an absolute piece of trash. It's like the AC Brotherhood of the Halo franchise: An awkward sequel to the second game that's existence is pretty much only justified by the addition of a new game mode (firefight/multiplayer) and is accompanied by a poorly written and designed campaign.

But Reach probably is the best game of the bunch if only because it is the most advanced. In my opinion, Halo 3 still stands above all as the most memorable, but that doesn't make it a better game than Reach, especially because Forge mode in Reach is so much more timeless than it is in Halo 3.

i agree with you FLAE

To me, none will ever be better than Halo: Combat Evolved.