1. Seeing The First Colossus - Shadow Of The Colossus
Team IcoThe first colossus. We all know colossal means very big. It is a simple thing to know that, but it is quite another to be shown that colossal means very, very big indeed. It is quite another to be paled into insignificance as the ground shakes and ruptures at your feet, thundering footfalls cracking stone around you as a true Colossus walks past, eyes too high and too large to even notice you. Now, you must kill this Colossus. Take our your sword, which, if we were the colossus would perhaps be a millimetre long - not even a splinter - and kill that ponderous creature that can move mountains. That is the simple request made of you in Shadow Of The Colossus. The game involves nothing more than climbing Colossal creatures, and ending their simple, peaceful lives. It is a crime. But is it a crime if done for the right reasons? Your fiancé is dead. In a faustian attempt to bargain, a dark and forgotten god has promised to return her... if you only kill these 16 giants. This game forces you to end innocence to restore love on an enormous scale. Not a numerical scale, this is no genocide. This is a an ant successfully navigating and ending the lives of sixteen humans. Shadow Of The Colossus is usually the first game brought around as Exhibit A when the tired old argument of "Games aren't art" raises its stupid head once more. This game confronts you with loss, grief, revenge, the value of life and innocence, a desolate and empty land, and scale. Sheer, sheer scale that there are things much larger than you, with little care for your problems. It is the moment that lesson is represented that takes first place on this list. When you realise that you are tiny. Insignificant. Yet still, you can battle on, affect things much, much larger than you and come out the victor. That you are willing to destroy what is beautiful and majestic and innocent for what is familiar and mourned. The first colossus really is a moment every single person, whether gamer or not should experience at least once in their lifetime.