To stand upon the highest point, whether it be on top of a mountain or one of the tallest buildings in the world, or even a roller coaster is one of those exhilarating experiences that can almost “pay the price” for being alive. It's that moment when your staring with your jaws agape and eyes wide open out into the world stretching out before you, a virtual map of the choices that you can make or the choices that you made in order to make it this far. It's a feeling that, aside from being on a roller coaster or airplane, most of will never experience. Have you seen the size of Everest? Personally I have a debilitating fear of heights, even thinking about the cold air wiping through my hair as I climb to retrieve something from the top of the refrigerator can make me sick to my stomach. Thankfully we have video games.

The impending release of Skyrim is upon us, just a few short weeks away. I have been thinking a lot about something that I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking about; I cannot wait to go mountain climbing. It's always on the top of my check list of things to do in every open world game that I play. Now with the inclusion of a dragon shout that allows you to become impregnable (not un pregnentable) for thirty seconds not only can you climb the mountains, you can leap from them in a hulk smash like fashion. This makes me excited.

Climbing a mountain, a skyscraper or even a cathedral in a game gives you a real sense of power in that game world. If you can reach the top of the world, then you can sure as hell conquer it. Height can also be used as a set piece to bring you down to new a new low as I will soon explain. These are just a few of the most awe inspiring and just plain cool vistas in modern open world video games.

Assassins Creed: Brotherhood
There are a lot of buildings to climb in Assassins Creed: Brotherhood, nobody is going to try to deny that. The game play was basically built around the idea of being able to gain some vertical space with ease. So how can you possibly decide on what the “Best” building to climb is? Sure there are plenty of tall buildings but how many buildings are the decided center for a known religion? That's right I'm talking about the freaking Vatican. What could possibly be cooler than dancing on top of the center of the Catholic religion, marveling on the denizens that were under their power. The only thing that could possibly make this even better or more blasphemous is if you could do this while also wearing the Popes' silly hat.

Just Cause 2
It's unnecessary to say that the sky is the highest point in all open world games, but until I played Just Cause 2 I had never seen it used to such an awesome degree. If you have never played it don't worry too much, the rest of the game is mainly for explosion whores; the plot is pointless, the missions are dull. If they had just turned the rest of the game into a skydiving simulator than I would have been in love. You can literally fly a plane so high that you reach above the clouds, hop out of your vehicle, and drop for what feels like 10 or 15 minutes. You can see the entire game world stretched out before you in all of it's glory and variety. What's even more fun? Hooking a car up to a helicopter and trying to catch it all the way down.

Fallout 3
Watching the town of Megaton expload into an ironic mushroom cloud combusted from a bomb that they worshiped doesn't give off the sense of glee and excitement that one would normally expect to have by causing an explosion of this size, a “Megaton.” While in most games height seems to be used to give players a sense of joy and excitement here it's used as a sort of punishment; not a tangible in game punishment but a moral one. The building from which you are watching the explosion from, Tenpenny Tower, is a place of luxury and almost what you would call royalty during this period in time. These are people who have from their point of view made it to the “Top” by keeping their poise and branch stuck up their ass attitudes amidst the destruction of the world.

By making the choice to destroy Megaton you have chosen a path that leads towards Money over Morality at the cost of dozens of innocent lives, including the young-ling! Think of the young-lings! The Nuclear cloud rises while you sit pretty on the balcony with the owner of the tower and it's impossible to not feel sympathy for all of those people below, in fact it's downright horrifying. This was a wonderful twist on the normally grand vista and a great visual consequence to your actions. You are above them, sitting in opulence and with a pocket full of money, but are you any better for it?

Oblivion
In Oblivion there are many mountains to scale that let you marvel at the world that Bethesda has created. One of the most beautiful mountains in the game is from on top of the Jerall Mountains overlooking the main city and the surrounding country side. It's made even more powerful by watching the sun rise over your shoulder and the light enveloping the entirety of the land of Cyrodiil. What makes this mountain awesome and very relevant to this article is the fact that this is the mountain range that borders on Skyrim directly to the north. The only downside to the location is that it makes the decay in texture resolution the further away that you look even more obvious and ugly.

So these are just a few of my favorite high places in games, what are some of yours and why?