Assassin's Creed's intro threw us into this bizarre situation without explaining what the hell was going on. We played as Altaïr in Desmond's head, but the Animus which makes this possible seemed to be on the fritz. We could walk around, but awkwardly and with a lot of static interference. For those of us who expected the game to remain solely in the 1100s, seeing Desmond awaken from this static vision on a lab table was jarring. The intro messed with our expectations and drew us in from the very get go.
The Borderland opening sequence felt like the opening for that movie we'd been waiting all summer to see. It set the scene with a quick establishing shot of a Pandora billboard, which made this seem like it could possibly take place on Earth. But then we got our first look at a scag, proving that this is definitely not Earth before the little creature was hit by a bus containing our four protagonists. The introduction of each character was completely contrived (I mean, who whips out a knife on a bus or blows kisses for absolutely no reason?), but we didn't care because these characters seemed so badass and the music couldn't have been more perfect.
BioShock could have opened with the plane crash and worked just fine. However, the quick bit of narration we got while Jack looked at a picture and said his parents always told him he was special added poignancy to the whole thing. We were slapped with this emotional moment where we relate to the character on a personal level and are made curious by the enigmatic statement that "They were right." It may have been easy to forget those first twenty seconds once the plane crashed, since people were screaming and fire was breaking out all over the place. But those twenty seconds opened BioShock on a deeply personal note, setting the tone for the underwater road we were about to travel.
Bayonetta opened with a bang. An epic fight took place on the face of a clock tower that had been busted off and was falling endlessly downward. The music was as intense as the battle, and over the top of everything was narration that briefly touched on the lore of the world we'd just been thrust into. Bayonetta's intro was pretty much a sensory overload that promised us this game was going to be ridiculously over-the-top. And boy was it ever!
Uncharted 2's intro pretty much left us breathless. It began right in the middle of the action (your Film Studies professor would use the term in medias res) with Nathan Drake holding for dear life onto the side of a train car dangling over the edge of a cliff. In trying to climb to safety, we were taught the basic controls we would need to have down pat in order to play the game, yet it was so thrilling that even after multiple playthroughs it never felt like a tutorial. It was an unforgettable way to start an unforgettable game, and that makes it our most memorable game intro of this generation.
By Josh Wirtanen
CCC
Editor/Contributing Writer
*The views expressed within this article are solely the opinion of the author and do not express the views held by Cheat Code Central.*
