FAVOURITE PUZZLES IN VIDEO GAMES?

The box puzzles in Vagrant Story.

Wild ARMs 1.

Go through the dungeon, on certain walls as you go are three plaques with poems on them. One describes the east wind as representing courage, another describes the west wind as representing love, and one describes the hope as coming from within mankind's heart. There is also a fourth plaque stating that you must free yourself from desire, for desire is the source of evil in the world. This is symbolism that comes up repeatedly throughout the game, and Wild ARMs the kind of game that has books and stone plaques full of mythology scattered throughout almost every area of the game, so it's not immediately obvious they're part of a riddle until you get to the final room and there are three switches on the ground and four pushable colored statues.

Wait, four colored statues? So which color is which? Well, there are key items you've picked up over the course of the game and subsequently forgotten about, which are small idols representing each of the three primary guardians. The idols of Zephyr, Raftina and Justine, the guardians of Hope, Love and Courage, respectively. The icons in your inventory are colored yellow, red and blue, respectively. So yellow is hope, red is love, and blue is courage.

There is a fourth guardian, Luceid, the guardian of Desire, who has betrayed the first three guardians and joined the demons. (He is actually the boss of this dungeon.) By process of elimination, the green statue must represent desire.

Push the red statue onto the left switch.
Push the blue statue onto the right switch.
Push the yellow statue onto the center switch.

Nothing happens. What the hell. Did I get this wrong? Just figuring this much out took like two hours of thinking and wandering around and trying to find clues. Argh, at this point in the game I'm going crazy.

But there's a fourth step to the puzzle. You have to let your desire crumble.

Put a bomb next to the green statue and blow it up.

After five hours I figure this out and am physically weeping. I am so fucking pleased with myself that I don't even bother to fight the boss. I am utterly satisfied, I save and quit and turn the TV off and go to bed without a word because no other experience can compare. I convert to Buddhism and become a monk and live in the snowy mountaintops for the rest of my life, meditating day and night, at utter peace with the universe. Best puzzle in the history of RPGs.

I like puzzles, but most don't really "challenge" me anymore. They're just interesting diversions.

999 on DS had some good puzzles that you needed to solve in every room you go to. I actually got stuck on the very first puzzle in the game and ended up solving it by probability (Okay, stop laughing now!). But the rest of the puzzles were pretty easy except for one which I needed to use a walkthrough, oh and the sudoku puzzle at the end was also pretty good.

I liked the puzzles in Plants vs Zombies, so I guess tower defence puzzles are fun.

I like "system puzzles". Where you build a system as efficiently as possible using a number of different possibilities. Of course this includes almost any game imaginable. Or at least tactical games (like Plants vs Zombies). I'm of course talking about the puzzle of setting up a really awesome flanking manouver in Silent Storm or building a functioning rail line in Cities in Motion.

(Basically. I like puzzle games. And especially puzzle games that exist in a "living environment" and thus have more than one solution.)

I generally don't like arbitary puzzles in my non-puzzle games though. (Damn you hacking minigames! DAMN YOU TO HELL)


EDIT:
I also love puzzles involving Thinking With Portals.

Music puzzles are always fun, like the aforementioned Song of Nephilim in Xenosaga and a similar puzzle in Xenogears. I also liked the piano "puzzle" in FF7. Come to think of it, I've always liked the type of puzzles that are rewarded by exploration, such as the tile sequence in Angeler's Cave in Link's Awakening, or the Wind Fish Maze Path in that same game...

I also loved following the "music" in the Lost Woods during the early stages of OoT.

They lose out anyways, if there's no music puzzle, there'salways the music in the game.