Sometimes planning a vacation feels like too much work. Even if you manage to score enough time off, finagle a passport and find affordable deals for your flight and lodgings, there’s still a good chance that you’ll get screwed by delays, lost luggage, overbooked rooms and locals with a powerful disdain for your loud Hawaiian shirts.

While nothing can replace the thrill of visiting famous sites and learning about them via overpriced headset tour guides, we’ve noticed that some games have done an amazing job of re-creating destinations we’d like to visit right down to the pixel. So scroll on for our whirlwind virtual tour of the most exotic places in the world through the lens of games.

Above: Although the Eiffel Tower and Champs-Élysées look great in Onimusha 3, the Arc de Triomphe is most impressive

The Eiffel Tower, Champs-Élysées, and Arc de Triomphe
The Game: Onimusha 3: Demon Siege
Platform(s): PS2
Release Date: Apr 27, 2004
GamesRadar Review

If you find the French to be too, well, French, then you might want to pass on a trip to Paris in exchange for a visit to the video store to rent Onimusha 3 for PS2. You’ll find eerily accurate re-creations of the Eiffel Tower, Champs-Élysées and Arc de Triomphe, all heavily populated with angry demons.

French Factoids: 
- Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, the engineer who designed the tower, was also responsible for engineering the Statue of Liberty’s internal structure.

- According to our sources there are currently no hostile demons attacking tourists around the Eiffel Tower… yet.

- The Japanese love copying others. Take the Tokyo Tower, for example: it’s a totally lame rip-off of the Eiffel Tower that just happens to be a whole 8.6 meters taller than its Parisian predecessor.

- Americans love dissing France, which is partly indicated by their tendency to associate things they consider to be vulgar or immoral with them. Think about that the next time you try slipping someone the tongue with a French kiss or ask someone to pardon your French. Other more dated examples include calling condoms a “French letter” or referring to someone with herpes or syphilis as being “French-sick.”