It's hard to hone in on the essence of stealth. Many stealth games focus on slow, methodical movement and punish you for slipping up, but others give you the opportunity to react before your cover's blown, or abandon the idea of caution altogether. Which of these truly defines stealth?

We believe the truth is somewhere in the foggy middle. The common denominator that links these games is knowing how, when, and where to stay hidden, but the specifics are not explicit. At the same time, good stealth games also give you little guidance and happily kick you into the fray to let you figure things out for yourself. The true measure of a stealth game, then, is freedom: the freedom to explore what stealth means, while giving you a place to plot, learn, and screw up for yourself. With that standard set, we've smoked out the 15 best stealth games of all time to show you what this shadowy genre is made of. Don't look away though, or they might escape.

The original Sly Cooper did something few mascot games ever manage - it was a genuinely great genre game, with a cast of universally loveable characters. Sly 2 is basically Sly+, with a raft of improvements and expansions on the stealth formula. But with all the same anthropomorphic heroes. Good.

The stealth is so tight and feature packed, and laid the foundations for the stick-to-the-city free-running of inFamous. Sly’s sneaking is more traditional, while support characters like Bentley and Murray mix it up with more gadget-heavy / combat-heavy stealth, respectively. The result is a well rounded sneaking game with a charming cast and absolutely loads of stuff to do. And it isn’t all dark and gritty like most…

Stealth Inc is the suspiciously bright passageway where stealth mechanics and mini-games meet. In a series of time trials, you - a sphere-headed clone with giant glowing eyes - must solve all the puzzles in a given room before the aggressive machines inside spot and kill you. You're unarmed and will die the instant they hone in on your position, so all you have are your wits and shadows to keep you alive. And it works remarkably well.

Gleefully tossing aside the gritty environment, gadgetry, and slow movement common to most stealth games, Stealth Inc goes for something more colorful and frantic, where you're encouraged to speed through the level as fast as you can without getting killed. Yet the stealth mechanics are absolutely essential for the game to function, and the controls for movement are incredibly tight, so it's no one's fault but your own if you stumble into a puddle of light and get vaporized. It's the ultimate test of a very different kind of stealth, where speed is favored over caution.

Second Sight, Free Radical’s unjustly forgotten original leaves you painfully vulnerable from the start. Controlling the sickly John Vattic, you wake up wearing nothing but hospital scrubs with no clue where you are, how you got there, or much about who you even are. The amnesiac patient may not be the most original protagonist, but he’s certainly one that immediately makes you want to hide until you know what the hell is going on. What makes Vattic’s stealthy hunt for safety so pleasurable is that he can control people and objects with his brain.

Like a cross between Solid Snake and a particularly wan Ben Kenobi, the most fun you have as Vattic is figuring out which of your freaky psychic abilities is best suited to getting you out of a jam. Does it make sense to possess a guard and shoot all the others? Use an astral projection to scout ahead and determine the best path around them? Vattic’s arsenal of skills, coupled with a story jumping in time, proved Free Radical can make more than just an excellent shooter.

When Rocksteady rebranded Batman’s sneak punching as ‘Predator Mode’, it wasn’t screwing about. Arkham City's approach to combative hide-and-seek is one of total domination, of giving you the tools and the information to concoct emergent, creative, horrifyingly powerful divide-and-conquer strategies on the fly. Rather than concerning you with claustrophobic creep-and-dodge work over your immediate vicinity, Arkham’s approach is to give you vantage and control over the whole arena: its every gantry and walkway, its every intricate path, route, and flow of activity.

Except when it’s not. It balances that sense of dominion, with an immediate fragility should things go wrong. Lose your concentration, slip up, fail to spot something important, and you’ll be panicked and flapping away in fright in an instant. That’s the dichotomy that makes Arkham’s stealth so good. It’s about cleverly making you look unstoppable, while knowing that you’re anything but. In short, it’s about being Batman.

Is Riddick strictly a stealth game? Probably not. It’s a mix of sneaky-sneaky, stabby-stabby, and punchy-punchy. But that’s no bad thing - the way stealth and more brutal combat mix makes for a pleasing, bloody adventure. As the perpetually on-the-run Riddick, it’s your job to escape Butcher… look, it’s all in the game name. You do so by fighting your way out of the cells, then getting into the vent system, and eventually off the planet.

It’s the executions that really make this game, combined with the savage first-person combat when things inevitably require a bit of brute force. Oh, and those fancy night-vision specs that Riddick uses are a neat way of avoiding the trap many stealth games fall into, where you end up staring at the screen for hours because everything's so damn dark.

The best games take complex concepts and make performing them feel effortless, and Gunpoint's low-fi take on the stealth genre is one of the best. Don't be fooled by its simplicity, though - its pixelated graphics and sidescrolling gameplay belie one of the smartest, funniest stealth puzzle games ever made.

Armed with a special hacking device called the Crosslink, a pair of hydraulic 'hypertrousers,' your fists and your own wits, you must infiltrate each of Gunpoint's expertly crafted levels without being detected. Your special pants let you blast up the side of buildings, attach to ceilings, and launch into guards to provide a few swift punches to their face. And your Crosslink allows you to hack into nearly anything (like light switches and security cameras) and rewire them to open doors or activate enemy weapons. It's one thing to completely ghost a level - it's another entirely to reprogram everything inside the level and manipulate the guards to solve it for you. Gunpoint may not offer as many weapons, camo patterns, or other fun stealth gadgets as other games on this list, but its simplicity proves that less is indeed more.

While similar in many ways to the Hitman games that came before, Blood Money improves on an already strong stealth system with a setup that rewards perfectly silent missions, and makes life a whole lot harder when you don't pull it off.

While the goal of any stealth game is to get from whatever window you crawled through to a certain goal without being seen, the threat of discovery usually ends when you finish the mission. Not so in Blood Money, where 47's notoriety rises every time he's spotted by a guard or security camera, and that notoriety makes him more recognizable to enemies in the missions that follow. You have to be on the ball at all times, and Blood Money gives you all the tools to make that happen, from elaborate costumes to new mechanics that make it much easier to dispose of a body or knock out the lights to a whole building. Everything in Blood Money has a place and a use, and the only limit on how well they work is your own skill.

Good stealth games give you a wide variety of tools and options to help you out of a jam if you get spotted; great ones encourage you to never want to go loud in the first place. While later entries in the Splinter Cell franchise have embraced 24-style action to go along with more traditional stealthy maneuvers, no other game in the series comes close to the purity of Chaos Theory's stealth playground.

Armed with a wide variety of gadgets and a trusty combat knife, you have everything you need to infiltrate a variety of multilayered environments undetected. You'll need them, too, because enemies react organically to your every move, spotting your handiwork well after you've moved on. To combat that, each level in Chaos Theory is filled with pipes to climb, hidden passageways, and multiple pathways to explore, providing you with a level of freedom few stealth games can match. And that's just the single-player - Chaos Theory also includes a brilliant competitive multiplayer mode (Spies vs. Mercs), as well as cooperative levels that require perfect synchronization.

Adding Deus Ex: Human Revolution to list of best stealth games can be a sticky issue, given that it forces players to go guns blazing into boss fights, even if they've otherwise been quieter than a church mouse augmented with hover technology. But while those forced battles are an unfortunate fact that can't be undone, Human Revolution's interpretation of stealth in every other instance is so strong that the good outweighs the bad.

While the game lets you customize the way you approach every challenge, protagonist Adam Jensen shows off the best of his abilities in stealth mode. Sneaking up behind guards and finishing them with a takedown puts his strength to better use than a gunfight, and can clear a room without a shot being fired. The cover system works well, letting you move seamlessly between hiding places. And where the brilliant Deus Ex inadvertently makes stealth easier with oblivious AI, Human Revolution has enemies that quickly spot you if you make mistakes. That means no dodging between cover while a guard is looking right at you, as it should be.

Sure, Dishonored does let you bust down the door of a mansion and use your powers to creatively murder every guard and unfortunate maidservant in sight... but there's something more elegant about sneaking through the one open window, snuffing out a single target, and sliding back out again without anyone realizing you were there.

Dishonored's stealth is also made more enticing by the fact that many of your dark abilities are meant to benefit a sneaky playthrough. We're talking a teleport ability that lets you juke between spots of cover, a power that disintegrates your victims, or x-ray vision that helps you map out guard locations while you're crouched on the roof. Get good enough and you can make it through the entire game without a soul outside your immediate circle - a badge of honor for any sleuth.

It wouldn't feel right to talk about stealth without mentioning at least one ninja. Mark of the Ninja is a 2D, side-scrolling stealth game, which puts you in the role of a master ninja (duh) defending his clan - which has had no contact with the modern world for centuries - from gun-toting invaders. Stealth is all you have to level the playing field but, thankfully, zipping between shadows is so fluid and sharp that it's a pleasure to take the job on.

Every ability in your low-tech arsenal is designed make sleuthing simpler, from darts that shatter lights to a panther-like crawl that helps you scramble up walls and squeeze through tight spaces. Each action flows naturally into the next, making every stage feels like a graceful, silent dance that you start at the beginning of the level. Far from fearing discovery, Mark of the Ninja makes you feel like a powerful stalker, a sense that few games <(a href="http://www.gamesradar.com/assassins-creed-chronicles-china-review/" target="blank">try as they might) have been able to replicate.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a great stealth game because it makes you terrified of being caught. You don't have so much as a sharp stick to your name when it punts you into the heart of a dark, creepy castle and tells you to watch your step. With no means of defense and little way to tell random ambiance from the approach of a horrible monster, you're left utterly helpless.

Terror is your motivator here, because you're facing something that can utterly destroy you, and you never know where it's going to come from. Being discovered is horrible, not just inconvenient, and the tentative stealth play that follows doesn't have to be forced. It just comes naturally, and never having to see the monster is all the reward you need.

The Thief series might not seem particularly remarkable these days. Its defining qualities are all pretty common for the genre - a first-person view, hiding in shadows to stay concealed, throwing objects to distract guards, and poking your head around a corner to see where your enemies are. None of that sounds remarkable until you find out that Thief is responsible for inventing those familiar mechanics, and that its best chapter, Thief 2: The Metal Age, still uses them better than most games that have come since.

Wide-open levels offer creative freedom, and the many different things you need to consider when developing a plan (how loud this particular patch of floor will be, or if you should club the guard in your path or try to sneak around) create a deep, complex stealth experience where few limits are imposed on how you play. It's by no means simple, but when you finally execute the perfect plan, you feel every bit the master thief the game claims you to be.

The hero of a stealth game tends to stay one step ahead of their pursuers because they’re predictable and rooted in patrols. That's what makes Alien Isolation so different and unsettling: the central enemy moves of its own free will, so you never know exactly where it’s going to appear.

In resetting your expectations for how a stealth game is meant to go, Alien Isolation forces you to relearn the basics. Moving slowly and quietly makes you better able to hide when there’s something horrible in the room with you. Even letting your guard down enough to walk into an empty hall can be deadly, because it invites doom from above. Hiding and crafting the tools you need to survive is fraught with anxiety, and being spotted by the immortal and hungry Xenomorph, after completing an intricate set of tasks, becomes painfully common. But there's no greater feeling than managing to make it to the next save point. Were you ever happier to see a pay phone in your life?

Snake Eater is the quintessential Metal Gear game, tip-toeing perfectly between stealth and storytelling. It's equal parts silly and melodramatic, diving deep into Cold War hysteria as viewed through Hideo Kojima’s lens of paranormal activity and self-aware video game-isms. But Snake Eater isn't just the ideal Metal Gear game; it's the best stealth game, period.

Snake Eater expands into unprecedented freedom, whether you want to Rambo your way through or make it to the end without killing a soul. Beating the game without leaving behind a body count is totally viable, thanks to your tranquilizer gun and a wide variety of camouflage patterns that help you inch past guards even in broad daylight. Snake Eater is also host to one of the greatest boss battles of all time: a multi-screen, hours-long battle of attrition against the world's greatest sniper. If you can wrap your head around the controls, you'll find that Snake Eater's construction still remains the pinnacle of the genre.

First person shooters are some of the most engrossing, personal, and powerful entertainment experiences you can get. You aren't just watching some character play a part on the screen, you are that character. You're seeing all of the action from their perspective, aiming down the sights of a gun in your hands, then pulling the trigger. It's the closest you can come to being a soldier, or zombie killer, or space marine. We love playing FPS games, which is why we've put together a list of our all-time favorites.

For this list, the games need to be in the upper echelon of shooters in terms of gunplay mechanics - which is why you won't see any BioShocks and Metroid Primes here (even if they do rank as some of the ). Also, we at GamesRadar+ are all about the console side of gaming, so while plenty of PC shooters are outstanding, you won’t find them well represented here. So, with all that in mind, here are the best FPS games we've ever played.

GoldenEye 007 takes its rightful place as the worst of the best; a shooter that can hang with the best of them, but only by a hair. It was the Smash Bros. Melee or Halo of the late '90s, the four-player, college dorm juggernaut that ate away the afternoon faster than an extra large pizza on Friday night. An entire generation of gamers were introduced to the magic of first-person shooting thanks to GoldenEye (on console at least). And yet, the years have not been kind to this game. The advances made in console FPS'ing thanks to Halo, Call of Duty, and others, have exposed GoldenEye as being - frankly - a bicycle riding on square wheels.

While the actual shooting in GoldenEye may feel horribly, painfully antiquated, the sheer size and scope of this first-person shooter remains its strongest suit. GoldenEye is packed with all sorts of different guns, gadgets, secret codes, an extensive single-player campaign, and several multiplayer modes to keep you busy. Anyone who spent time with this game remembers the cutthroat nature of Man with the Golden Gun, or how friggin' unfair Oddjob was (he's still banned to this day). GoldenEye 007 shone bright in its heyday, and certainly helped paved the way for the rest of the entries on this list.

Gruff, comically macho Sam Stone is the definition of a one-man army, given the sheer body count of violent creatures he's put down in his time. The Serious Sam games are all about increasingly grandiose rampages, constantly spawning hundreds of enemies right on top of you to achieve maximum amounts of cartoonishly violent chaos. Luckily, you've got the means to take down whatever supernatural horrors that await in ancient Mesoamerica, from the typical firepower (shotguns, miniguns, and rocket launchers) to the exotic (vintage cannons, laserguns, and flamethrowers).

The Second Encounter is the peak of the series' knack for perfectly orchestrated set pieces, no cut-scenes required. Secrets that end in jumpscares, stampedes of the raptor-skeleton-looking Kleers, and parades of the screaming Beheaded Kamikaze soldiers (which make no physical sense, by the way) are just a few of the unforgettable moments that seem to happen back-to-back-to-back as you progress through the wide-open levels. It's a silly thrillride, full of color and comedy, and evokes the classic era of FPS that prioritizes the simple fun of shooting guns at moving targets over all else.

Borderlands 2 is probably the weakest game on this list when it comes to shooting mechanics, with gun damage that relies more on elemental multipliers and player level than shotgun-to-the-face equals dead. But wandering around Pandora, collecting loot, and using the thousands of guns to make bloody fountains out of bandits is an absolute pleasure. Plenty of shooters confine players to narrow corridors, scripted enemy encounters, and squat and pop shootouts. Not so much with Borderlands. The world is massive and open for you to explore.

The game is as much RPG as it is shooter, with multiple player classes that range from dual machine gun wielding Gunzerkers, to psychic-powered Sirens. Then there are upgradable talent trees, elemental weapons, and quest rewards. Take all of that and slap it into a four player co-op shooter experience with an open world filled with weaponized vehicles, hordes of monsters, and gargantuan bosses, and you've got a shooter that's like no other.

Love the large-scale, vehicle-filled firefights of Battlefield, but wish the scope was a little bit bigger? As in, 'over 1,000 players battling across an entire continent' bigger? Sounds like you need to enlist for the ever-raging sci-fi shootouts of at 1,158 concurrent combatants. That makes for a lot of bullets, lasers, and tank shells flying through the air on planet Auraxis at any given time.

The unique balance of the three available factions is reminiscent of StarCraft's asymmetrical, immaculately balanced warfare: the Terran Republic has rapid-fire weaponry and faster vehicles, New Conglomerate forces hit harder at the cost of speed, and the Vanu Sovereignty prefers hovering all-terrain vehicles and copious laser guns made possible by alien technology. Likewise, the six distinct classes ensure that every player has a specialized role to play in this never-ending fight for allied territory. This FPS is the closest you'll get to having your boots on the ground in a planetary war, and it is glorious.

Global Offensive is a paradoxical multiplatform sequel: it was developed to bring console gamers into the fold of this legendary FPS series that flourishes on PC, but ended up making little impact on the Xbox 360 and PS3, while becoming the de facto choice for the most loyal CS fans and legions of mouse-and-keyboard newcomers alike. It doesn't change much, and it doesn't need to - underneath the graphics' grittier realism, this is still pretty much the same team-based, Terrorists versus Counter-Terrorists shooter that values quick thinking and even quicker reflexes.

But CS:GO dared to introduce a few new elements to the tense, one-life-per-round skirmishes of the original. The CZ75-Auto pistol offers a high-risk, high-reward purchase, molotov cocktails can temporarily deny large swaths of the map, and the single-shot, insta-kill Zeus x27 exists solely to be an expensive taunt. In a series that's known for adhering to a proven formula, these additions have gone over well for the second most-played game on Steam. Oh, and those primo weapon skins - a purely aesthetic perk, rest assured - will delight your inner collector, especially if you're lucky enough to score a rare knife.

The sad truth is that PC and console players have very different experiences with Team Fortress 2. While PC players see regular updates, new game modes, and an overflowing cache of items both useful and , the version released for the Xbox 360 only contains the original, vanilla edition of the game. That means no cart-escorting Payload mode, no additional weapons, no hats. But before you demand the poor thing be put out of its misery, know this: that bare-bones version is still amazingly fun.

That's not hugely surprising when you think about it, since everything that made Team Fortress great at the start is there. Maps are colorful and more complex than they look, letting you charge right into a fast-paced slaughter, or sneak into an enemy stronghold and take them all by surprise. Each class is distinct in ways that are outside the norm for shooters (the camouflaged Spy and up-close-and-personal Pyro in particular) and complement each other perfectly, so it never feels like one outclasses the others. Most importantly, it's easy enough for new players to pick up and have a lot of fun, but deep enough for veterans to keep coming back even updates are a far-flung dream. Compared to that, hats really aren't that big of a deal, no matter how beautiful they are.

Unless you’re a hardcore veteran of the great Quake 3 / Unreal Tournament wars of 1999 and utterly set in your ways, there’s something for everyone in Unreal Tournament 3. Epic Games really diversifies the frantic fragfest with all sorts of spins on deathmatch, territorial combat and flag capture. Oh, and it has hover boards.

Unreal Tournament 3 was also one of the first console games to support mods, at least on the PlayStation 3 version. The well-tuned foundation of its first-person combat, bolstered by classic weapons like the Redeemer and the Flak Cannon, meshed perfectly with vibrant sci-fi environments, weird user-created mods and a pulsating soundtrack. The game seemed to expand every time you played, though it never quite took off commercially - in fact, Midway’s marketing is probably what pushed the series into dormancy until 2015.

If it’s possible to be ‘famously’ buried by non-existent marketing, you could say Singularity is chiefly known for how unknown it was upon launch. Developed by the FPS veterans at Raven Software and dumped on an unsuspecting public by Activision, Singularity turned out to be a weird, timey-wimey shooter completely smitten with its own silliness. The game uses a ‘time manipulation’ glove (just go with it) not only as the crux of a weird alternate history plot, but to taunt and torment enemies in bizarre ways. There’s a disturbing thrill in aging an enemy rapidly to the point of no return, or to revert them to a primitive man-beast that can’t tell friend from foe. Even better, a temporary time bubble traps goons and other objects in stasis, letting you suspend precisely aimed bullets mid-air and let them all go at once with a snap. There’s plenty of temporal puzzle solving in Singularity too, but it’s only in combat where the game’s really on the clock.

sounds like it should be a dismal failure, an example of too many strange ingredients combining to make an unpalatable mess. It's equal parts stealth shooter and old-school run-n-gun, moving its fight against WW2-era Nazis into an alternate version of the 1960s where the Third Reich has effectively taken over Europe. Oh, and it also attempts to turn the silent, meat-headed Nazi killer B.J. Blazkowicz into a more human and relatable character. But The New Order doesn't just take all these disparate elements and make them work as a worthy follow-up to a series that spawned a legion of copy-cats - MachineGames has crafted one of the smartest 'mindless' shooters ever made.

Nearly every moment of Wolfenstein: The New Order is malleable, allowing you to tackle its labyrinthine pathways and devilish challenges how you see fit. Levels are open-ended, providing multiple pathways to its objectives, allowing for an equally numerous variety of strategies. Slink through hidden ducts and stealthily shoot enemy soldiers from the shadows with a silenced pistol, then seamlessly go loud with a pair of akimbo AK-47s if you get spotted (or if you just have an itchy trigger finger). Blasting Nazis with an astonishing range of interesting weapons provides its most immediate thrills, but its story is a contemplative investigation of the nature of war and things people are capable of doing to protect the ones they love, and choices you make in the game's opening chapter ripple outward and encourage multiple playthroughs.

First Encounter Assault Recon is an absurd acronym. It sends the wrong message! Even if special forces soldiers with superhuman abilities were actually fighting ghosts, psychics and the walking tanks that protect them, they probably wouldn’t go around calling their business something that implied that they’re constantly terrified. As a name for Monolith Productions’ thriller shooter, though, it’s wonderfully evocative. The studio made a shooter as laudibly simple as it is nervewracking; all you do is blast stuff, but that stuff is going to freak you out good along the way.

F.E.A.R. is clearly a product of its time. The source of all the supernatural phenomena and paramilitary shenanigans you’re fighting against is a little girl with scraggly black hair - a psychic and mad science experiment subject named Alma - straight out of the many Japanese horror movies popular during the early ‘00s. The ability to slow down time for a limited period, the game’s big twist on shooting, was also de rigueur at the time. What elevates F.E.A.R. above its familiar components is an incredible sense of atmosphere and incident. The first level remains one of the all time greats, a perfect roll out of jump scares, weirdness, and big taxing shoot outs that gives you simple weapons and asks you to just use them well. The pace that level sets never lets up the whole time even as F.E.A.R.’s plot gets sillier and sillier.

No game here is better at putting boots to asses than . It's a bull in a china shop; a runaway train that's on fire, strapped with explosives, and barreling through downtown. If you find carnage an art, then Bulletstorm is your Louvre. Creative killing is rewarded in abundance here. Strap a bandit with explosives and kick him into another bandit before detonating them both in a shower of bloody giblets: you get points. Use your beam lasso to toss a guy into an overgrown cactus just for the hell of it: you get points. Steering your sniper bullet around a corner to land the perfect headshot before detonating that bullet to trigger an exploding barrel that obliterates two other enemies: you get so many points.

The best way to approximate Bulletstorm would be to imagine any Mad Max: Fury Road trailer, re-work it into a first-person shooter, and then temper it with a streak of gallows humor that stops it from ever taking itself too seriously. And just like Fury Road, Bulletstorm's action isn't just vapid eye candy, but extremely satisfying gunplay that constantly challenges you to think of new and exciting ways of utilizing the (deadly) toys it gives you. Try it out and see if the heavy KA-THUNK of your quad-barreled shotgun doesn't warm your heart as it melts your opponents into a bloody stew.

Quake 3 is the Olympic gymnast of the FPS genre. Knowing how to aim each beautifully unique weapon is only half the battle, because there's a multitude of mobility options that blast the maps wide open, provided you can master them. Tricky maneuvers like rocket jumping, plasma climbing, and grenade jumping are all stacked atop your basic pace-quickening bunny hop, making it so that a skilled player can fly through any of the artfully laid-out maps at blazing speeds.

Competing in this arena makes absurd demands of your hand-eye coordination; those rail gun headshots aren't going to hit themselves. But at high-level play, it also becomes an intense battle of wits over space control, knowing the precise timing of power-up spawn-ins and deducing where the opponent is based on subtle audio cues. Listening to Shane "rapha" Hendrixson explain all the multilayered thought processes behind his flawless play in this is like going to church for those who can appreciate the finer minutiae of FPS skill.

Most pure shooters rely on a scripted gun-range mentality as a rule. Obedient targets rush into view and everyone merrily mows them down. Far Cry 4, on the other hand, is open world paintball where the focus is on dealing with whatever the hell turns up. Any FPS built on emergent events and improvisation needs a tight gun-handling model and this nails it, letting you pop off crossbow bolts and rockets almost with the power of thought alone, it’s so easy.

You could almost forget it’s not linear, such is the cavalcade of trigger-pumping action as honey badgers burst from bushes or trucks skid off the road spilling guards ready to attack. The behind-the-scenes scripting required to achieve such a smooth flow of action is impressive. However, perhaps its best contribution to the FPS world is that aggressive, rapid-pace stealth: swapping hiding behind corners for sprinting machete runs and stolen gun double take downs.

Battlefield is the king of big scale, multiplayer battles. While COD offers a much personal, more enclosed FPS experience, Battlefield goes big on everything. Maps, vehicles, events, team-play, stats… one of the game’s real strengths is making you feel like you’re a small part of a much larger, ongoing war. And you’re never out-gunned, because there’s always a way to take out a tank, or deal with groups of enemies - you just need to be smart with your squads and their load-outs.

Battlefield 3 specifically hits the sweet spot in terms of shooting mechanics, well-designed maps, and balanced classes/vehicles. It’s no longer the most shiny or comprehensive game, but there’s still a healthy community desperate to shoot you in the face and gather the XP. Sure, Battlefield 4 looks nicer, and has levolution, but it’s not as robust and well-designed as BF3.

You might think, as old as Perfect Dark is, it's long past due to retire from best shooter lists like this one. Released in 2000 when developers were turning out 3D games like proud primary schoolers at their first science fair, the adventures of Joanna Dark have aged in ways that would push other games out of consideration. But by a stroke of good fortune, and thanks to design choices that look smarter with every passing year, much of what made Perfect Dark great back then is still near-perfect now.

There's its eclectic arsenal of weaponry, including everything from a basic pistol, to an x-ray sniper rifle, to a rocket launcher that you can control via first person view, cackling as your friends scatter to avoid the inevitable. Even the sound of the guns and the way they reload is satisfying, alongside the actual shooting, which is smooth enough for dedicated players to master or newcomers to get the hang of quickly. Plus, with the option for four-person multiplayer and dozens of challenges to overcome, there's even more to do after the campaign than during it. This girl is in her golden years, and she's still got it.

Titanfall may not have a single-player campaign, but honestly, it doesn't need it. Not only is this shooter able to provide those big, explosive moments you'd get from a single-player Call of Duty campaign in a multiplayer setting, it's able to provide them by weaving them organically into the core gameplay. Besides, a proper story would just get in the way of its immediate, moment-to-moment action.

Titanfall is a game in constant motion, whether you're boosting up onto a billboard and wall-running into a bombed-out building or you're picking off AI-controlled NPCs to whittle your Titan's respawn timer down a few more seconds. And once that timer hits zero, down comes your giant mech, which you can either pilot yourself or use as your personal robot bodyguard. There are few greater thrills than hopping onto the back of an enemy Titan, shooting it to pieces, launching yourself into the air, landing on another Titan, blowing that one up, then launching onto the roof of a building, all without breaking your stride. Most games wish they could be half this exciting - this kind of stuff happens in Titanfall all the time.

Metro: 2033 felt more like a promise than a fully realized game when it first came out in 2010. Its post-nuclear war world, where humanity survives underground, felt forbidding and harsh, but almost comforting at the same time. Was it violent, poisonous and overrun with killer mutants and sociopathic idealists trying to control the Moscow underground’s precious resources? Sure it was, but it also never felt apocalyptic; life in Metro went on after the bombs fell, people just wore gas masks a lot more often.

As full as its world is, though, the original Metro was miserable to play. Limp gunplay soured vivid ideas like having to manage bullets that are both ammunition and currency as well as the delicious tension of having to constantly search for mask filters on the irradiated surface. , the package that paired 4A Games’ second chapter Last Light with a vastly improved version of 2033, delivers on the original promise in full. Not only does lead character Artyom’s journey finally feel complete with both games under one roof, the action is as fully realized as the world itself.

Few things in life are better than splattering digital zombie brains all over the walls of post-apocalyptic alleyways. And that's why Left 4 Dead 2 is so great. You get to decapitate and explode hostile, risen corpses to your heart's content. And, sure there are plenty of games that let you gun down hordes of undead with everything from a shotgun to a katana sword, but Left 4 Dead 2 is easily one of the best at what it does.

There aren't any complicated stories to keep up with or kill to death ratios to worry about. It's just you and your co-op friends trying not to get eaten alive by player-controlled super zombies and common undead as you move from one safe house to the next. You get the shooting mechanics of Half-Life 2, classic zombie slaying weapons that feel oh so satisfying in your hands, and hundreds of running corpses to shoot. If you somehow get tired of blasting zombies to bits, you can join the other side and hunt the humans as the opposing super zombie team. Left 4 Dead 2 has it all, and absolutely deserves a place as one of the best shooters of all time.

Say no more than ‘Super Shotgun’ to summarize the best of what Doom brought to the demon dissection table. The indispensable weapon lets you barrel through hell with, well, twice as many barrels as you’re used to, amping up Doom’s classic monster-mash to a bloody crescendo.

While its predecessor is the dominant cultural touchstone, Doom 2 shows far more ambition in its level design and its nightmarish menagerie, even drafting old bosses from Doom to fill in as regular enemies. It also abandons the strict episodic structure in its move from Phobos to Earth, letting you keep your arsenal for the duration of the game. And at the end of this hell-jaunt, in a secret room, you’ll find the remains of hell’s true architect: John Romero’s severed head on a stick. It makes the trip worth it, every time.

Chances are, you’re one of the many people who played and enjoyed the original Resistance (because it was a PS3 launch game), got burned badly by Resistance 2 (because it’s ass), and didn’t even bother with Resistance 3. Big mistake. It was one of the best story-driven shooters of the last console generation.

There are definite shades of Half-Life and Metro in Resistance 3, which tells the tragic story of Nathan Hale’s eerie, cross-American journey, where he attempts to save humanity from the seemingly unstoppable Chimera. There are so many stand out moments in the narrative, and the emotion Hale goes through - as he turns his back on his family for the sake of humanity - really gets under your skin. Oh, and the weapons (because they’re made by the creative minds at Insomniac) are both unique and utterly brilliant. Come on, Sony. Stop pissing about with Killzone and give us more Resistance.

In terms of pure shooter feel, has few equals. The gunplay in Bungie’s opus is a delightfully refined, deceptively subtle evolution of the action we know and love from the Halo series, buffed with elemental abilities and a dizzying array of weapon/armour perks. It just feels so great to play; to be in that world, hosing enemies. What’s truly commendable too, is that the shooting works perfectly in both PvE and PvP - few games truly achieve excellence at both.

And because the shooting is so smooth, so endlessly entertaining, it’s easier to forgive some of the game’s perceived flaws. Sure, Crucible still isn’t the finished article, and it’s occasionally unbalanced and glitchy, but every match is taught and brutally contested. No, the plot isn’t explained very well, but who cares when the shooting is this good? And the best part is that Destiny improves with every update, so this already-first-class FPS just keeps getting better.

is the game that defined modern FPS games. After Modern Warfare came out, many shooters tried to capture some of its new FPS magic, whether it was adding progression systems to multiplayer, or rollercoaster-ride action sequences to story modes. The game has one of the most memorable and satisfying single player campaigns in any shooter, genre-changing multiplayer, and an innovative co-op mode, each being just about enough content to justify as its own game but packaged together to make a gargantuan shooter that you could conceivably never stop playing.

Even with the yearly sequels, the series has yet to top the disturbing, yet ultimately unforgettable events of Modern Warfare’s story. After all, it's not every game that you get to experience your own death in the wake of a nuclear blast, or camouflage yourself in tall grass as enemy troops walk right over you. The multiplayer is still home to players looking for a pure CoD experience, where killstreaks only come in three varieties and gunplay skill reigns supreme. No Call of Duty game has changed the genre as much since Modern Warfare, and it doesn't look like it will be topped any time soon.

This may seem like a bit of a cheat since is an anthology of previous Halo games, but here are the key reasons why it deserves its own recognition. First, each game has been updated in some noticeable way, whether that's a simple update to the frames per second as is the case with Halo 4, or if it's a complete re-tooling with a new engine, cut-scenes and content as is the case with Halo 2 Anniversary. In other words, despite the word ‘collection’ being right there in the title, this isn't a simple rehash. The Master Chief Collection offers experiences you simply can't get anywhere else. And yes, they are all that good. Whether it's the immediately-comfortable feel of Halo: Combat Evolved, the dual-wielding and bigger-than-life action of Halo 2, the masterful sandbox design of Halo 3 or the storytelling expertise of Halo 4, each individual game in The Master Chief Collection deserves its accolades.

Second, in a move that we hope more developers take note of, 343 Industries combined multiplayer matchmaking across all titles to offer a singular experience. True, The Master Chief Collection suffered at launch (and some time post-launch) with matchmaking bugs galore, but with the technical hurdles now behind us, it's easier to appreciate the wealth of content available to players. Just as importantly, 343 didn't try to force its hand in terms of unifying the online experience. Want to play with original Halo rules? Go for it. Blood Gulch has been re-released about a bajillion times, but you can choose your favorite version. Choice is the defining attribute here, and that's worth some serious kudos.

You’ve probably heard a lot about how Half-Life 2 is the most groundbreaking, most important, most genre-changing FPS ever made. You’ve probably heard endless championing of its prowess in the areas of interactive narrative, precision pacing, awe-inspiring set-pieces, and deliriously inventive interaction. You’re probably sick of hearing it. But there are two important points about the now 11 year-old rhetoric of unreserved Half-Life praise. Firstly, it’s all entirely true and accurate. Secondly, none of it really gets at just how damn fun Half-Life 2 is.

It’s easy to talk about a game like this by listing concrete innovations and bullet-pointed achievements, but the fact is, you won’t be thinking about any of that when you’re whirling between the buildings of one of H-L2’s, small, open settlements, gunning down two Combine troops in a row before spinning around and launching a pinball of plasma springing around the wall to nail an unseen third. Not as you catch the fourth one’s grenade with the Gravity Gun and hurl it back into his face half a second later. Not as you look up, spot a gunship and a Strider coming over the horizon, and immediately pull out your rocket-launcher, deciding which will suffer your laser-guided fury first. Yes, Half-Life 2 is a cerebral genius, but when it comes to fighting, it’s a Swiss Army Knife strapped to a pinwheel.

Wait, what? A semi-obscure, two-generations old cartoon shooter beating out the likes of Half-Life 2 and Halo? Yes. Because while it never quite made the iconic status of its genre's brightest stars, the GoldenEye team's best game is flat-out the most creative, imaginative, lovingly-crafted, and just outright fun FPS ever made. Not only that, but in its format, structure, and content offering, it's a game so far ahead of its time that we're still waiting for someone to catch up.

Its loose, time-travelling plot is the gateway to a pantheon of utterly unique, immaculately conceptualised levels, each with a feel, flow, and design as special as its setting and look. And although consistently hilarious in its film-pastiching conceits, it's a game packed with immense depth and precise intent, an intricate structure of differing approaches, strategies, and immediate, gratifying fun. But then there's the seemingly endless array of blisteringly fast, entertaining, and kinetic multiplayer options. And the similarly vast, ludicrously creative challenge modes, that push the tight but accessible shooting and madly eclectic weapon-set to their limits, and beg for a second, online-enabled life. And good Lord, those unlockable characters. Monkeys vs. Gingerbread Men in a chaingun battle to the death? Hell yes. Hell yes indeed.

Not every villain who opposes Batman can be as iconic as The Joker or Scarecrow, but that doesn't mean they can't be memorable. When crafting the Arkham games, developer Rocksteady knew just how to make the most out of the Dark Knight's diverse rogues gallery, applying smart redesigns where necessary to match the series' darker, grittier atmosphere. It's impressive when B-list bad guys like Calendar Man or The Mad Hatter can be made menacing, and WB Games Montreal later mimicked Rocksteady's style in Arkham Origins to elevate underachievers like Copperhead and Anarky into worthwhile adversaries.

With the release of to pursue new projects. That means there won't be any in-game criminal makeovers for the legions of forgotten weirdos who've made the mistake of trying to terrorize Gotham. The following villains are generally thought to be some of the least threatening crooks Batman has ever beaten up - but I'd like to think that the patented Arkham style could've scored them a spot on the caped crusader's Most Wanted list. Just imagine the possibilities of fighting the virtual, redone version of someone like...

He's ridiculed because: Poor Crazy Quilt. This petty criminal underwent an experimental procedure to restore his vision after going blind, but the results were less than optimal: Crazy Quilt could see again, but only in a wild kaleidoscope of bright colors. This constant, prismatic assault on the eyes drove him insane. Now, he cavorts around Gotham wearing a garish multicolored costume and a sight-enabling helmet, which can also hypnotize his enemies or zap them with lasers. Try as he might, nobody - least of all Batman - seems to take him seriously.

But in an Arkham game: If you've played , which employs dazzling visual effects that fill the screen with neon and corrupt pixels. Imagine seeing Batman transported into a similarly disorienting, intensely hued world when he's zapped by Crazy Quilt's beams of weaponized color. Given how gorgeous the graphics are in Arkham Knight, this kind of experimental aesthetic could look absolutely stunning.

He's ridiculed because: If you think The Riddler overestimates his own importance, just wait ‘til you meet this toga-clad gangster. Ol' Maximillian here is absolutely convinced he's the reincarnation of the Greek gods' head honcho Zeus, which spurred him to rise up through the ranks of organized crime. Even though he's got no superpowers or inherent strengths to speak of, he's somehow persuaded legions of gun-toting goons to obey his every command. Batman: The Animated Series has him fighting back with a thunderbolt-shaped electric rod, which helps makes his motif seem a little less dorky.

But in an Arkham game: Though he never shows up in-game, the unlockable character bios in Arkham Asylum depict Maxie as a beefcake with a deranged sense of superiority who went haywire after too much electroshock therapy. What if all that shock treatment left him with 10 million volts of electricity surging through his veins, not unlike a certain Metal Gear Solid villain by the name of ? It wouldn't be too much of a leap to think yourself a reincarnated god when you can shoot lightning from your fingertips and flash-fry your enemies in an instant.

He's ridiculed because: When you're a supervillain wearing a white leotard spotted with multicolored polka dots, getting any kind of respect is going to be an uphill battle. But don't judge this crook by his cover, because his power - the ability to morph any of the dots on his suit into a wide assortment of weapons - is actually a legitimate threat.

But in an Arkham game: Arkham's thumpy, trademark brand of fistfighting goes a lot deeper than merely punching and countering, thanks to the variety of enemy types you encounter later on. Throughout the series, Batman has had to deal with rioters, mercenaries, and assassins wielding swords, bats, electrified clubs, miniguns, and remote-controlled drones - but no one soldier combines all the tactics needed to deal with these assorted methods of assault. Enter Polka-Dot Man, who could use his suit to become an all-in-one foe that would demand mastery of all your gadgets and counter techniques to take him down.

He's ridiculed because: You know you're in for a treat when an original character is excessively campy even by 1960s, live-action Batman standards. Played by horror legend Vincent Price, Egghead's shtick is that he's obsessed with eggs. That's pretty much it. He's got a gargantuan bald head, wears a suit of white and yellow, chucks hazardous chicken eggs that can emit radar waves or noxious gas, and makes egg puns at every available opportunity. His greatest peace-disturbing accomplishment was instigating a food fight with Batman and Robin, who then proceeded to smash his face with eggs and fists.

But in an Arkham game: Let's go extra dark and disturbing with this one. Instead of chicken eggs, this twisted Egghead would be obsessed with stem cell research, plundering human embryos from Gotham's hospitals to fuel his own research for developing a genetically perfect henchman. Of course, there'd be many failures along the way - leading to an army of horrific, mutated fetuses viciously crawling at Batman like the . It'd be a scene right up there in the 'mind-warpingly disturbing' department as the infant Crawlers from Dead Space 2.

He's ridiculed because: Just look at him. Charles Brown (likely a reference to the kite-tormented protagonist of the Peanuts comic strip) decided that the best way to distinguish himself in Gotham's crime community was to soar through the air on a gigantic glider and wield miniature kites as projectile weapons. Without any updrafts or wide-open spaces surrounding the things he wishes to steal, Kite Man is completely useless. Unless you feel threatened whenever you hear "Let's Go Fly a Kite" from Mary Poppins, Kite Man is about as intimidating as, well, a kite.

But in an Arkham game: Batman's gone up against other high-flyers in the Arkham series, like Firefly and [minor Arkham Knight spoiler redacted], but they've never involved any test of your combat abilities. The AR flight challenges push your cape-gliding skills to their limits, but their presentation is simply boring. A fight against Kite Man could address both problems, testing your capacity for sharp aerial maneuvers while you fistfight in midair, weaving between Gotham's skyscrapers and divebombing to avoid Kite Man's attacks.

He's ridiculed because: Just as Bizarro is the polar opposite of Superman, Batzarro is the cartoonish negative of the Dark Knight. For starters, he wields dual pistols (which he may have used to shoot his own parents), calls himself the World's Worst Detective, and... has fangs and no eyes, for some reason. In an amusing flip of Batman's constant inner monologuing, Batzarro usually just blurts out whatever he's thinking (all styled with the same grating 'opposite day logic' as Bizarro-speak). Unfortunately, he's a little too goofy for many readers' tastes.

But in an Arkham game: The Arkham series rarely gets to flex its humorous muscles - but as your exchangers with The Riddler (and, on occasion, The Joker) prove, there's value to having bits of laugh-out-loud comedy amidst all the doom and gloom. As with his counterpart Bizarro, Batzarro's more unpredictable than outright evil, causing chaos whenever he tries to assist his idol Batman. Battling Batzarro could be a boss fight where you have to subdue him and a group of thugs before he kills them in an attempt to help out, all while he spouts ludicrous, laughable dialogue.

He's ridiculed because: Ever see a kid getting picked on because they take too much pride in their fancy calculator? Calculator (the Batman villain) takes that kind of regrettable preoccupation with number-crunching to the nth degree. His master plan revolved around preliminary failure: Calculator would dress up like a TI-83, get beaten to a pulp by various superheroes, then use his costume to analyze the do-gooder's fighting style in the hopes that he'd outsmart them the second time around. Unfortunately for his schemes, those calculations never seemed to pan out.

But in an Arkham game: Calculator has turned his criminal life around in the comics as of late, ditching the geeky getup for a job as a tech-savvy information broker and hacker for the criminal underworld. That effectively makes him the evil equivalent of Batman's close ally Oracle, who plays an important role in the Arkham games. Going up against an in-game Calculator might involve counter-hacking his attempts to take over the Batcomputer, assisting Oracle to help shut him out or misdirect the Calculator away from crucial intelligence related to the Dark Knight's next move.

He's ridiculed because: With a name like that, you might be expecting a terrifying Grim Reaper type who wields a scythe, but no - he's just a guy dressed like a skeleton who's really good at playing dead. By inducing a full-body yoga trance, Lord Death Man can fake his own passing, which apparently aids him in committing crimes. Then, somehow, he developed the power to actually reanimate himself after taking fatal damage. Though he's not much of a supervillain, you've got to give him points for sheer willpower.

But in an Arkham game: Lord Death Man's unique ability could push Batman to the limits of his 'no killing' rule (even more than running over thugs on the streets of Arkham Knight). LDM could create a scenario in which Batman would have no choice but to inflict lethal harm in order to prevent further calamity, forcing the Dark Knight to 'kill' him with the knowledge that it wouldn't take (this is actually something that The Joker has tried in the past). It'd also make for a pretty memorable 'Gotcha!' moment when Lord Death Man miraculously shows up later in the game.

As video games continue to mature as a medium, they become more adept at reaching beyond their confines as mere entertainment. Sometimes they empower us, other times they challenge us, and, rarely, they move us. But packing an emotional punch is no easy task; it requires a carefully choreographed assault designed to dismantle our defenses and strike us where we are most vulnerable. One misstep and the whole effort crumbles.

Telling a story that can reduce a you to tears is quite a feat, but working that climax into the opening hour of a game requires a whole new level of mastery. You have to step outside of the box and tell a new kind of story, one that surprises as much as it devastates. You must dig deeper to find the humanity in your characters, so that when they suffer, we suffer too. If you're on the hunt for some games that'll get you misty-eyed before you've even settled into your chair, then look no further.

Kids do dumb things. But having your harmless childish antics result in the death of your only parent is a cruel twist. As children, we tend to think our parents are invincible, that they will always be there to care for us. But as Oliver's mother collapses to the ground grasping her chest, it reminds us all that, sometimes, the universe has other plans.

But what makes 's prologue so heart-rending is the moment where Oliver finally succumbs to his grief. As Joe Hisaishi's moving soundtrack begins to swell, Oliver clutches a doll his mother made for him and remembers the sweet, yet inconsequential, moment she gave it to him before heading to work. Watching Oliver break into tears is hard to watch, because it forces us to reflect on the same fleeting moments that we're left with when the ones we love are lost to us forever. When people die, they leave holes in our lives, but how can a boy as young as Oliver ever expect to fill the space left by his mother?

Sometimes love is absolutely terrifying. It makes you vulnerable and, in the worst cases, can opens you up to immeasurable pain of loss. But Joel never had a choice not to love his daughter, Sarah. And he never had a choice when the outbreak of a zombie-like infestation drove them from their home and into the iron sights of a merciless soldier.

is deserving of praise for its harrowing vision, but never was that vision more realized than in the quiet moment of a father cradling his fatally wounded daughter. Dying in someone's arms has become a cliche, but this wasn't a time for composed last words. Instead, it was the heart-dropping panic of a dad clutching his dying baby-girl, barely able to utter a single word of comfort as she slips away. Few things in video games have ever been as haunting. There was no peace, no quiet passing, just a little girl who didn't want to die and a father not ready to let her go.

Seeing the future is as much a blessing as it is a curse. For Shulk, the protagonist, it often acts as a painful reminder of just how helpless he can be. Even with the knowledge of the future, he finds himself unable to change its course. That helplessness, however, was never more realized than as he watched, incapacitated, as his best friend Fiora was ruthlessly murdered and his hometown destroyed.

Fiora's death is painful because we took her for granted. In life, we wrongfully expect that bad things only happen to bad people, and, in a way, Xenoblade Chronicles lulls us into that line of thinking. It placates us with quiet moments between friends, and the nurtured expectation of a peaceful existence. The moment Fiora's bloodcurdling scream is silenced by the blade, we, like Shulk, realize how delicate peace truly is. Tragedy doesn't discriminate. It doesn't care if you're selfless or kind. Tragedy only cares if you have something to lose. And, as Xenoblade Chronicles shows us, we all do.

No one ever comprehends true fear until they become a parent; to deal with the creeping dread that, like a monster under your bed, waits until your mind is quiet before ambushing you with the terrifying cruelty of the world your child belongs to. But to see those nightmares played out before your very eyes, to stand neutered and helpless as death whisks that child away, is a pain that no one should suffer. But in the opening moments of Heavy Rain, you experience just that.

Chasing your son, Jason, through a mall is a debilitating insight into that boiling dread. As you fumble awkwardly through crowds, it's easy to imagine you are Ethan Mars. You feel his panic as if it is your panic. By the time you find Jason, just in time to see him carelessly step in front of traffic, you're so emotionally raw and agitated that it's impossible to separate yourself from what is happening on the screen. For that brief moment, you feel Ethan's loss as if it was your loss.

After the harrowing conclusion to Season 1, it's hard not to step into The Walking Dead: Season 2 with your guard up. Like Clementine, you have internalized the lesson that no one is safe. In a world as barbarous as this one, emotional attachment is just another weakness. It's a terrible sacrifice to choose between your humanity and your survival, but The Walking Dead asks it of you again and again.

But just when you think The Walking Dead can no longer surprise you, it hits you with an emotional sucker-punch. Without even a moment to catch your breath between the shocking conclusion to Season 1 and the span of time between Season 2, Clementine is thrust back into the heart of tragedy. Within the blink of an eye, a simple robbery goes wrong, leaving Clementine and the very pregnant Christa to pick up the pieces. But that lingering shot of Clementine's empty eyes taking in the brutality is what brings it all home: any shred of innocence she had left is now certainly gone and there is nothing you can do.

While some games elicit an emotional reaction through sweeping musical scores or tender moments of humanity, Homefront is a literal tour de savage force, stripping you emotionally naked and hosing you down with its merciless prologue - and all you can do is watch. Its premise of North Korea invading the United States might seem farfetched, but it's only the backdrop for a sobering look at the horrors of military occupation.

As the prison bus you're confined to makes its way through the neighborhood, your window becomes a tapestry of brutality: families torn apart, people beaten to death before your eyes, rows of innocents chained and gagged. Rounding the corner, all of that crumbles beneath the weight of a single moment. A mother and father, up against a wall, calmly reassuring their baby boy that everything will be okay. But as two gunshots crack, and their bodies slump lifelessly before their screaming child, all we can do is watch. Shooters empower us to intervene, to take command. But sitting on that bus, hands bound, we are powerless - stripped of all agency.

"Nothing gold can stay," wrote Robert Frost. As the amber hues of the forest shifted to rancid brown, those words are brought to life in heartbreaking clarity. Whisked away one night by a storm, the adorably nimble Ori is discovered by the pudgy Naru, and the two become fast friends.

The short, yet painful, prologue employs a masterful use of visual storytelling, seeing you literally walk through a season's worth of memories in the span of minutes. Ori and Naru's friendship is beautifully resilient, even when the forest they inhabit slowly withers and both risk starvation. But that loving selflessness is never more apparent than when Naru gives Ori the last apple, dismissing her own starvation with a playful wave of her furry hand. will enchant you with its breathtaking storybook visuals and sweeping musical score, but it's the quiet moment where the fox-like Ori settles onto the still and silent body of his best friend Naru that remains long after the credits have rolled.

I won't blame you if you felt caught off guard by these heart-breaking prologues. Most of us expect to invest a few hours in a game before it reduces us to a quivering pile of tears and sobs, but there's a lot that can be said about a game that isn't afraid to come out swinging. As we only begin to explore the potential of the medium, we also come to grasp new, and sometimes heartbreaking, ways of telling a story.

To those who've never delved into comics before, but would really like to try, the format can feel impenetrable. Super hero serials have decades-long backlogs, a sea of creator-owned comics can leave you little clue where to start, and the financial commitment of comic readership would make anyone anxious to invest in the unknown. It can be a daunting challenge, and you may feel like giving up hope on ever really becoming a Reader of Comics with so many obstacles in your path.

But what if you had a starting point, a story you were already familiar with transferred into comic form? Like, say, one based on a video game? If that sounds good, then you're in luck, because game developers have long since discovered the pros of going comic-side. There are now a plethora of video game comics on the market, and I'm not talking shameless cash-ins. These are proper comics done by proper comic authors and artists, often with help from the creative minds behind the games that inspired them. To help you figure out the best way to launch into game-comic readership, we've collected some of the best you could be reading right now and the optimal place to snag them. Read on, and if you think we missed a great title, sound off in the comments - help your fellow readers, and we'll get through this together.

Status: Ongoing

Co-written by comic giant Gail Simone and the lead writer of the Tomb Raider reboot, Rhianna Pratchett, Dark Horse's Tomb Raider comic puts Lara Croft in the hands of creators you know will treat her right. Its takes place between the reboot and Rise of the Tomb Raider, giving insight into Lara's personal struggles as she deals with the fallout from her time in Yamatai. It also gives a nice introduction to Trinity, the shadowy organization she's destined to encounter in her search for all manner of things mythical, priceless, and powerful. Her adventures take her to some strange places, from the jungles of South America to the subway tunnels and theater stages of London, all lovingly rendered by a rotating group of talented artists.

Best place to read it: Issues can be purchased individually from the are available as well.

Status: Ongoing special release, currently complete

Shepard may be the savior of the Mass Effect universe, but s/he isn't privy to everything that goes on in its vast expanse. In fact, s/he doesn't even know everything that happens on the Normandy, and that's where the Mass Effect comics come in. Considered fully canon (and written/co-written by Mass Effect lead writer Mac Walters), these comics cover events that only get cursory attention in the games, like the First Contact War, how Liara got her shadowy title, or what everyone was up to while Shepard was in stasis. Featuring gorgeous full color art over 27 issues, there's more than enough here to help fans occupied during the wait for Mass Effect: Andromeda. Plus, how could you resist the tale of a

Best place to read it: Those who prefer physical media have .

Status: Ongoing special release

It takes some serious creativity to pull a coherent plot out of a game like Team Fortress 2, which doesn't have a hint of story and centers around a bunch of mercenaries wearing weird hats. But the Team Fortress 2 comics pull it off, because if nothing else, they are very creative. Acting as accompaniment to the game's biggest updates, the comics build an erratic, yet plausible storyline where the sudden emergence of robot soldiers and haunted swords actually makes sense. It's all as ridiculous as you'd expect, and the comic's absurd sense of humor is what really pushes it into must-read territory. It's the story Team Fortress never needed, yet is so much richer and funnier for having it around.

Best place to read it: All the comics are free-to-read on the compilation (alongside a pair of Left 4 Dead and Portal comics).

Status: Complete

When a game works well, there's little need to reinvent the wheel to make a comic of the same property. Or reinvent the cog, in the case of the Gears of War comic. Focusing on minor characters and miscellaneous happenings between the events of Gears and Gears 2, the Gears comic succeeds by focusing on what made the original so enthralling: a gritty and melancholy setting, sharp attention to detail, and plenty of heart-thumping, chainsaw-based brutality. It doesn't exactly tread any new territory, but does such an excellent job of translating the spirit of the Gears games onto the page that it really doesn't need to do anything else.

Best place to read it: The full digital collection is available on available at retail.

Status: Complete

The Last of Us has a fine prequel in the touching Left Behind DLC, but it never hurts to get a little extra love. That's what's to be found in The Last of Us: American Dreams comic, a prologue to Left Behind that focuses on the relationship between Ellie and Riley as it develops in the confines of an oppressive military boarding school. Though it boasts an art style closer to Scott Pilgrim than the CGI of its source material, American Dreams' story is appropriately poignant, and introduces the reader to a new, delinquent side of Ellie. Integrating itself into the grander story through the smallest of details but immediately feeling like part of the whole, American Dreams deserves a place on any fan's shelf right next to Naughty Dog's apocalyptic opus.

Best place to read it: Digital version of all the issues can be purchased if you're willing to pay a bit more for a Kindle or paperback edition.

Status: Complete

With nearly two decades of games to its name, Silent Hill has a plethora of content to fill out its small and ill-lit universe, and just as many gaps for new stories to fill in. Spanning 25 issues, the Silent Hill comic series tells eight standalone stories that take place within Silent Hill, each focused on a new unfortunate soul that wanders into its foggy confines. Each has its own unique art style (Downpour: Anne's Story has a realistic look with a high level of detail, while Dead/Alive resembles a disturbed child's sketchpad) and take on the nature of the town, letting each new volume approach fear in its own unique, perfectly unsettling way.

Best place to read it: This one's a little tricky, because while the series has an excellent - can all be purchased separately.

Status: Complete

A world the size of Thedas can't be contained in a single game, and even after three it feels we've only just breached the dragon's lair. The Dragon Age comic trilogy guides us a little further inside with a new story about the adventures of companions Alistair, Isabela, and Varric as they search for Alistair's lost royal father. Though the story is thick with Dragon Age lore and might seem inaccessible to those just getting into the series, the density of its narrative detail is perfect for fans who already know enough to make sense of it. That's in addition to the impressive visual detail in the book's beautiful, polished illustrations. Though it's only a trilogy, there's plenty of material here to keep fans busy during the wait for the new .

Best place to read it: Buying is the prettiest and cheapest available option.

Status: Complete

Master Chief may not talk much about himself (or anything at all), but that silence conceals a fascinating backstory that defines the Halo universe as we know it. Thankfully you won't have to wait for Chief to get chatty to hear the whole tale - you'll just have to grab a copy of Halo: Fall of Reach. A comic adaption of the novel of the same name, Fall of Reach is broken up into three parts, each detailing an important part of the Chief's life: his childhood abduction and training as a Spartan, the beginning of the Human-Covenant War, and fall of the colony of Reach (which leads directly into of Halo: Combat Evolved). While the events of the comic will be familiar to anyone who's read the novel, the comic's gives it an extra leg up, making it a worthy addition to any Halo collection.

Best place to read it: Sadly there's no omnibus for this series and it's not part of Marvel Unlimited, but thankfully the three arcs <(a href="http://www.amazon.com/Halo-Fall-Reach-Boot-Camp/dp/0785151478?tag=gredit-20ascsubtag=videogamecomics" target="blank">Boot Camp, are each available as a full volume.

Status: Complete

Ace Attorney might seem like an odd series to adapt to comic form, since much of its appeal rests in eviscerating your opposition with the power of lawyering. But while it doesn't have that level of interactivity, the Ace Attorney manga fully embraces the series' best qualities and creates a fun side-story for fans to get their Phoenix fix. A five-volume mini-series covering a slew of new cases, its heavy focus on the evidence lets you play a more passive part in the solving of the crime, but nonetheless pushes you to figure out the answer yourself. Featuring brain-teasing puzzles and the charm that the Ace Attorney series is famous for, this manga is great for established fans or new arrivals who want to check the story out before taking on the challenge of crime-solving.

Best place to read it: There aren't many options here for those who prefer digital editions or collections, but the are all available at a relatively decent price.

Status: Complete

Despite its wide popularity, Kingdom Hearts can be , particularly because different parts of the story are exclusive to different platforms. Thankfully, those who can't swing the purchase of a new system to play a single game can turn to the Kingdom Hearts manga instead, which covers the events of the games in a relatively faithful manner, while adding a few extra bits of story exclusive to print. The most recent (and arguably most helpful) addition to this Kingdom Hearts collection is the five-issue Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, which tells the story of Alex, Roxas, and Xion that sets up Kingdom Hearts 2. Laying out an otherwise convoluted story through simple but elegant illustrations instantly makes it easier for fans and newcomers to access the full plot of Kingdom Hearts, and any comic that does that is a winner in my book.

Best place to read it: In a vast departure from how Kingdom Hearts is typically organized, all five volumes are available to western readers and can . That was easier than expected!

F1 2015 is upon us, bearing the weight of three decades of F1 games on its HD shoulders. Who could have thought in the heady days of Namco's Pole Position that one day we'd be looking at 60 photo-quality images made up of over 2 million pixels each zooming around on TVs the size of dinner tables? Recognisable 3D drivers, laser-scanned circuits… it's incredible how far we've come.

But that doesn't mean previous F1 games should be forgotten forever just because the drivers in them have long-since retired (or worse) and their graphics look like Steve from Minecraft got given a racing overalls skin. Now, to be clear - I'm not just going to list all the classic ones like Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix, F1 World Grand Prix or F1 '97 because the truth is, while they were amazing at the time, they're not very good if you play them now. These are the other F1 games that still deserve to be played today.

While the impressiveness of those scaling sprites has waned slightly, this F1-themed arcade sprint is still a ton of fun. The camera on the car is slightly off-centre, which immediately gives this a more organic feel than most 2D racers. In the arcade, this was exacerbated by the free-feeling analog steering wheel.

The crashes are over the top, with explosions and bouncing wheels, but there's a really nice pit mechanic. His name's Bob. No, I'm joking (sorry), I mean the way you have to pit in if you sustain damage, as your car smokes, then catches fire. Fail to do so and it explodes, but sometimes you can just make it to the finish line before it does. Risk vs reward – it's classic gaming stuff.

Officially licensed? No. Real tracks? No. Formula One cars rocketing around banked curves, flipping against rocks and scrambling for time bonus checkpoints? Hell yes. This may be best remembered for being the game that kick-started the 3D polygon era, but it shouldn't be forgotten that it is still an absolute blast to play. The handling is precise, the polygonal scenery flashing past still looks gorgeous and the three tracks are beautifully designed.

The arcade original remains the best version (with PS2's remake being a bit too slidey to be perfect), with silky-smooth and gloriously solid flat-shaded 3D. Smoothly switching between the four viewpoints is still more fun than it should be, and the difficulty level is perfectly judged, ensuring plenty of longevity. They don't make 'em like this any more. FOR SHAME.

"You wot, mate? A PSP game? Naff off." That's what you're thinking. But this is, quite simply, the best dedicated handheld F1 game you can buy. It's essentially a shrunk-down PS2 game, complete with engine failures, damage (decent damage, at that) and extensive career mode. Your pit engineer even tells you how your sector times are compared to your opponents. It's the full F1 experience.

The graphical simplification is evident if you play it today, but that's where the compromise ends. The controls are wonderful. Cannoning along the flat-out chicane at Albert Park, picking your braking point for the right hander feels every bit as good as a full console game. The Vita version of F1 2011 is nowhere near as good as this. FOR SHAME.

Domark's 16-bit racer remains one of the fastest video games ever made, particularly in 'Turbo Mode', which uses the graphics from the two-player mode in a single-player set-up. The scenery absolutely flies by at these speeds, with a little 'whoosh' noise every time you pass under a flyover.

It's got the official drivers of 1993 too, barring Ayrton Senna who must have still been under license with Sega at the time. While the technical accomplishment of having 3D grandstands and rotated sprites (without a Mega-CD to do all the work) has faded with time, revving the cat-like engine and gliding through these sparse environments is still fun – especially when you clip the wheel of a slow-moving car and bunny-hop into an Agip sign.

To think I found this in a bargain bin. Using a bespoke game engine, Melbourne House managed to get the PS2 to shift 22 gorgeous-looking cars around at 60fps. Sure, the damage modelling is underwhelming and the handling is a little too simplified, but the atmosphere of the game and superb sense of fluidity is wonderful.

Best feature? Zooming down a straight in the slipstream of the car in front, watching vortices of air streaming off its back wing. If ever a game was ahead of its time, it's this. If you want to see a PS2 running a game that still stands up next to F1 on PS4, then this is the one.

This one's pretty much vanished into obscurity already, but that's a real shame as it's arguably the best kart racer that isn't called Mario Kart. The drivers and cars may be recognisable (though 'super-deformed' with big heads and cartoon-slanted wheels), but the tracks are only loosely based on reality, with some recognisable corners that then skew upwards into the sky, with rollercoaster sections of excitement.

It's beautifully smooth and controllable (albeit lacking any kind of drift feature as F1 cars really shouldn't drift around corners), and only really let down by some disappointingly generic weapons. Yes, it has weapons. Trapping Jenson Button in bubblegum is an odd thing to do. But still, fun. You'll undoubtedly find it cheap – pick it up, you'll enjoy it.

Everyone remembers PlayStation's officially-licensed Formula One games, but Saturn had one too. It wasn't made by Bizarre Creations, instead appearing under the Sega Sports label. It also didn't have all the tracks, providing just three official circuits (Germany, Suzuka and Monaco) and a handful of playable drivers.

But this is a wonderful arcade representation of Formula One. One of the first console racers to feature a 3D skybox, simply turning the car fills your senses with an amazing visual effect as the sky arcs overhead. Cars spin, tyres go off and you can gamble on fuel between pit stops. It's starting to show its age, but get past the slight flakiness and there's a great racing game here, especially with the official Saturn steering wheel.

Now listen. I want you to know I am being absolutely serious and I'm wearing my 'nostalgia sucks' hat when I say this: Nigel Mansell's Grand Prix was made in 1988, but remains one of the best F1 sims of all time. You have to qualify within a certain time or you'll never see a real race. You've got to keep the revs within the power band to keep fuel consumption down and – explaining instantly why I've always played racers on manual gears – you have to learn to change gear or you won't ever leave the pit lane.

You have four settings for your turbo and have to manage fuel and engine temperature as you use it. If you do run out of fuel, weaving left and right will slosh fuel back into the pump in the engine - just like real cars of the '80s. You can catch spins, blow the engine or your tyres… it's an amazingly faithful replication of the sport – it just looks like your TV's broken, is all. Amazing job, Martech.

How can a 10-years-old PS2 game still be one of the best F1 racers you can buy? Well, it's all in the handling. F1 '05's handling model is sensational. It also uses an increasingly shaky TV pod cam as you get faster, until 200mph really feels like 200mph. If you ever wanted to get your teeth into a fast, responsive, devilishly fun and controllable racing game, then this is absolutely it.

It also sounds incredible. The commentator suggests that you 'turn up the volume' while you wait for the green light, and you really should. There's also a 5-year career mode to get your teeth into. It's little surprise to note this game was developed by Studio Liverpool, of Wipeout fame. Now there was a team that knew how to make a great racer.

Despite the progress made by the sequel (and its now sadness-tinged Ayrton Senna license), it's the original that I would recommend most strongly, and the 16-bit version at that. The gameplay itself may be sedate by today's standards, but the rivalry system is perfect, allowing you to move up through the teams as quickly as you think your skills will allow – or down if you fail to meet expectations.

The music is wonderful, and couples with a presentation style tinged with the romance of late 1980s-era F1. The 2D images disguised to look like TV footage in the post-race screens are achingly beautiful, complete with heat haze effects. It’s a game to savour, and also one of the best games you can play on a Sega Nomad. Fact.

Studio Liverpool's first - and last - PS3 F1 game is still beautiful. Running at 60 frames per second, it's only the 720p resolution that really betrays its last-gen status. But it's arguably volved than Codemasters' subsequent take on the sport, thanks to QTE pitstops (way better than that sounds), parade laps to warm up your tyres, and commentary over the race action.

The handling model is more accessibly video gamey than true simulation, and you can even steer with the D-pad which is actually surprisingly sharp. Any game with Martin Brundle in it is automatically 20% better, so it gets marks for that too. Smooth, precise, exhaustive and with damage that actually sees a wheel falling off when you hit another car (I know, right?), this is still mightily impressive, 8 years on.

This may not have been the final last-gen F1 game from Codemasters, but it's by far the best. Firstly, you've got the result of four years of honing the formula (pun intended) and the amazing Ego engine, making this easily good enough to pass for a new-gen racing game. But if the main course (pun not intended) is good, it's the dessert that'll keep you coming back for more.

There's classic content featuring vintage cars, circuits and even drivers. The 1988 season is best represented (although sadly lacking the stars of that year – the McLaren Hondas), but there's 1990s content too, offered as DLC or with the special edition of the game. And that's got Nigel Mansell's FW14B. I made a video series showcasing the best of this content, which you should totally watch. With such an authentic and slick main game made even better with such fan-pleasing content, it's clearly the best F1 game ever made. Unless F1 2015 can change that...

While playing with Lego playsets as a kid was always fun, everyone knows the best part was mixing those boxes together and having a pirate take on an army of dinosaurs as the Millennium Falcon swooshed overhead. Lego Dimensions is meant to recreate that feeling of nonsensical childhood bliss by bringing together beloved pop culture properties into a single game, so Batman can take aim at the Scarecrow (from The Wizard of Oz) while Gandalf laughs about it in the background. Just like you remember.

The game's story is built to accommodate all that world-mixing, as it's kicked off by a villain creating transdimensional travel for the express purpose of kidnapping famous characters we all know and love. Specifically, famous characters from Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Portal, and plenty more (all of which will get their ). In preparation for Dimensions' release for every major console (including Xbox 360 and PS3) on September 27th, we've gotten a chance to dig through Lego's toy box and see what the game has in store. We're ready to share that all with you, and not just because our moms told us to.

It may feel like a lifetime since the Doctor Who Lego Dimension playset was first leaked by the developer's own PDF instruction page, but all the wibbly wobbly timey-wimey wait is over. Now we have official confirmation of not one, not twelve, two different Doctor Who packs, one starter and one bonus.

Announced at San Diego Comic Con, the starter pack and its associated level will feature all the touchstones of a proper Doctor Who experience, like Daleks, Cybermen, the TARDIS, and K-9. In addition, it will contain figures for the 12th Doctor (voiced by original actor Peter Capaldi, alongside Clara Oswald's actress Jenna Coleman and Missy's Michelle Gomez), the TARDIS, and K-9, with the latter two acting as rebuildable vehicles. And fear not, fans of the earlier seasons: the 1st and the 12th Doctors will both appear in the game, and when one is defeated, he'll regenerate as the other (and the appearance of all twelve Doctors in the trailer below suggests that roster could grow). Meanwhile, the extra Doctor Who fun pack will come bearing a playable Cyberman figure and a rebuildable Dalek, just in case you weren't nerding out hard enough yet.

I know we've all been staring forlornly at our Skylanders, amiibo, and Disney Infinity figures wondering when the next toys-to-life franchise will come around, and bless Lego Dimensions for being the next to deliver. Of course, in less cheeky terms, Lego is uniquely qualified to work within the format, since it's been making both parts of the equation for years.

The game's accompanying portal (which you build from bricks before you start playing) works the way you would expect, acting as a stage where you can place whatever characters you want to load into the game. However, Dimensions' portal is unique in that it's divided into three parts, and will make it possible to move up to seven characters (or objects, but more on that later) between those three sections at will. In fact, that becomes an important part of the game in some situations; during boss fights, for instance, a red light will flash under one segment when the boss attacks the characters standing there, and their hold can be broken by moving the figures to another space. Someone should tell Dorothy that all you need to beat the Wicked Witch's magic is to move over a square.

During my time with the Dimensions' demo, I had far too much fun taking Scooby Doo on a joyride through the Lego-fied poppy fields of Oz (while he's covering his eyes, naturally) before crashing into a fight with the Wicked Witch over a crystallized piece of the universe. That reality-smushing is not only a common occurrence in Dimensions, but is meant to be the driving force of the game, as you experience fourteen different worlds crashing together in humorous, light-hearted ways. Specifically, you'll see memorable places and faces from The Simpsons, Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Portal, Jurassic World, Midway Arcade, Lego Chima, Scooby-Doo!, DC Comics, Lord of the Rings, The Lego Movie, The Wizard of Oz, Ninjago, and Back to the Future, all interacting as your additional playset figures allow.

Integrating this many franchises could be risky, because time constraints could mean that there's little time to treat each property with the respect it deserves. But Dimensions seems to be on the right path so far, as it puts real care was put into integrating different pieces of these stories well. The poppies in Oz make characters sleepy, the cartoony look of the Scooby-Doo world matches the original show, and transdimensional madness takes hold of Middle Earth while Gandalf is fighting the Balrog. Plus, the game contains original music from its source material and voice performance from some characters' original actors, showing a commitment to treating these tales with respect. We won't know for sure until the game is released this fall, but the fact that few moments go by without Batman being comically grumpy makes me hopeful.

As much fun as a Lego game can be, it just doesn't feel quite right if there isn't a building component involved. Lego Dimensions not only lets you build your own block creations, but actually takes it out of the digital realm and does what Lego does best: lets you build with actual blocks you hold in your hands.

Each playset comes with at least one vehicle that's built out of a series of Lego blocks, and it will need to be transformed into something new depending on what function you need it to serve. The Delorean, for instance, has one form to emphasize speed and another that gives off bursts of electricity, both of which could be super handy in the right circumstance. In order to change the vehicle in the game, you'll have to take it apart in real life and physically build it into what you want it to be, based on a digital version of Lego's familiar schematics. You're admittedly limited in what you can create (with each auto sporting three transformations maximum), and the game can only do so much to confirm you actually rebuilt your car, so it's forced to take you at your word when you say you did it. That could make the mechanic feel gimmicky in the long run, since it doesn't actually affect the gameplay in a measurable way, but it could still be fun for players who enjoy the novelty of putting a controller down to play a game to the fullest.

While there are plenty of playable figures planned for Dimensions, the story will following the antics of Batman, Gandalf and Wyldstyle, showing the eclectic mix you can expect from the overall game and banking on The Lego Movie's popularity in one go. Each loses a friend in the game's opening (Robin for Batman and Frodo for Gandalf), which is what sends them on their journey through the game's many worlds.

These three characters will come in a starter pack with the game portal and the Batmobile, giving you plenty of stuff to play with right off the bat <(i>ha). Each has unique special abilities that help you progress through the many worlds you'll visit, like using a Bathook to pull apart obstructions or using Wyldstyle's master builder powers to uncover hidden keys. They'll be the primary focus of any story-based cutscenes as they work to recover pieces of dimension energy and rescue the captive Lego characters of the universe. Expect a colony of bat puns along the way.

Of course, that doesn't mean that our three heroes will be the only stars of this show. At any point you can introduce characters from other playsets into your game, letting them tag along beside the main three or having them act as your primary character. Each extra pack will also come with a vehicle that can be loaded into the game (like the Batmobile or the Mystery Machine) and driven by any of the characters, which you'll need for a variety of missions throughout.

Sadly there doesn't appear to be a co-op options as of yet, so the seven characters and/or vehicles will act as additional bodies that a lone player can switch between as they desire. But that presents an interesting new dynamic that hasn't been seen in toys-to-life games up until this point, so having a RPG-like party to control according to your wishes could prove interesting and fresh. And hey, if you can control Scooby Doo and immediately flip to Wonder Woman, I'm all for it.

From Software's Souls games and Bloodborne have an amazingly intuitive, challenging gameplay formula, fascinating worlds to explore, and brutal enemy encounters to overcome. From Demon's Souls to the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne, each of From's action RPGs is built around the same, challenging philosophies while managing to feel fresh by adding new features and tweaks here and there (for better or for worse). Now Dark Souls 3 is on the way, and there are a few things the next game should learn from the previous entries.

There's a lot to live up to in the Dark Souls series. After all, the first game made it to the top of our list. Dark Souls 3 has the potential to be the series' top title, if it takes the best parts of Bloodborne, Demon's Souls, and the Dark Souls games into consideration.

Bloodborne has taught me something important about the Souls game formula: fighting without a shield is exceptionally entertaining. By adding health regeneration mechanics and faster movement speed to compensate for the lack of defenses, it makes less defensive play far more manageable. In the Souls games, I've always equipped a shield because, from the start, blocking is almost essential - at least until you get the items, experience, and abilities to go without (and, yes, speed builds can be quite effective in Dark Souls). It's just that shields always remain the safety blankets of the series, and that needs to change in the next sequel.

Take a bit of Bloodborne's speedy, shieldless combat style and let it influence Dark Souls 3. We may have already seen a shift in this direction with the announcement of DS3's new weapon stances. The stances are said to give attack bonuses and other combat benefits that could make way for a greater variety of combat options. We'll just have to wait and see how it plays out.

At certain points in the Dark Souls games and Bloodborne, you have the ability to fast travel between the bonfires spread across the world. Whether that ability comes right from the get-go like in Dark Souls 2 and Bloodborne, or is earned halfway through the game like in the first Dark Souls, warping across the world is wonderfully convenient.

Bloodborne almost got its travel system right, but forces you to wait through a second loading screen, the game making you to go to the Hunter's Dream hub before you can travel to your desired location. If Dark Souls 3 gets a warp mechanic to augment its doubtless multitude of hidden shortcuts, pulling the bonfire to bonfire transportation feature from Dark Souls 2 would be fantastic. It isn't like it makes the game easier or anything. You just don't need to look at a loading screen as often.

You know what's a bigger pain in the ass than retrieving your souls after you die (but rather brilliant with it)? Having to defeat the thing that just killed you to get your souls back. Bloodborne introduced a system that screws with failed adventurers just a bit more than the Souls games. Occasionally, one of the enemies near your bloody death site will gobble up all your blood echos (Bloodborne's equivalent to souls). You can't just run by and pick them up anymore. You have to kill that enemy (and possibly die again) to get the game's precious currency back.

Dark Souls 3 needs more of that kind of stuff. Yes, losing all of your souls feels like a harsh punishment when it happens to you the first few times, but after a while, you learn to adapt. You learn to run by and grab your dropped souls, then get the heck out of there. Death becomes just a slight inconvenience. Call me a masochist, but I want death to hurt a little bit Dark Souls 3.

Don't get me wrong. The Dark Souls games have some fascinating boss designs. The Chaos Witch Quelaag, the Gaping Dragon, and Ceaseless Discharge (ew) in the first game are all memorable encounters. Dark Souls 2, though, is not as creative. Many of the bosses are just huge weapon-wielding dudes in plate armor. Dark Souls 3 needs to get back to putting us in front of eccentric boss designs that we haven't seen before, and with original game - and Bloodborne - Director Hidetaka Miyazaki back for the second sequel, we should expect nothing less.

Bloodborne has bosses that are out of this world, but also fit into the eldritch Victorian horror setting of Yharnam. There are giant spiders covered in hundreds of eyes. There are vomit spewing monstrosities. And speedy, corrupted, fellow hunters pose some of the greatest challenges of all. The variety ensures that players never know what to expect when a boss's introductory cutscene starts to play. Dark Souls 3's bosses are going to need to be on point to top some of From's designs so far. But if they're a mix of massive, inventive, disturbing, and just plain gross, they'll be well on their way to standing up the intimidating beasts we've already faced.

The Dark Souls stories let you dig into the narrative as much as you want. If you don't care much to sort out the lore, you can get by with simply knowing you're an undead warrior who needs to go out and kill a bunch of monsters to lift the curse. On a base level, that simple scenario is all you need, really. You can ignore the lore almost completely, and the things you do and see in the game will still make sense, more or less. If you want more, you can read into all of the weapon descriptions, boss souls, and environmental clues to decipher the rest of the lore, which ends up being as much fun as playing the game itself.

Now, this may just be me, but when I finished Bloodborne, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I couldn't tell you the first thing about that old guy I found at Byrgenwerth, why there are giant abominations everywhere, or why Gherman does the things he does. Because it puts more of its plot up-front - but still, without explaining it - you have to read into Bloodborne's story much more than the Souls games in order to avoid confusion. While I know that's Just What From Games Do, Bloodborne's more explicit - but still oblique - story elements make things very confusing for those not wanting to go lore-hunting. All I'm asking is that Dark Souls 3's story be easy enough to understand on the surface level that I don'r feel obliged to watch a narrative explanation on YouTube immediately after the credits roll.

One thing that Dark Souls 2 expanded on much more than any other From game was the PvP system. There were dedicated PvP covenants that allowed players to receive significant rewards for their efforts in ruining other players' lives. You could hop into PvP arenas for one-on-one battles that wouldn't be interrupted by annoying NPCs or Blue Sentinels. In almost all of the previous games, there are also fun bonuses, like items that let you disguise yourself as a piece of furniture, or turn invisible, to surprise anyone who invades your world.

Dark Souls 3 can expand on the PvP of the series even more. Let more players enter the dedicated PvP arenas for team or free-for-all battles, or take part in different multiplayer game modes like capture the flag or king of the hill. Give us plenty of PvP covenants to dedicate ourselves to with rewards that make it all worth it. The amazing multiplayer is a huge part of the reason players stick around for New Game+, and let's make it even better.

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 2's have a hub-style layout. Demon's Souls has players teleporting to its different environments, while Dark Souls 2 sends players down semi-linear branches that typically end in big boss battles. Those world layouts work well enough, but I've always found it much teresting to explore the interwoven environments of the first Dark Souls and Bloodborne.

In those games, you never know where the door in front of you will lead. It could take you to a completely new area, with enemies you've never seen, a humongous boss waiting to eviscerate you, or create an unexpected but ingenious shortcut to a location you've already explored. Trudging through these environments, discovering incremental ways to make your journey easier, is so much teresting and rewarding that leaping from one self-contained region to another. If Dark Souls 3 sticks to the interconnected open-world, it'll be a step (many, in fact) in the right direction.

There's one in every Souls game. Just... don't.

Platform games are one of gaming's most enduring staples, and you can't really mention them without talking about Mario. Except I am. Put simply, there's no point in me trying to list the best platform games of all time because, like it or not, Mario titles would take up at least 50% of the entries. The best platform game ever made is probably Super Mario Galaxy 2 (so says our list). But let's not argue about that. Let's look at the challengers.

There's more to the competition than just Sonic the Hedgehog. In fact, you're about to read about 25 amazing platform games that don't have Mario in them. And they're in order too, so let's start with 25 and work our way up to the top. Let's-a go! *Gunshot*.

Ah, a familiar face. Crash is surely one of PSone's most enduring icons and his first adventure is arguably his best. The tight, corridor-like nature of the levels mean Naughty Dog (yes, of Uncharted fame) was able to cram loads of polygonal detail into every frame, making this still look surprisingly lush, especially on a PSP or Vita's screen.

The gameplay is much harder than most people remember, and finding all of the wumpa fruit (there's a blast from the past) requires some pretty serious skills and searching on later levels. It's true that non-homing jumping in 3D space doesn't work very well a lot of the time, but Crash's shadow at least allows you to see where you're landing. It's still fun, charming and easy to get hold of via PSN.

It's rare for a platform game to out-concept the infamous Glover in the 'most ridiculous premise for a platform game' contest. But Vince is the third-best voodoo doll belonging to the owner of a magic shop in New Orleans, who comes to life when zombie dust is spilled during a robbery/kidnapping.

Vince himself is a wisecracking platform hero (no, wait - come back!) who can defeat his enemies by inflicting pain on himself. Chuck yourself in a fire if it helps (and it probably will). From the world design to the N'orleans Jazz-influenced soundtrack, Voodoo Vince has a ton of personality to go alongside the tight 3D platforming design. Still surprisingly good-looking, too. That original Xbox has still got some clout, I'm tellin' ya...

Shantae is one of those games that hardly anyone talks about, but deserves much more acclaim. Shantae herself is a Middle-Eastern belly dancer and in this, her third game, she must team up with her former enemy, Risky Boots (great name – love it) and save her town from a typically pantomime-evil threat.

What follows is classic platform action, where new abilities unlock secrets in previously-visited areas. It's very similar to an old (unrelated) game called Monster World IV – in fact, it could feasibly pass as a sequel to that game. But this is better. Some might be put off by the ridiculous moments of cartoon fan-service (those costume changes are gratuitous to say the least), but it's all tame and feels good-natured. Look out for the new-gen sequel currently in development.

It's remarkable how well the oldest game on this list has stood the test of time. While you could boil this first Dizzy sequel down to an overly-punishing 'fetch and carry' quest, you'd be doing it a massive disservice. The design of this static-screened world is still a treat for the imagination. A desert island with pirate gold lying beneath the surface of the water, complete with a treehouse village, a sub-aquatic world (with a shipwreck) and cursed treasure to boot.

The one-hit-and-you-have-to-restart 'feature' is cruel, but it actually gives the game an immense feeling of peril. Every jump near a hazard – be it a jellyfish or burning torch – must be judged perfectly, or you have to start again. And each moment of discovery when you work out where an item goes is a moment of air-punching glee. Even though the whole game fits into 48k of RAM, it's still brilliant.

Channeling the likes of Rocket Knight Adventures, Giana Sisters is a fast-paced, flowing and beautiful platformer. It's dripping with classic platform iconography, too. Coloured jewels floating the air, begging to be collected. Lush forest backgrounds… glistening water… it's exactly like the platformers of the 1990s, only rendered in spectacular modern detail.

It is, however, extremely difficult. It is certainly possible to master its versatile moveset, but doing so will take a lot of time and patience. Fortunately, it's totally worth the effort, so it won't feel like a chore. And when you're dashing, spinning and leaping around like you own the place, you'll feel amazing.

Disney platformers in the early 1990s were pretty much universally brilliant, whether on 16-bit or 8-bit machines. The Lucky Dime Caper may be an 8-bit title, but it's got everything you could want. Donald himself is beautifully drawn, full of personality and charm. The movement is solid and smooth and the mallet attack feels suitably meaty.

The levels are now the stuff of cliché, what with a water area, a forest, an ice zone and desert, but you can tackle the first three in any order, then the next three in any order, too. The soundtrack is superb and the sense of drama it creates by the time you reach the final level is palpable, followed by some of the most celebratory music ever committed to cartridge. Such a pity the game isn't more readily-available today.

It's very rare to have something from your childhood remade in a way that's sympathetic to what you remember, but Castle of Illusion's HD redux is exactly that. Some moments, like the leaves in the spiders' webs, look and sound exactly how you remember them… although if you go back and play the original now, you'll be amazed at quite how old it feels.

From the over-sized library to the confectionary-filled sweet level, everything is lovingly-rendered and delivered in an organic-looking, non-regimented way. Mickey looks superb in 3D and the scattering of collectible items is challenging enough to be rewarding, but certainly not impossible. Whether you play on PSN or iOS, the experience is the same. This is quality, retro-styled gaming, only modern enough to feel fresh and relevant today. Just a shame the 'bottom bounce' has been replaced with a standard jump attack. Ah well, can't have everything.

Obviously there are many Mega Man games that have a special place in a lot of hearts, but Mega Man 2 is the most iconic. It's also one of the most hardcore platforming experiences around, with ultra-precise and solid controls, fearsome enemy patterns, and carefully rationed upgrades that come to you as you swear your way through screen after screen of chunky scenery.

It also sounds magnificent, with a classic soundtrack made up of bleeps, bloops and fizzes. Forget its actual age, there is a timelessness to Mega Man 2. It's a distillation of the joy of pressing a button to interact with a little sprite on your TV screen. The game design is spectacularly great, with an understanding of timing and challenge far beyond many games, even today.

After Mario and Sonic made platformers THE genre to play, everyone wanted in on the action. By 1993, there was an element of platformer fatigue. But even the biggest critics of the fad would have to concede that Aladdin is a very special video game. With sprites designed by Disney animators themselves, this was as close as you could get to actually playing an animated movie on your home console.

It's the Genesis/Mega Drive version, of course, that we're championing here. The SNES version, while still good, simply doesn't have that authentic feel of the Mega Drive version. With MIDI-fied versions of the feature film's classic songs, technically astonishing collision detection (knives split apples mid-air) and a tonne of gameplay variation, this is how you do a movie tie-in.

A lot of indie platformers play around with various gimmicky mechanics, but rarely make them feel as cohesive as Sound Shapes. At its heart is a simple (but not simplistic) 'stick to grey surfaces and avoid red ones' idea, which gets difficult very quickly. But this is coupled with a superb musical element.

As you play a level, you add notes to the music, building the soundtrack and avoiding various threats that all bounce along with the beat. It's mesmerising and utterly, utterly brilliant. The fact that it works with actual music tracks too – imported via DLC – makes this even more delightful. This is so much more than the sum of its parts. Like music, really.

There is an argument for one of the original SNES versions of Donkey Kong Country, but those games' controls lack the precision of the Returns series, which were given Retro Studios' usual classy treatment. This Wii U game has quality written all over it (erm… in invisible ink). And no, it doesn't count as a Mario game.

Not only is the platforming gameplay as enjoyable as ever, it all sounds absolutely phenomenal, thanks to another sensational score by David Wise, who worked on the original Donkey Kong Country. I actually know someone who listens to music from the game on a loop, it's that good. Not me, I hasten to add. But maybe you will.

The 32-bit scene was comparatively light on side-scrolling platformers, most likely because they were seen as a 'last-gen' genre now that 3D worlds had arrived. Klonoa blended the best of both sides, offering precise, smooth, colourful gameplay with 3D visuals.

It's still a 2D platformer, of course. And one that moves absolutely beautifully, despite the now prehistoric tech specs of the humble PSone. Flowing, precise and smooth, Klonoa is sheer class. It's a relatively rare game to get hold of in disc form these days, but you can buy it on the PSN to play on PS3, PSP or Vita. So do that.

There are several entries in the Ratchet Clank series that could easily fit on this list, including the PS2 original (and the new RC remake on PS4 will probably be best of all). But this PS3 game is everything the series stands for, and at its most imaginative, too.

There's the 3D platforming and melee combat we've come to know and love, plus a load of customisable and upgradeable weapons, and some time-warping puzzle-solving to boot. All of this is wrapped up in super-slick production values and topped off with a funny and entertaining script. Can't get much better than that, really. This is exemplary platforming by one of the master development teams of the genre, Insomniac.

Bionic Commando already had a legion of fans hanging onto the glory days of the '80s arcade scene. But this XBLA remake is a revelation for anyone who loved the game the first time around. Everything's better. From the graphics to the controls and the freedom of movement, Bionic Commando: Rearmed is the perfect example of an HD upgrade done right.

The game is mostly the same as it always was, only with a better ending and a few new features thrown in for good measure. And the arm itself makes for a rather unique-feeling platformer, as you swing around, blowing up walls to find secrets and generally feeling like a bionic version of Spider-Man. With a gun. What's not to like?

It's amazing to think that Cave Story is actually already over a decade old. But this 3D remake of the original platformer/shooter hybrid is undoubtedly the best way to play it. This is the definitive version of the game.

But why is it so good? It's the amalgamation of screen after screen full of smoothly-moving (and exploding) sprites, tight controls, a clever upgrade system and good old fun. Yes, it's one of those increasingly rare things – a game that is fun just to control. Add in one of the most subtle, yet brilliant, branching route systems ever seen and you've got a classic on your hands. Well… more like 'in them'.

3D platformers were everywhere in the late-1990s, but even with the mighty Super Mario 64 already owning the platform (sorry, I mentioned Mario), Rare managed to create something truly special on N64 in the shape of Banjo-Kazooie. The two-character set-up works beautifully, with Banjo and Kazooie complementing each others' movesets and playable both as a team and individually.

The textures may look primitive today, but there's still a lot of charm to the game's colourful world, and the Xbox 360 HD re-release is perfectly acceptable, if a little simplistic in terms of geometry. That still can't dull the game's humour, open design and depth of exploration. Oh, and it turns out that Kazooie is a girl. Amazing how few people realise that.

Dave Perry must have learned a lot from developing Cool Spot, because by the time Earthworm Jim came around, everything was working. Jim works as a character because his shape can morph into anything. He can use himself as a skipping rope. Mario can't do that. The 8-direction shooting lends a Gunstar Heroes vibe to proceedings as you monkey-swing and bounce around the levels, giving this entry genre-straddling elements, while remaining most certainly a platform game at heart.

But for all the technical accomplishment and game design (excluding that water level – but even that was fixed in the HD remake, so get that), it's the game's humour that makes it stick in most people's minds. You could call it low-brow, but that just resonated with bogey-hungry '90s kids everywhere. While it does feel very… ''90s' today, it's still brilliantly playable and you should get it.

It was the game to get for Christmas in 1992. Taking the super-smooth movement of the original game and ramping up the level variety, scale, speed and spectacle, Sonic Team created a timeless platform adventure. And, unlike the original game, the second level is just as good as the first. As is the third, for that matter. Emerald Hill, Chemical Plant and Aquatic Ruin form a holy trinity of gaming playgrounds.

While both the drop-in/drop-out co-op and split-screen 2-player mode have clear flaws, that doesn't mean you can't have fun with a friend. Competing for rings in the pseudo-3D special stage is still loads of fun, but it's the game's longevity that's kept it on this list. People still speedrun it. The new iOS conversion is technically more advanced than the original, while remaining outwardly authentic. However you play Sonic 2, on whatever platform you choose, you will have fun. Fact.

The Castlevania template had already been established long before the 32-bit era arrived. And before Konami turned the series into a 3D adventure, there was time to release the pinnacle of the series' 2D evolution. Symphony of the Night combines pixel-perfect 2D platform combat with 3D background elements to incredible effect. The fact that the 3D is now pretty shaky and roughly-textured somehow makes it all the more wonderful. This has become an icon of retro gaming.

It's aged beautifully in terms of gameplay, too, serving up a huge, lavish adventure, rich with stat-boosting items and new weapons to uncover – not to mention one of the best hidden endings ever. After the PlayStation version, the game also appeared on Sega Saturn, offering extra content including a new playable character. But other elements were weaker, so it's a tough call to say which is best. Both, basically.

Sackboy may be available on PS4 (with some amazingly cute friends), but it's his second PS3 adventure that remains the definitive LBP experience. The built-in levels are more imaginative than those of the original, and the joyous presentation – not to mention Stephen Fry's lovable narration – make just moving around this craft-themed world a pleasurable experience.

But it's the creation suite that really makes this indispensible. You can create regular levels, as you could in the first game, sure, but now you can actually make different genres of games. Yes, making games in a game. What a time to be alive.

Some games are built to reward skill. But few have such a sadistic slant, encouraging you to die a hundred times in preparation of nailing a level with a perfect run. In fact, it even celebrates your catalogue of failures, with an incredible, climactic cascade of replay Meat Boys all dying around that one, lone survivor.

All of this would be for nought if the game played badly, but Super Meat Boy's controls offer incredible precision. When you die, it is simply because you didn't perform well enough. Granted, the graphics are basic by today's standards, but that's because there needs to be no margin for error. A platform is a platform, a wall is a wall. This is ultra-purified platforming action – and it's the meat in the sandwich that matters, not how prettily the bread is cut.

Proof (as if proof were needed) that it's the way a game plays and not how it looks that makes it either a great experience or an also-ran. N+ is all about momentum. It takes some getting used to, certainly, but the potential for perfect runs makes this a mouthwatering prospect for anyone with an eye on getting the best score.

It's mega-hardcore, too. A single wrong move and you're dead, forced to watch a chain reaction of explosion around the screens as pieces of debris (and you) fly around, detonating more explosives. It's this knife-edge of tension juxtaposed against the beauty of a clean run that makes N+ such a delight.

Metroid was pushing all the boundaries when it first released on NES back in 1986, but it was rougher than tree bark with a sore throat and a hangover. Yes, that is rough, you're right. But Super Metroid cemented that formulative… er... formula so perfectly a few years later, it spawned two decades of imitators. The level design and control set are perfectly married, ensuring every area has something new to offer every time you learn a new ability.

The 16-bit visuals may look, shall we say, 'functional' by today's standards, but the music remains some of gaming's best – and actual tunes are used brilliantly sparingly. Super Metroid is designed to give you a sense of melancholic isolation and it gets under your skin. The series translated into 3D perfectly with Metroid Prime, but while Prime is the , Super Metroid remains one of the best platformers ever made.

Is PoP a platformer? Yes. Environmental traversal makes up so much of the game, and requires dexterity and quick-thinking to keep your character from a fall, just like Sonic or he-who-must-not-be-named. But if you do fall… well there's PoP's best stuff.

Being able to rewind time is a brilliant concept and even though it was relatively new when Sands of Time came out, it was done in exemplary fashion. Indeed, play the game too much and you start reaching for the undo button in other games. And even real life. Hit by a bus? That's OK, just rewind time and… oh yeah. Damn.

Rayman Legends is simply the best platform game ever made that doesn’t have Mario in its name. With sublime, intuitive controls that see you sprinting, sliding, wall-jumping, swimming and thwacking enemies into next week, this a joy to play – and easy to pick up if you're a newbie. It works best on Wii U, which is no surprise considering it was designed to be exclusive to that console, before going multi-platform late in development. The HD art is beautiful, the minigames an absolute riot (Kung Foot is worth the asking price alone) and the level layouts are a masterclass in game design, with secrets everywhere and constant rewards for skilful play.

As if that wasn't enough, the multiplayer co-op is exceptional, combining the best of helpfulness and bastardry as you race each other to gather lums, cut a rope to send your mate down a hole to their death or, y'know, actually work together to 100% each level. It's massive too, even going so far as to include levels from Rayman Origins. It's impossible to be disappointed with this game. If you have any interest in platformers at all, you need to play this. Just as soon as you've played Super Ma...(snip!).

Kickstarter has seen a resurgence lately, what with the mega-success of recent nostalgia-fueled projects like Yooka-Laylee, Bloodstained, and Shenmue 3. After a lull last year for big-name, video game Kickstarters, it seems like gamers in general are once again ready to part with their money in the hopes of bringing new experiences to life. Which is great! But there are a few things you ought to think about before throwing some of your hard-earned cash at a project.

Rather than hard-and-fast rules, think of these as points to ponder when you're considering a contribution. No two Kickstarters are identical, so it's always a case-by-case affair - but if you consider the following, you'll feel that much better when you do decide that a project is worth your support. You shouldn't be cynical, but sometimes it pays to be skeptical.

As a general rule, Kickstarters aren't always the wondrous community efforts that they appear to be at first glance. Tucked away in the FAQ for Yooka-Laylee is the fact that there was "a plan in place using personal finances to get the game done no matter what happens." Bloodstained was already 90% funded before it was revealed to the public; the primary purpose of the Kickstarter was to in Sony's case.

These standout spiritual successors are on a different scale than the low-budget projects that really do need every last dollar if they hope to exist. It's not that your money is going into the pockets of some big corporation behind the scenes, but many Kickstarters won't explicitly list out the specifics of how exactly your contributions help make the game possible.

Now, I've never been the producer on a video game, so I have no experience balancing cost charts and divvying up funding into a realistic budget. But common sense dictates that not all stretch goals - extra modes, more bosses, bigger levels, and so on - are entirely dependent on the money that exceeds the initial funding goal. While that may be true for features that require additional salaries, like voice acting or console ports, other stretch goals are just there to be an appealing carrot on a stick.

Take Bloodstained, where an extra $250,000 of funding unlocked such goals as a Speed Run and Boss Rush modes. There's no way in hell that implementing these modes costs that much; plenty of indie platformers that were made in their entirety for less than $250,000 have 'em. Rather, they're more like little objectives to help build up excitement and nudge would-be backers into chipping in for the greater good, like the thought of a corporate sponsor matching your contributions to a fundraiser.

Banjo-Kazooie holds a special place in many of our hearts, with cherished memories of collecting Jiggies, Musical Notes, Eggs, Mumbo Tokens, Feathers, and Extra Honeycomb Pieces while sitting in front of a colossal CRT television. Yooka-Laylee was engineered to tap into that nostalgia, given that that it's a game about two animal buddies teaming up, from a studio founded by ex-Rare developers. And while Yooka-Laylee's looking great so far, it's not going to replicate the experience you had as a kid.

That's because you probably played the original Banjo-Kazooie in 1998, and you're not a kid anymore. When we're young, each game feels like a substantial purchase, and we have all the time in the world to play and replay them. Nowadays, you're a grown-up with responsibilities, strapped for time and burdened by an ever-growing backlog. Of course you're going to experience this game differently. That doesn't mean Yooka-Laylee won't be fantastic in its own way, and could outshine your fondest Banjo memories. But short of establishing a psychic link with your younger self, that experience you remember is going to remain in the past.

If there was such a thing as an albino four-leaf clover, it still couldn't match the rarity of a Kickstarter that successfully meets its estimated delivery date. It's no one developer's fault, really; there will always be unforeseen hurdles that get in the way of making a game. But at this point, you should just ignore those projected timetables, because that development schedule is basically an optimistic delusion.

They're called estimates for a reason: unlike a big-name publisher putting out a AAA game behind schedule and squandering millions of marketing dollars in the process, there aren't as many repercussions for a Kickstarter missing its deadlines. Those creators would no doubt like to deliver their product to you in a timely fashion, but they're not under any contract to ensure that a game code pops up in your email by a certain date or they're fired. You already gave them your money; all you can really do now is wait.

I believe it was the late rapper Notorious B.I.G. who famously said "Mo' project funding, mo' potential to make unrealistic assumptions about the scope of your project." With a creative medium like video games, it's understandable that additional resources would make developers' minds race with possibilities for making their project grander than the one they had originally planned. But that temptation has consequences, because at some point, those ambitions need to be reined in to the realm of the financially realistic.

The Double Fine Adventure that eventually became Broken Age made over eight times the amount it was asking for, but still needed content shaved off to be completed two years behind schedule. Chris Robert's . Or you might get a situation like the Ouya, which blew past its $950,000 goal for a total of $8.5 million, delivered the product exactly as promised, and then collapsed when consumers suddenly realize they had backed something they never really wanted in the first place. More funding than expected doesn't sound bad on paper, but it can impact a project's progress in ways that are tricky to quantify, unlike money.

Yes, nostalgia is a potent and powerful sensation, but don't let it cloud your judgment. You have to keep the perspective that, no matter how much of your own savings you're putting into a Kickstarter, the most you're going to get back is a game (and sure, maybe some extra bits of swag and brief face-time with the developers). It can be a rush donating $100, or $1,000, or $10,000 and feel like you're driving a project to the finish line - but please, consider what your future self will think of that sum once you've beaten that game and moved on with your life.

That last contribution figure isn't uncommon, either. Consider on the eve of its final day. Toejam and Earl may be peerless in the funky fresh department, but they've never done anything that deserves 10 grand of one person's money. If you're paying sums that could cover months' worth of your rent to help make a video game you have no stake in, you're either paying more than you can reasonably afford, or you're being fiscally irresponsible. Probably both, actually.

Movies and TV shows often employ something called 'stunt casting', where a famous celebrity plays a smaller part in an attempt to add legitimacy and publicity to a project. Stunt casting can also apply to the development side of games; take Keiji Inafune's role as producer for .

When a Kickstarter makes a big deal out of an affiliated name, you might want to look for the fine print that describes their actual role on the team. The ill-fated vehicular combat shooter had famed sci-fi author Neal Stephenson as... something. Only he knows what.

There's never a guarantee that a Kickstarter will be successful, even if it gets funded in the allotted time. In most cases, 'success' can be measured simply by whether or not the project ever comes to fruition. are two examples of games that were never completed even after they took backers' money. Other times, the end result may be a disappointment; many of those who had high hopes for the Ouya or Planetary Annihilation felt burned by the finished product.

But ultimately, Kickstarter is not a conventional transaction, where you pay X amount and get Y possession guaranteed. Rather, you should back the projects that you want to see happen, without the expectation of getting anything in return - at least, not for a good long while. Think of those reward tiers as a time-capsule gift to yourself; a pleasant surprise two years from now after this Kickstarter feels like a distant memory. Otherwise, the wait for gratification will be agonizing.

You could argue that the best way to play Fallout is to go in completely blind. It puts you in step with the character you're playing, who very likely just stumbled out of the darkness of a recently opened Vault, blinking in the harsh light of a hellish desert landscape. But at the same time, you're probably already going to be uncomfortable and confused enough about what's right in front of you, never quite sure what to expect until whatever you weren't expecting is pointing a gun at your face. Wouldn't it at least be nice to know what turned the entire world into sunscorched badlands? Why you were locked in a vault in the first place? And how a parody of Coca-Cola almost managed to outlive humanity?

If a history of the world according to Fallout is what you crave, then you've come to the right place. Here you'll find an explanation of what happened to the world to make it so damn crummy, according to the haphazard historians of Fallout. Let it be a guide for you, and a lesson for all of humanity: seriously, don't mess with nukes.

Up until 1961, the history of the world according to Fallout falls in line with the version you probably already know - agriculture was established, all the same revolutions happened, World War 1 came and went, and World War 2 ended with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945. The first real sign of a timeline shift happened in 1961: Carl Bell's space flight in the Defiance 7 on May 5, making him the first human being to leave the Earth's atmosphere before his death upon re-entry.

That might sound like a bit of historical minutia that you forgot from high school history class, but I assure you it isn't, because Carl Bell doesn't exist. The first person in space was actually Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 16, 1961, but in the Fallout timeline his flight never occurred. In addition, NASA and Apollo 11 (the first manned lunar lander ridden by Neil Armstrong) don't exist, and in their place stands the United States Space Administration and Valiant 11. America still lands a man on the moon, but not before…

If Carl Bell is the rumbling on the rail tracks of time, the break-up of the United States is the speeding train that smashes through history as we know it and scatters it about the countryside. In the midst of the Cold War and the Red Scare, the United States takes drastic steps to secure itself against a Communist takeover, which culminates in the country being split into thirteen separate pieces.

This is initially a restructuring tactic, dividing the country so each region is better served by the glory of capitalism and is therefore less likely to fall to the Communist menace. However, with limited resources at the federal government's disposal, the commonwealths quickly turn to infighting as a means to secure their own self-interest. So begins nearly a century of scrambling for special attention from the country's highest authority, which intensifies as oil reserves start to dry up.

In a bid to avoid the look of human androids that trip straight into uncanny valley, General Atomics International releases the Mister Handy line of robot workmen, which look like a mix between an octopus and the thing you thought was hiding under your bed as a child. With twice the rocket propulsion and four times the dapper charm of a regular human, the Mister Handy line becomes one of the highest selling brands of robot butler in the US and Mexico, where they are widely embraced by the average family.

The Mister Handy's popularity leads to the construction of various models such as the Godfrey, the Wadsworth, and the Codsworth. These models run on nuclear power and are self-repairing, making them perfect stewards for humanity in the event of an unforeseen nuclear incident. Ahem.

A day spent worrying about a nuke crashing through your roof will leave you parched, so the American population was more than ready for a symbol of glorious, refreshing capitalism to wash their worries away. Thus comes the invention of Nuka Cola, a carbonated blend of twelve different fruits, in 2044.

The flavor of Nuka Cola changes noticeably that same year with the coming of the Great Passion Fruit Famine, which necessitates the removal of one key ingredient. However, fans quickly adjust to the new taste, and Nuka Cola becomes the most popular brand of soda in the country in a short period of time. Within 25 years, a Nuka Cola vending machine can be found on virtually every American street-corner, and the associated bottle caps become commonplace trash.

Nearly 100 years after oil supplies first became scarce, America takes decisive (and divisive) action by ignoring alternative forms of energy and instead invading Mexico. After years of pressuring its southern neighbor to ramp up oil production to meet ever-increasing demand, the United States occupies Mexico under the guise of stabilizing its government and preventing the spread of pollution to US soil.

Unable to combat the military power of the US, Mexico is eventually tapped of natural resources as they're funneled across the northern border. It is believed that resulting food shortages eventually affect supplies in the US and leads to riots in Denver, Colorado, but this remains unconfirmed.

As a lack of oil finally leads to a global panic, the Resource Wars begin and various nations do battle for what remains. The Europe Commonwealth (European Union was a close second in the name selection race), responds to dwindling oil supplies in the Middle East with a full-scale invasion. Tel Aviv is destroyed by terrorist operatives as the region destabilizes, and localized, small-scale nuclear strikes commence. The United Nations, unable to control the volatile political situation, collapses entirely. The US starts encroaching into an otherwise neutral Canada, and no one knows what happened to Australia.

In the midst of this political turmoil, Chinese spies infiltrate a military lab located at the Hoover Dam and steal a sample of a volatile biological agent known as Limit 115. The vials are shattered in a public square in Denver, leading to the spread of a mutant virus called the New Plague. 200,000 people succumb to the disease in Colorado alone; the US government calls for a national quarantine, and advises American citizens to avoid ice cream socials.

As part of a program called Operation: Safehouse, the government commissions a company called Vault-Tec to construct 122 public fallout shelters called Vaults to protect the people of America in the event of a nuclear attack. Equipped to maintain a human population for up to 900 years while the surface world heals, most are outfitted with expansive living quarters, gardens, and water treatment plants. As the threat of nuclear war diminishes in the minds of the populace, some Vaults see critical life-support systems sacrificed to create luxury rooms, such as .

Unfortunately the US government isn't actually full of benevolent philanthropists interested in the safety of the civilian population. Rather, most Vaults are staging grounds for elaborate social experiments to determine the best course of action for superior specimens (e.g. members of the US government and their descendants, later known as the Enclave) to repopulate the world. The results are, for example, Vaults designed to separate people into clans, or expose them to radiation, or create a society made exclusively of children governed by a robot nanny. All Vaults are monitored by overseers that transmit resulting data directly to Enclave headquarters.

While the world had plenty of futuristic shed-sized supercomputers before 2059, this is the year that the first true artificial intelligence came into existence. The exact nature of the unit is unknown, as the records of its creation are lost in the years that follow, but it's possibly a late model in the ZAX line of learning computers (which are known for achieving self-awareness and cheating at chess, though not necessarily in that order). It could even specifically be John Henry Eden, a self-made ZAX unit programmed to store data on the history of America, who constructs a personality and history based on former American leaders. He later becomes the self-proclaimed President of the United States.

This revelation leads to the refinement of artificial intelligence, resulting in the creation of androids and sentient computer helpers for everyday use. Some eventually become so realistic that it is difficult to discern whether or not they're human, even to the androids themselves.

After draining the Middle East oil reserves and not recovering enough fuel to meet demand, the European Commonwealth dissolves. The remaining concentrations of humanity form nation-states battling over what was once the coalition's resources.

With one major global region locked in a vicious civil war and no significant political maneuvering from the USSR, South America, Africa, or Australia, the United States and the People's Republic of China continue to expand military operations without resistance. An ever-increasing demand for oil from both nations strains international diplomacy.

As construction concludes on the first set of public Vaults, regular evacuation drills become common throughout the United States. While this is purportedly a safety precaution taken with the interest of protecting the general public, the 122 Vaults under construction are not sufficient to house more than a small portion of the population. Optimal candidates for Vault placement are chosen and quietly informed of their inclusion in the program.

The frequency of drills increases over time, which leads to a steady decrease in emergency evacuation attendance. Citizens assume that all uses of the air raid warning system will signal additional drills, and find better things to do with their time.

In a valiant effort to keep its infrastructure from collapsing due to a lack of fuel, China adopts a two-pronged approach, seeking out a deep-sea oil reserve in the Pacific Ocean and negotiating with the United States to establish trade. However, when America refuses to part with its oil and sabotages China's excavation operations, China launches a full-scale assault on the oil-rich Alaska.

Despite heavy American fortifications, China takes Anchorage and the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, securing America's sole domestic oil supply (after the collapse of the withered husk of what was once Texas). In an effort to push back Chinese forces, the United States government commissions ungainly but highly effective power armor suits for all soldiers on the Anchorage front line. However, further complications develop when Canadian forces, drained by American demands for supplies and access to Canadian lands, attack the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline in a bid to bring the conflict to an end.

In a calculated maneuver to show Canada it really shouldn’t have done that, the United States forcibly annexes its northern neighbor. Civil rights are suspended within the newly claimed territory and resistance groups are executed en masse.

Images of America's war crimes are broadcast in the United States, spurring unrest and rebellion. The occupation continues until, drained of resources and nearly conquered in its entirety, Canada cedes to America's demands for annexation.

Seven years after sabotaging China's Pacific excavation operation and claiming the world's last untapped oil reserve, the United States government entrusts fuel giant Poseidon Oil with the construction of a state of the art drilling rig. Ostensibly a show of America's dominance and (heavily disputed) claim to the oil, the rig is also meant as an isolated base of operations for the Enclave, from which they can direct Vaults and still guarantee survival in the event of a nuclear strike.

While the rig is suitable as a fallout shelter, the Enclave's end goal is to eventually repopulate the mainland or, in the event of total destruction of the livable environment, find a new planet to colonize in the vast reaches of space. To that end, the Enclave captures the Bloomfield Space Center in 2076 and seizes the Hermes-13 space shuttle. However, they are unable to properly operate the ship, and this second phase is abandoned.

Despite assuring the American people that the war with China (and all associated resource loss and crimes against humanity) is strictly a defensive effort, the US government directs a sizeable force to the Chinese mainland. Military campaigns are conducted in the Gobi Desert and on the Yangtze River, but American forces are eventually bogged down in the mainland, further draining domestic resources. However, a delivery of top of the line T-51b power armor (which ) turns the tide of the offensive, giving American forces the strength to advance through China and conquer Nanjing and Shanghai.

Meanwhile, all Chinese-Americans living in the United States are shipped to a concentration camp known as Little Yangtze in the Southwest commonwealth, previously southern California and Nevada. Few records from the period survive, but those that do detail horrific military experiments.

The Enclave shadow government orders defense contractor West Tek to fashion a biological agent to immunize American soldiers against any possible contagion, in an effort to safeguard the troops and cure the New Plague (though really more the former than the latter). Early tests of the Pan-Immunity Virion Project result in animal specimens with drastically increased muscle mass and brain activity; the aim of the project immediately shifts to the creation of super soldiers and is moved to a secret military installation in Mariposa, California.

The resulting virus is renamed the Forced Evolution Virus (or F.E.V.), and regular testing begins on military personnel. However, when the project's directive is leaked to soldiers guarding the base, the garrison mutinies, executes the researchers, and declares that Mariposa has seceded from the union. This further destabilizes the already crumbling U.S. military, stretched thin by a two-front war and unable to quell riots and demonstrations amongst the civilian population.

Though it is uncertain where the war's first shot originated (though there are strong guesses to be made), the presence of an unmarked nuclear warhead, en route to an undisclosed target leads to full-scale military strikes by the United States, China, and the USSR, all launching their nuclear payload simultaneously. The two-hour volley is so energy-intense that it reshapes the Earth's geography, altering the movement of its tectonic plates, evaporating or poisoning water sources, and drastically altering the planet's climate by launching debris into the atmosphere.

Humanity is virtually annihilated in what is later described as a "nuclear firestorm". In America, many civilians believe the air raid warnings to be signalling another drill and don't relocate in time. The Vaults close with few of their selected candidates inside, and those left outside perish in the resulting chaos or are horrifically mutated by radiation. Ill-equipped to handle the reality of a nuclear apocalypse, most Vaults collapse in the ensuing decades. Human civilization disappears from existence.

In 2161, the Vault Dweller (whose travels are documented in their well-loved biography, Fallout) leaves Vault 13 to find a replacement for its broken water chip. On their journey, they discover a hellish version of human society that still exists in the wreckage of its former glory. Their child would later beget the Chosen One (of Fallout 2 fame), who in 2241 travels the wasteland in search of a Garden of Eden Creation Kit, and gives the remaining members of the Enclave their just reward.

In 2277, the Lone Wanderer (from Fallout 3) escapes Vault 101 in search of their father and gives humanity the one thing it needs most to rebuild. And possibly that same year, the Sole Survivor emerges from Vault 111 and takes on the task of restoring what was once Boston, Massachusetts. Two hundred years after it was nearly obliterated, against all logic and expectations, humanity stubbornly continues to live.

The old stock's a little flat these days, though. And irradiated.

One minute, you're ringing in the new year; the next, you suddenly realize that the first six months of 2015 have already come and gone. With any luck, you've kept your digital backlog relatively tidy, because there are some seriously standout games from the past half-a-year that demand your attention. Hopefully you weren't planning on getting much sun this summer, because with games like these, you might not be going outside any time soon.

At the end of each month, we look back at the standout games that demand your attention above the rest of the year's releases thus far. That way, you know what to prioritize before you're caught up by all the other amazing . So, without further ado, here's what you should be playing right now to tide you over until next month.

is an absolute marvel of storytelling, making ingenious use of out-of-order video clips to spin out its mystery. Despite the fact that the game’s unique structure means your path to the end won’t match anyone else’s, Her Story is complete and coherent, though its solution is open to interpretation. It’s a detective game that relies on your natural instinct to push its narrative forward, never nudging you in one direction or the other, letting you explore avenues of investigation as they come to you.

Watching FMV clips on a reproduction of a computer from the '90s certainly doesn’t sound terribly exciting, but you’ll be thinking about Her Story for days after you’ve tracked down that last video. You’ll find yourself rolling little details around in your head, mulling over their implications, deciding that you finally know the “truth,” only to realize that another detail makes your assumptions invalid. But then again, does it? One final bit of advice: go in knowing as little as possible, and don’t try to game the system. Be a true detective.

is another biff-pow display of Rocksteady’s exceptional craftsmanship in bringing a classic comic icon to life. Though combat and stealth are again refined and expanded within Batman’s beautifully rain-slick city, the game’s elegant design is reflected not in its individual components, but in how well they connect with one another, like nodes in a web.

Though the Batmobile’s roaring arrogance has made it a controversial addition to the Arkham series, there’s no question about how integral it is to Batman’s latest patrol. Conceptually, it’s meant to be a way to move quickly in a much wider slice of dour ol’ Gotham, and its visual appearance is, of course, inspired by Batman’s history of driving - as The Riddler calls them - rocket-powered hearses. But Rocksteady dives in fully and makes sure the vehicle connects to combat, stealth and every part of Batman. The overall game’s polish and continuity can be seen in one motion, with the Batmobile hurtling down an alley and launching Batman into full flight, right through a window and into a savage display of ne’er-do-well punishment. It’s one move, one world and one of the coolest moments of 2015. It’ll get you pumped to track down every last super criminal, including whoever masterminded the dreadful PC port.

In a sea of multiplayer shooters obsessed with grit, gore, or teabagging, stands out like a brightly colored squid catapulting through the air - which is actually a thing that happens regularly in this game. Nintendo's take on team deathmatch puts the focus on marking your squad's territory with a rainbow of ink rather than racking up kills, but it still delivers the thrilling blend of twitch shooting and coordinated tactics that define the genre.

Even if those human-squid hybrid Inklings are dripping with kid-friendly personality, this is the kind of joyous multiplayer experience that anyone of any age can enjoy. There's still weapon progression like you'd expect from Call of Duty or Battlefield, but with ink-filled Super Soaker facsimiles and colossal paint rollers. You won't hear anyone raging on voice-chat (because there isn't any), but the GamePad provides clear cues for what to do next. And while the selection of maps currently feels a bit sparse, the moment-to-moment gameplay is fresh, exciting, and - most importantly - good fun.

As open-world experiences go, takes high fantasy to new heights with its staggeringly massive world and rich, engaging storytelling. The grizzled Geralt of Rivia finds himself in landscapes that are as picturesque as they are treacherous, where otherworldly beasts and crazed cultists lurk in the wilderness. There are unforgettable side-quests and delightful supporting characters to distract you at every turn, but you best remember Geralt's primary goal: finding his adopted daughter (and witcher-in-training) Ciri before some supremely evil people get to her first.

That's not to say that you need to rush through the main story, because taking the time to stop and smell the eviscerated corpses is well worth it. The sword-and-spell-casting combat looks stunning on new-gen, and the deep upgrade system gives you plenty of options to slay your way. There are a few hitches - notably some framerate issues that can hopefully be patched out - but the sheer depth of the overall experience makes The Witcher 3 a triumph among action RPGs. Now, if you'll excuse us, we've got to return to a rousing round of the in-game card battler Gwent.

It takes a lot to make a fighting game appeal to the masses. You need slick graphics, excellent presentation, and the kind of depth that'll ensnare those highly skilled players who people want to watch. has got all that, and more. While the Fatality finishers still pack in more gore than you can shake a disembodied limb at, MKX brings a lot of new, refreshing ideas to the table that really make this fighter stand out.

For starters, there's the variations mechanic: every combatant has three unique movesets to choose from before each fight, letting character loyalists mix things up and giving the roster a wildly diverse variety of playstyles. You'll also have a blast playing through the elaborate story mode, which introduces a swath of likeable newcomers while imbuing familiar faces with . The online play still has a few kinks that could be worked out, but fans of the Mortal Kombat series - or fighting games in general - will have one hell of a time with MKX.

Of all the re-releases that have come out this year, .

Xenoblade Chronicles 3D is massive, sporting one of the most interesting locales ever designed. Its sprawling swamps and rolling hills - all set on the backs of two titan-sized dead gods and filled with beasts both great and small - are practically begging to be conquered. While its lush, verdant landscapes lose a little luster and detail on the smaller screen, what you trade in graphical quality you gain back in portability. Being able to take an adventure of this magnificent scope with you wherever you go is a technical marvel. Don't miss it.

somehow manages to be diamond tough and lovingly tender at the same time, balancing out its demanding difficulty with a story that'll practically yank your heartstrings right out of your chest. Playing this open-world platformer puts you in a wondrous state of conflict: the tight controls inspire you to run free throughout the lush world, but the sheer depth of the beyond-gorgeous backdrop art makes you want to stand still and gaze at the environment for hours.

The protagonist Ori is such a cute li'l critter that it's hard to watch the fuzzball die again and again while you struggle to overcome the many deathtraps and spike pits in this treacherous forest. But you'll get over any bruises to your ego, so long as you remember that you're the one responsible for plunking down checkpoints before delving into the trickier bits. The degree of challenge here may rattle anyone without an affinity for hardcore 2D platformers, but Ori's dazzling presentation has a universal, heartfelt appeal.

You’ve probably heard that is really hard. You might've heard it’s really easy. The reality lies somewhere in between. Yes, it sends an army of writhing, fanged, flayed, terrible, tormented beasts your way, beasts only someone bragging about their perceived gamer cred would ever deem a pushover. But it teaches you how to deal with them expertly, their unique attacks and defenses and behaviors, building you up until you look and feel like a great gothic badass. And when you do, you'll have earned it.

In streamlining some of Dark Souls’ complexities (the weight system, magic attacks, a few character skills here and there), Bloodborne gains a rawer sense of immediacy, with vital combat that require relentless attacking sans the comfort blanket of a shield, and unpredictable bosses that force you to develop reflexes alongside your already honed skills of pattern memorization. Oh, and the world. That mystifying, atmospheric, intricately hewn world. Developed for PS4 from the ground-up, the enigmatic Yarnham looks like a beautiful waking nightmare.

If you've yet to succumb to monster hunting fever, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Plenty of games let you battle vicious beasties and craft fancy gear - but few can develop the kind of player investment and cooperative dedication typical of Monster Hunter. For the uninitiated, is a great way to educate yourself on its gloriously addictive ways. Not just because it's the most beginner-friendly entry in Capcom's hit series - it's also the best Monster Hunter game yet.

Gathering materials and killing harmless herbivores is really just a build-up to something greater: downing fearsome creatures after incredibly demanding battles that require true mastery of your chosen weapon. Series vets are already familiar with MH's captivating gameplay loop of fighting and looting, but the new Charge Blade and Insect Glaive playstyles offer entirely unique ways to test your prowess. If you're looking to start or join a dedicated hunting party - preferably with an expert as your guide - Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate offers the kind of adventure that can hook you for hundreds of hours.

Majora's Mask is... well, it's a bit weird. Instead of following the familiar formula that Zelda games have stuck to for years, Majora's Mask asks that you play the same three days over and over again, trying to make the world a little bit brighter each time. It's certainly strange, and more than a little stressful - but taking the time to learn its rhythm opens up one of the most intriguing and creative Legend of Zelda games ever made. Perhaps that's why, 15 years and a 3DS port later, it feels even better than ever.

Much of that feeling is thanks to the improvements found in this portable version of the N64 classic. The updated Bomber's Notebook makes tracking numerous sidequests a painless process, boss design has been retooled to make things teresting, and additional save points help make portable adventuring much more palatable. Plus, New 3DS owners even have some improved camera control with the C-Stick. Whether this is your first time playing through those ominous 72 hours or your hundredth, is a master quest that stands the test of time.

Grim Fandango is, without a doubt, one of the most unique video games ever made. The quest of an undead travel agent as he attempts to atone for his sins is a love letter to film noir greats like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, but it also transcends its influences to be something truly original. And with , you'll finally get to play this lost classic on your PlayStation 4, complete with (some) updated graphics and a fantastic re-recording of the original score.

Grim Fandango is also one of the most uniquely frustrating games ever made, and the Remastered edition only serves to highlight its many game-ruining bugs. Whether it's glitching out a puzzle, clipping you through a wall, or just flat out crashing, Grim Fandango Remastered actually seems buggier now than it did 17 years ago. Make no mistake: Manny's journey is still definitely one worth revisiting - just remember to save your game. Often.

sounds kinda ridiculous at first - it's literally a remastered HD version of a rebuilt SD version of the original Resident Evil. Turns out the joke's on us, though, because that's all we really needed to enjoy the survival horror staple all over again: the HD Remake gives all the main characters and the Spencer Mansion an enticing facelift but keeps the little quirks that make Resident Evil awesome/a total headache/undeniably unique.

You'll still need to manage eight (at most) inventory slots, and you'll still need to keep your distance from downed zombies - or preferably burn them on the spot. The most major change is the new default control scheme, which makes it handle more like a modern fixed-camera game, but you're free to select the old 'tank' controls if you want. With modern conveniences where it needs them and good old weirdness where it doesn't, Resident Evil HD Remake is a near masterpiece… of unlocking.

It’s really big, very cold and mostly empty, but that hasn’t stopped us populating an entire genre with exciting sims dedicated to exploring and fighting in it over the last forty-or-so years. Human instinct is drawn to discovery, and the vastness of the void creates unlimited opportunities for scope and scale that you just can’t find here on Earth.

The genre has evolved and refined itself over the last four decades, and, despite falling out of mainstream favour over recent years, is now on a major, and very exciting, resurgence. Here are the most important steps in its lengthy history.

Space games existed in some form before A Journey into Space; 1974’s Star Trader was an extremely basic text-based space game, but it wasn’t until a decade later that the genre started to see a real shift forward. A Journey into Space was originally released on the Atari 2600 by Activison and it was one of the first space sims to establish flight mechanics like landing, takeoff, ship stabilisation and more. It was also one of the first games to encompass actual pretty graphics.

Space Shuttle was so deep that it revolutionised the genre and gave it a sense of scope that hadn’t been seen before. It was so popular, in fact, that it was re-released on several machines after the Atari, with Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum versions released in 1984, and two final versions released on the Amstrad and the MSX in 1986. See kids, HD remasters aren’t such a new fad after all!

Ah, Elite. Created back in the 1980s by the revered space-nut-cum-games-developer David Braben, with his good pal Ian Bell, Elite is considered by most to be the seminal space trading simulator. I’m firmly in love with Elite Dangerous thirty years on, but Elite’s rich history is ingrained in the halls of science fiction. It was truly massive back in 1984, with eight whole galaxies each containing 256 planets to explore. All of this was done from the cockpit of the ship, and a lot of the now-iconic features of Elite were established here, including the recognisable scanner that sits in the center of the cockpit’s design.

Elite also experimented with procedural generation, and despite having to downsize the universe at the request of the publisher - mostly to make it less obvious to the player that the computer is generating systems using algorithms - the game was still awe-inspiring to those who played it. Braben and Bell even removed an entire galaxy when they found a planet had been named ‘Arse’ by the game’s random generation technology. It’s difficult to imagine how impressive it must have been considering the progress of games over the last few decades, but Elite is a remarkably important step in the evolution of space games.

Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts called his game “World War 2 in space” and if that’s not a selling point then I’m not sure what is. It’s a game that focuses heavily on combat scenarios, and uses Star Wars as a main influence in bringing the fraught tension of dogfighting to life. It not only made space combat exciting, but it also implemented fresh mechanics to level objectives, adding bonus tasks that net larger rewards when going above and beyond while on a mission.

Released on floppy disc at the start of the 1990s, Wing Commander also spawned a couple of sequels and several add-ons to the main game. These expansions’ fully realised plots kept the game supported for months after release. Wing Commander was a major critical success, too, even earning 6/5 stars in Dragon - the official Dungeons and Dragons magazine - and is regularly considered one of the all-time PC greats. Competition ramped up considerably after its release, leading to contemporaries like LucasArts’ X-Wing.

Shuttle was published by none other than later commercial space flight pioneer Virgin back in the early 1990s. When you look at it now it looks like a very basic version of Kerbal Space Program, but it still packs a considerable amount of depth. From takeoff all the way to re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, Shuttle recreated a lot of the complexity of real cockpits, displaying almost all of the major functions with an array of knobs, buttons and little levers. It was truly incredible. Especially for a game taking up a miniscule amount of space on a floppy disc.

The game was praised for condensing of tons of information into a system that players could learn to understand. Similar to Kerbal, Shuttle also incorporates real life space shuttle missions and other flight tests into its mission structures. The Enterprise flight is a particular highlight, and you even get to run through the launch of the Hubble space telescope, building a space station like the ISS (International Space Station) and more. Shuttle may not have the dogfighting bravado of Wing Commander, but it refined the core simulation mechanics that lie at the heart of the genre.

Despite sounding like a cheesy television show that your parents might have watched in the mid ‘70s, Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space is a two-player strategy game built on the idea of the space race. Playing as either the USA or USSR, each player’s end goal is to make a successful landing on the moon, but the game incorporates many mid-tier objectives on the way to the lunar surface. You control a base station that acts as your hub for missions and other developments, and the game itself takes place across twenty in-game years, from 1957 to 1977.

The game takes great advantage of humanity’s achievements during the Space Race, allowing players to carry out real historic missions on their path towards reaching the moon. It was billed as a game suitable for young children, but drew a fair amount of criticism for being overly complex and difficult to play. Still, that didn’t stop it getting 90/100 from PC Gamer UK, and more recently it received an open source translation from the original creators back in 2005.

At the end of 1993, David Braben’s first Elite sequel hit the Amiga, Atari ST and DOS. It carried over a lot of the ideas that its predecessor established ten years earlier, while expanding the size and taking advantage of the graphical power of new hardware. Frontier continued the Elite staple of allowing players to do whatever they want, focusing mainly on trading to earn money and reputation. There’s almost no plot whatsoever, save for some titbits around the game’s political factions.

Frontier also adheres to Newtonian physics and thus the ship controls are vastly -depth. There’s even an time acceleration feature which allows players to travel between planets and stations within the same system, as well as the classic hyperspace jump. A really cool feature of Frontier is, weirdly enough, its copyright protection - every now and then the game’s security forces will ask you for a certain string of letters from your game manual. If you enter them incorrectly three times in a row, your game ends and that’s that, you can’t play anymore. Tough!

You might not know it but EVE Online is now over a decade old. This super dense, in-depth MMO has had numerous major updates since its release, but it continues to be one of the most complex and engaging space simulators ever made. With its rich player driven economy and some of the largest multiplayer battles ever seen, EVE definitely isn’t for everyone, but invest time into learning some of its incredibly intricate game systems and you’ll become engrossed in arguably the best space MMO ever made.

The game is famous for a lot of really cool events, including one player who offered $500 in real money to anyone who could assassinate a particularly high profile target. A few key, obliging players then spent a year of real-time playing the game, working their way up the ranks of the target’s corporation in order to earn trust and get close. One assassin even managed to reach second in command of the entire organisation. Then, when the moment was right, the assassins struck by killing their target (twice, no less, which means you’re really dead in EVE’s world), stealing valuables and destroying the rest - over $16,500 worth of in-game items were destroyed. They even bagged the $500 bounty.

The first half of this decade has seen a resurgence in the space simulator genre, and Kerbal Space Program has led the charge. Still technically in beta, KSP packs charm and depth using its Kerbals - cute little green humanoids - to provide the character to make your ventures into space feel human and perilous. With so many options for creativity in Kerbal’s tools, any accidents, deaths or abandonments-on-nearby-moons are your fault, but the game constantly pushes you to trial and error until you get it right.

Developer Squad has gone so far in its depiction of authentic space as to involve NASA in its development process, implementing real missions and ships into the game so that you can experiment with real life science. Other space organisations have taken real interest, too, including the Copenhagen Suborbitals, Space X, and the ESA. It’s these kinds of partnerships that really prove the educational and scientific power of video games nowadays, and how space simulators have become important and respected by those outside of the hardcore gaming community.

FTL is the top-down, fast-paced real-time strategy game that turned space simulation into permadeath roguelike, brought it to mobile, and made it endlessly replayable - not to mention furiously addictive. While a lot space games focus on the overall scope of space battles, lasers and explosions, FTL concerns itself with the stressful minutiae of crisis management on a single ship. There’s no maneuvering or aiming going on - FTL just takes the randomness of certain scenarios and forces you to cope against difficult and often insurmountable odds.

The permanent nature of every demise makes it all the more stressful. Permadeath is a risky mechanic to put in a game, often dividing players on whether it’s well executed, but FTL puts it to excellent use. Even when the game feels like it’s beating you up unnecessarily, the unpredictable nature of its mechanics make it easy to pick up and play again, and you rarely see the same scenarios play out again in exactly the same way.

First announced a few years back as David Braben’s next ambitious project, Elite: Dangerous took full advantage of the crowdsourced funding model, using Kickstarter to raise over £1.5m of development budget. Since then it’s raised a lot more cash, and the scope of Dangerous’ vision has expanded as its wallet has bulked out. It’s been a long, lengthy road to release, running through several alpha and beta stages, but developer Frontier has been vigilant in the refinement of its latest game.

Dangerous takes tons of the key elements that made the original Elite games so iconic and frame-shifts them to 21st century standards. The game’s high definition sheen makes its impressive scope even more beautiful - there’s nothing like travelling from a hot white star all the way to a distant gas giant, descending into its icy rings until you’re there in between the trillions of bits of space debris. There’s still a long path of development and expansion ahead of it (with its console debut having just occurred by way of Microsoft’s early access Xbox Game Preview programme), but Elite: Dangerous is arguably the most important space simulator of the last ten years.

No Man’s Sky has had gamers everywhere wetting themselves since it was announced back in 2013. It’s huge - indie developer Hello Games has claimed it’s technically infinite - and is heavily focused on venturing out into the nothing to find weird and wonderful things. Very few details exist about what else you actually do in No Man Sky’s procedurally generated universe, and the studio’s own Sean Murray has been very explicit in not wanting to describe the game’s main objectives because he believes that goes against what the game is about.

Whatever you end up in doing out in the stars, No Man’s Sky is colourful and bold, full of alien spaces and unusual celestial landscapes. It feels like the space simulator’s arcade cousin, and the fact you can travel seamlessly from land before climbing your ship and flying up into space is something especially magical - something even Elite: Dangerous hasn’t managed to implement yet.

With a ludicrous amount of crowd-sourced money in the bank - just under $70 million at last count - Star Citizen is probably the most well-funded space simulator game of all time. It’s definitely the biggest game to ever get funding from Kickstarter. There are a lot of grand promises for Star Citizen being bounded around by its developers, and while they’ve definitely got the money to keep the game in development for a life-time if they need to, all eyes are intently scrutinising whether those promises have substance.

Aside from anticipation for the game, Star Citizen represents something perhaps more important. It raked in tens of millions of fan-donated dollars, and that’s pretty impressive for a game sat within a fairly niche genre which many discounted as near-dead a few years ago. Over the last four decades, space simulators have evolved and refined themselves, coming out in all different shapes and sizes with unique takes on what the genre means and can achieve. The fact we’re at a stage where a single space sim can amass the budget of a blockbuster triple-A title just by asking for it is, frankly, just really bloody cool.

Doom's demons are what make the series work. Sure, sprinting around a space station with a Super Shotgun in hand is thrilling, but if you don't have interesting targets to blast into a cloud of gore, what's the point? The minions of Hell are what give Doom its spicy, pulse-quickening flavor, with designs that are both threatening and intriguing. You have to remember that, for many gamers, Doom was their first-ever exposure to first-person shooting - and its enemies are what made the experience so profoundly vivifying. As you viciously unload clip after clip into hordes of growling Hellspawn, you're getting a subtle crash course in the core dynamics of the entire FPS genre.

After seeing the recent . And many of those demons stand the test of time, re-emerging in the new Doom with their designs - in both form and function - surprisingly intact. We'll be sure to add more returning enemy types as they surface with fresh Doom details; for now, enjoy this retrospective of Doom's demonic bestiary, from the original games to Doom 64, Doom 3, and the upcoming fourth entry in id's legendary franchise.

These slain-then-reanimated space marines are the perfect introduction to Doom's crusade of carnage; as the very first enemy you encounter, they convey a massive amount of information about this virtual world. Their human frames evoke the Nazis of Wolfenstein 3D, and as with mowing down the SS, their undead status enables guilt-free genocide. But the Zombieman's guttural, beast-like growls and groans of pain are much more alarming than any German exclamations, commanding your attention while still acting as the most minimal, easily handled threat in the game. And seeing them in-fight when one of their ranks engages in friendly fire is utterly mesmerizing (and advantageous).

Doom 3 stumbles because it tries to put more focus on jump-scare-enabling civilian zombies lurching at you from the darkness, instead of the rare undead soldier who can actually shoot back. Turns out, the original Zombieman is the perfect embodiment of a minor, retaliating threat. These grunts are easily killed, but still problematic when ignored. In that regard, the new Doom's design - complete with its 'body horror' arm-cannons - seems like it'll carry the torch of the traditional Zombieman nicely.

The Imp's importance to Doom's fundamentals cannot be overstated. As the second enemy type you encounter after the Zombieman (still in the opening level, mind you), Imps are your first real taste of the supernatural horror that awaits on the rest of Mars. Their spiky bodies and propensity to fling fireballs clearly signal that yes, these are the armies of Hell walking in your presence. And those fireballs are an ingenious teaching method: they force you to learn how to strafe out of harm's way or suffer third-degree burns. Unlike the Zombieman's bullets, Imps' projectiles present visually distinct hazards, which fly just fast enough to test your twitch reflexes without being imperceptible.

Doom 3 tweaks that design slightly, giving Imps the ability to climb along walls, and bolstering their trademark fireball flinging with a pounce attack that's much more aggressive than the original's 'slowly waddle towards you to get within punching range'. The new Doom looks like it'll retain Doom 3's springy, more agile Imp design, acting as a barometer for the player's ability to dodge out of the way of incoming ranged or melee attacks at a moment's notice.

These beasties are actually just 'Demons', but most everyone calls 'em Pinkies - partially because of the pig-like pigmentation of their flesh, but mostly because Pinky is an infinitely more delightful name. Just as Zombiemen and Imps embody invaluable FPS intelligence, the Pinky introduces fledgling players to a new kind of threat: the bullet sponge that rushes in your direction until one of you is dead. One Pinky is reason to be afraid; a pack of them indicates that it's time to either run away or carefully use the environment to funnel them into a manageable procession towards the warm, welcoming barrel of your Super Shotgun.

I guess a bright pink bipedal demon felt too outlandish to be a part of Doom 3, so the classic Pinky got replaced by a four-legged, dog-like meld of demon flesh and robotic hind legs. But id and Bethesda seem to have heard my nightly prayers, having restored my most beloved Hellspawn buddy to his rightful form in the new Doom. Forgive the blurriness of the image - that bad boy only shows up for a fraction of a second in the most recent Doom gameplay trailer - but this is clearly a modernized version of the charming goofiness inherent to the Pinky's original look.

For most people, the sight of a naked, grotesquely obese man with elephant legs is not their idea of a good time. Turns out, it's even worse when they've got two rocket launchers for arms and a limitless supply of ammunition. Fighting the Mancubus is the organic tutorial to the ins and outs of splash damage, given how it fights with - and is easily killed by - rockets. The concept of extra damage invisibly radiating out from a rocket's point of impact is a basic FPS principle we know and love now, but in Doom's day, it was a principle had to be learned.

It becomes apparent - probably after a few instances of kamikaze-esque self-disintegration - that trying to blast a Mancubus with rockets from point-blank will kill the both of you in a hurry. Best to plug its rippling belly with some shotgun or chaingun rounds, saving those rockets for rooms full of lesser enemies. The new Doom gives you another option: set it up for a melee execution with a few potshots, then force-feed it its own explosive heart for gut-busting results.

Fun fact: the original Cacodemon design is heavily based on from a Dungeons and Dragons manual (which I highly doubt id ever paid royalties for). Cacodemons are like Imps on steroids, spewing fireballs at a faster rate and surviving way more punishment. The Cacodemon's cyclopean glowing eye, ominous blue-mouthed grin, and sheer size - often taking up a huge chunk of your screen - can make even the hardiest space marine freeze in terror at first sight. But doing so ensures certain death, so you're forced to adapt. After slaying your first bushel of bulbous Cacodemons, you'll realize that you've been honing the skills needed to down these big red blimps just by mowing down the previous enemy types.

Like the Imp, the Cacodemon's ranged attacks often force you to backpedal while shooting, which becomes an invaluable tactic for any firefight the more you get used to it. But their hovering freedom of movement also trains you to keep your eyes peeled for any overhead threats that could swiftly close the distance on you. The new Doom's slightly smaller Cacodemon appears to patrol the skies in much the same way, and will hopefully cave in and collapse into a pile of intestines upon death (just like the original).

These resilient brutes are available in two flavors: the tan-skinned Hell Knight, or the pink, beefed-up (and doubled-up) Baron of Hell. Either way, you're going to have a tough time dealing with their massive health pools, ranged fireballs (this time in lime green), and devastating wallops up close. Besting them is a matter of preparedness, because if your ammo supply isn't well-stocked when a Hell Knight rolls up, the fight will be over before it's even begun.

The Hell Knight is undoubtedly the most iconic monster in Doom 3 (appearing front and center on the box art), with a muscular, hulking redesign that looks like it could crush the original goat-man sprite with a single swipe. Doom 4 repurposes this design with a cleaner, bone-colored noggin, while maintaining the Herculean physiques. This new breed of Hell Knight seems to have a bigger focus on melee aggression, but granted, that's judging based off a single fight scene (and I definitely spotted up some charged-up energy in its hands at one point).

Revenants are something of an anomaly: an enemy that's just as deadly from afar as it is up close. Those twin shoulder-mounted rockets aren't just for show, and can obliterate your health from long range, but the Revenant will gladly punch you to death if you try for some close-quarters combat. Engaging them can be a frustrating experience at first, as you desperately try to figure out the most effective distance to mount your attack.

Then comes an epiphany, the kind that can only arise from brilliant game design: you need to confuse the Revenant by dancing between its two attack ranges, like a boxer darting away from and into dangerous punches at just the right moment. Of course, you'll need to be fast if you want to survive, because it can easily match your pace with its speedy footwork. And judging by the grisly ending to the fresh Doom gameplay reveal from E3 2015, the Revenant's more than happy to tear off your arms and beat you to death with them. Just something to keep in mind.

If Doom's bestiary is like a lesson plan, then the Cyberdemon is your final exam. This colossal, rocket-armed, cyborg minotaur has it all: the deadly projectiles of the Mancubus, the erratic zig-zaggy movement of a Pinky, the imposing size of two Cacodemons stacked atop one another, the speed of a Revenant, and the immense survivability of a Hell Knight. Oh, and it doesn't take splash damage, so you can just forget about spamming your stash of rockets and calling it a day.

But then, taking down a Cyberdemon should never be easy, given that it's typically been given final boss status throughout the series. It's an iconic-enough enemy to have been the first actual 'thing' revealed for the new Doom, so it'll be interesting to see if it's used sparingly or becomes a more common, less demanding encounter (hopefully the former). Either way, hearing the Cyberdemon's battle-scream in-game is sure to make your teeth grit, fingers sweat, and intestines quiver each and every time.

Games give so many conflicting messages to players. Most want hours and hours of your attentive dedication, then for you to return for DLC, and to never give up on the multiplayer (lest you trade it in). It can be a lot to ask, but many people are more than ready to sacrifice vast chunks of spare time. Which makes it all the more frustrating when a game says "Hey, don't you think you should take a break?" I'll tell you when I've had enough!

But there are a handful of titles that skip the simple guilt trip, and instead express concern over possible addiction by actually rewarding players for NOT playing. These games admirably promote shutting off or logging out from time to time, doling out some kind of tangible bonus for not playing them. If only other worrisome publishers got as proactive as these games...

Note: An earlier version of this article appeared on the site in 2014. This new-and-improved, updated remix near doubles the list of entries, so do give it a look even if you read the original. New stuff is up front, too.

Despite what the crackpot media might have you believe, not all video games are out to get us… just most of them. The rest make do by occupying only a large tract of our time, as opposed to every last drop of it - here's looking at you World of Warcraft and Destiny. Some games, it seems, would rather maintain a clear conscience, a basic responsibility to the health and wellbeing of the player. Sometimes they even express this in the form of an explicit 'go outside already' tip. 'Get some fresh air', they say, 'you're starting to smell'. Bless their swollen hearts.

Though some games go even further than that. Some games actively reward inaction, making not-playing an ironic element of their gameplay. Some games take the design philosophy of 'less is more' to its natural conclusion, interpreting 'less' as 'zero human interaction whatsoever'. Today's thoroughly big list takes a look at 15 such titles - those that effectively reward the player for his or her total inactivity. Sometimes taking your time (or just being flat-out lazy) has its rewards. Enjoy.

Reams and reams have already been written about the absurd fallacies that govern our games - those oddball behaviours and mad practices that seem so wonderfully at home inside of a virtual setting, and yet so massively inappropriate beyond it. Far Cry 4 evidently takes issue with these sorts of unthinking and unrealistic reactions. Case in point - the game's early doings, in which the villainous Pagan Min appears to kidnap protagonist Ajay and stuff him into an easily escaped room. Now, given the man's obvious penchant for violence, as well as his ominous promise to return, it's hardly surprising to find that most gamers quickly attempt to scarper.

But what if you don't run? What if instead of scurrying off to go native and/or ride around on massive murder elephants you simply decide to sit it out and wait? Does Min return, torture tools in hand and ready to rend flesh? Actually no. Instead we're treated to what is perhaps the most realistically dull conclusion of all time. You sit around for 15 minutes, Min duly returns and kindly escorts you to your original destination. Game over. That's it. I guess he's not such a terrible genocidal dictator after all… Just a weird uncle really. Very weird, mind, but still...

From the 'loving mother's school of devastating fight advice', it's Final Fantasy V and the Gogo boss monster - aka the one that you beat by doing nothing precisely nothing. Take that bullies - looks like I'm the bigger man now… on the floor, being kicked. Cheers Mum. You see the thing about Gogo is that he's actually a mimic, meaning that he'll only attack so long as you choose to attack him. Attempt to duke it out and he'll unleash wave after wave of unstoppable carnage, but opt instead to heed his sagely warning - 'to do as he does' - and Gogo will eventually relent, granting you a prize before scampering off elsewhere.

Good thing too, as trying to best old Gogo via conventional means, i.e. - the exact way that anyone would after 30-plus of furious fiend blasting - is considered to be a truly difficult feat. Gogo can annihilate the entire party in just three turns, and must realistically be defeated with the help of a high-level muting buff, lest this monstrous mime work up to his uber destructive meteor attack. The lesson here: Not every boss taunt ought to be ignored.

What better way to mask dark-hearted villainy than with a sweeping sense of whimsy? Disney has been at it for years now... In the case of Jonathon Blow's Braid this diabolical bent extends far beyond the terrible actions of Tim. You see, even the gameplay itself bears something of a sadistic streak. Case in point - level 2-2, or 'the curious case of the cloud that just wouldn't budge'. Well, to be fair, it does actually shift, though at such an imperceptible crawl as to trick most players into ruling it out as an effective means of locomotion. So why exactly would you want to ride such a slowpoke?

Well, as it turns out Blow and co. made it so that this granny-rapid gas ball provides the only means of reaching the game's most maliciously placed star. Now keep in mind that you don't actually need this item at all, though of course there's no accounting for the insatiable appetites of the completionist. All told, the player will need to wait 2 whole hours for this fluffy bugger to reach its destination. To be clear - that's 2 entire hours of your life… in exchange for a pickup that anyone, of any skill level could also achieve… Methinks I smell a trolling.

Everyone loves a dev team with a decent sense of humour, particularly when that team belongs to an oftentimes 'holier than thou' indie scene. "Ya, programming in a start button was just, like waaaay too mainstream". Praise be to the folks at Galactic Café then, whose winning sense of humour even found its way into The Stanley Parable's achievement section. An achievement section that features such noteworthy accolades as 'You can't Jump' - which rewards players for trying anyway, and 'Click on Door 430 Five Times', which err - well, you probably get that one.

Then there's 'Go Outside', an achievement that ensures that even avid gamers get their fair share of fresh air. To earn this trophy, gamers must stop playing the game for an entire 5-years. Play it, log off, and log back in a whopping 1826 days later. What could be simpler? Well, changing your computer's internal clock for one, but that's no fun now is it?

First things first: this particular section of Earthbound has you playing the role of a man named 'Poo'. A man. named. Poo… No, not a sentient slurry, nor a talking number two, but a man… named Poo… Just let that sink in to your mental u-bends for a minute. Giggles all gone? Good. Get everything out of your cistern… damnit, 'system'? Great, then let's continue. You see it seems that good old Poo is trying his damndest to master the art of Mu meditation. To do so he'll need to ignore a series of increasingly tempting visions while doing precisely nothing. Seems simple, though neither the player nor Poo can be quite sure that these tempters aren't actually real people in need.

This all continues until Poo enters a mysterious spirit world, wherein a strange spectre appears to torment him with various threats of mutilation. Hold your nerve and you'll complete your training unharmed. Intervene however, and it's all the way back to square one. Oddly enough, Earthbound actually features a second instance of similar inaction, whereby the player must stand motionless beside a waterfall for a full three minutes. Doing so will eventually unveil a gatekeeper asking the player for a password - or a swift slap to the face, depending on how many times you muck this one up.

Being the wholesome, family-friendly organisation that it is, many of Nintendo's games will occasionally prompt their players to set down their systems, unglue their eyes, and take a refreshing stroll out into the sun… probably to buy some more Amiibo. Because who told you you could stop buying Amiibo, huh? Get out there and buy some more goddamn Amiibo! But while many games will make an honest attempt to remind you of the world beyond your bedroom, few among them will actually ask you to close up shop as part of the game itself.

Then again, most games aren't part of the endlessly inventive Legend of Zelda series. In the case of the DS-exclusive Phantom Hourglass, this level of invention appears in the form of a classic key quest (with a twist). Said quest tasks Link with finding a way to affix a sacred crest to a seafaring chart. Sounds simple enough, and it is, provided you're able to think outside of the box - or handheld gaming device, as the case may be. Simply highlight both bits - one on each screen - before shuttering your DS and reopening. Tada! Both elements have now magically bonded, and all because you took a breather. Good luck trying that one with an emulator…

'Victory through inaction' is about as close to a catchphrase as the Spec Ops series is ever likely to get. Make no mistake about it, if you were one of those fortunate enough to miss out on the first nine titles, then you - sir or madam - truly were a winner. To say that these games were shoddy is an insult to true shoddiness. In truth, they were little more than uninspired dreck, the veritable bargain bin liners of a bygone day and age. Then of course came The Line, team Yager's incisive spin on/total indictment of the modern military shooter.

Here again, 'the only way to win was not to play'. However, unlike earlier games in the franchise, this decision had absolutely nothing to do with the title's supposed lack of polish - just the opposite, in fact. You see, protagonist Captain Walker's aim is if anything a little too effective, a factor that permits both he and the player to continue on with their mission long after losing all effective and justifiable impetus for doing so. In short, the further the player progresses, the more needless the devastation unleashed. All with the game goading and openly mocking your bloodlust every step of the way. Well done, winner. You're a monster. You really should have stopped playing.

Long before the Battlefield series spread to consoles, it had one of the most dedicated communities on PC. The fans were reliving World War 2 over and over again in team deathmatch, with a passion that I'm sure the developers had hoped to inspire. But when EA and DICE released a futuristic sequel, Battlefield 2142, they handed out special points multipliers for every 24 hours the passionate fans didn't play the game.

Of course, the official messaging on the feature focused more on assisting those that simply couldn't play the game as much as their competition. If jobs, or pets, or heart surgery distracted you from logging into Battlefield 2142, you would accrue an hour of Away bonus for every 24 hour period you weren't in the game, doubling the Career Points you'd earn in battle. Given that 2142 is the underplayed black sheep in the BF series, it seems like a lot of Away bonuses were earned by players before the servers were officially shut down on June 30, 2014.

thatgamecompany is one of the more avant garde developers around, creating games that are as much about atmosphere as gameplay. As such, thatgamecompany wants players to soak in the artistic vibe of Flower and Journey at a slower pace, even encouraging them to step away from the game for seven days before resuming the adventure. This 'more casual' playstyle is incentivized via the most hardcore of the PS3's in-game tools, the Trophy.

Flower's Welcome Back and Journey's corresponding Return are Bronze Trophies handed out for quitting the games for at least a week and then resuming your campaign. Those extra days away might give you enough time to truly deconstruct the themes and techniques of these thought-provoking games, putting those lessons to work in your own life. Or, if you're like most Trophy fanatics, you briefly pushed the system's internal clock forward by a week and immediately collected the Bronze, foregoing any transcendence. If only all epiphanies were this easy.

Bravely Default is Square Enix's return to form for the JRPG genre. Tropes like amnesiac teens, HP/MP, and world-powering crystals are all in full effect for the lovely throwback, but it also has some gameplay tricks that couldn't be done in 1992. For example, the new SP metric allows you to take extra actions during combat, which can turn the tide in a difficult battle. And you earn SP for having a good night's rest (kind of).

SP stands for Sleep Points, which are collected for every eight hours that your game is in Sleep Mode when the 3DS is closed with the game on. That's enough time to get the doctor-recommended amount of rest or finish a full day's work at the office, all leaving you and your characters refreshed for when you return to Bravely. The only thing undercutting these good intentions is the fact you can also buy SP via microtransactions. Paying for an SP Drink replenishes Sleep Points without the wait. If only we could spend money to avoid sleeping in real life. Or is that what caffeine is for?

Every now and then you'll see a sensationalist news headline about some poor soul that played an MMO until they died of exhaustion. Those tragedies, along with a general portrayal of kids wasting years of their lives on virtual avatars, feed a fear that people harm themselves by playing a game like World of Warcraft. No doubt with those fears in mind, Blizzard (ever the canny developer) implemented Rested XP as a way to make logging off beneficial for its diehard audience.

After heading to an inn and leaving the servers, every eight hours a day spent away nets you a Rested XP bubble. You can stockpile these for up to 10 days. When you return, each bubble grants double XP for kills until the bubbles all dissipate (aka your dwarf is no longer rested). That means players who only log in once a week have a chance of closing the gap with their more hardcore friends. So, when you're thinking of pulling an all-nighter to off 30 rats, you might be better off napping and then killing 15 in the morning for the same XP. Then again, if you're that hardcore, you likely hit the level cap a long time ago.

Nintendo games are notorious for continually hitting players with warnings about playing too much, with most games featuring at least one character that shows up to lecture you about taking a break. Pokemon has been known to engage in the same finger wagging as well, but the DS remakes of Gold and Silver didn't just tell kids to switch off their handhelds. The duo of games push Pokemaniacs to get their lazy butts into shape alongside their Pokemon.

The Gold/Silver remakes come packed with the virtual pet-style Pokewalker. The circular, simple electronic device is shaped like a Pokeball, and you use it to temporarily take individual Pokemon out on a walk to collect experience and mildly uncommon items. It’s a cute way to get slightly active via pocket monsters, but you can only gain a single level per trip, meaning it’s less time consuming to remain immobile and grind out XP in-game. Laziness wins again!

Peter Molyneux is just the type of mad genius to conjure up a virtual real estate market within one of his fantasy worlds. Fable 2 did a much better job than its predecessor with paying off Molyneux’s lofty design dreams, and it includes a world so dense that you can buy property and collect rent from it while not even playing. You can step away from the game and know you’ll have some cash waiting for you when you come back.

The rent payments go into your coffers every five minutes you aren’t playing Fable 2, and it can stack up for up to two months' worth of gold. Of course, this it vulnerable to the offline exploit of simply turning the system clock forward two months to collect the cash immediately. This is why we can’t have nice things. I’m assuming Peter Molyneux agrees, because the cash-for-not-playing aspect is missing from Fable 3’s real estate.

Despite Nintendo’s many series that whine to players to put down the game occasionally, Fire Emblem once seemed too hardcore to tell you to walk away. In fact, most FE entries were more likely to drop you into a grueling, 45 minute battle, allow no saving during the permadeath conflict, then say, “Deal with it, loser.” When 3DS’s FE: Awakening rolled around, it softened some of its edges, including doling out rewards for stepping off the battlefield every now and then.

Like most strategy RPGs, you can spend time leveling up your Awakening squad of knights and dragons in random battles that pop up on the map. But if you overdo it and kill off the few superfluous baddies dotting the map, they’ll respawn as weaker and weaker pipsqueaks. Conversely, if you step away for a few hours, the map will be repopulated with dramatically more powerful opponents that drop better items and cash. Nice bonus and it also spreads an important message about the dangers of factory farming. Or am just reaching with that?

Hideo Kojima uses every tool at his disposal when making Metal Gear Solid games, and that includes messing with the in-game clock in ways most players will never notice. Of all his games, Metal Gear Solid 3 might be the best at finding unpredictable ways to grant players advantages for turning off the game. For instance, if Snake has taken too much damage, just take a long break from the campaign and his health and stamina return to normal. Though, all his food turns bad in the time you waited for Snake heal.

But the rewards for ignoring MGS3 go much deeper than that. The End is one of the toughest bosses you may ever face in any game, mainly because the wily sniper is hard to find and even harder to kill. If he’s too tough for you, Kojima gives you an out: just leave things alone for a week. When you return seven days later, the decrepit The End will have died from old age. In a way, it’s actually more humane to let him expire from natural causes.

Now that I’ve reached the end of this feature, are you sure you don’t need a break? It’s just that you look tired. If not, share your own favorite memories of when you didn’t play a game right down there in the comments!

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The internet got hit with a heavy dose of Final Fantasy fever coming out of E3 2015. Against all odds, Square Enix finally announced a Final Fantasy 7 remake. And it's not just going to be a one-to-one remake. Speaking to - and not changed - in this new Final Fantasy 7, but we're not stopping there.

Let's not forget that the Square half of Square Enix still has an extensive back catalog of fantastic games that are just as worthy of the remake treatment as Final Fantasy 7. Some of them were great ideas that just weren't properly executed at the time, while others are timeless gems that have proven themselves worthy of another go-around. Which one gets your vote? Which game from Square's collection would you like to see get a modern-day makeover? Let us know in the comments below, and read on to see our picks.

What's striking about Bushido Blade are the things you don't see. Here's a 3D fighting game without a health bar, timer, energy meter, or brightly-colored combo counter cluttering up the action. Instead, all you have are two fighters slowly, cautiously circling one another, each awaiting their chance to deliver the killing blow. There are no double-digit combos here. One clean hit is all it takes to win a fight. When you hear people talk about Bushido Blade, one word always comes up: tension. It's one big game of chicken with razor-sharp swords.

Sadly, Bushido Blade never lived up to its full potential. Instead, it spawned the Kengo: Master of Bushido series, which ended up playing like an awkward and stilted Soulcalibur (complete with all those meters and mechanics the original omitted). A modern Bushido Blade could correct the series’ stiltedness while remaining true to the minimalist design that makes it so unique. If you've been even a little bit interested in the player-versus-player combat of the Souls series, then you're ready for a new Bushido Blade.

At first glance, Brave Fencer Musashi looks like a low-rent Legend of Zelda clone, and OK, yeah, in some ways it kind of is. Combat's a little clumsy, and its 3D graphics are blocky and primitive, even compared to other PlayStation games at the time. Luckily, that's the kind of stuff that can get fixed in a remake, because Brave Fencer Musashi's world is filled with interesting secrets, loads of charm, and far too many food puns - and it deserves another chance.

Japan's greatest swordsman has been transported to an alternate dimension by Princess Fillet of the Allucaneet Kingdom in order to put an end to the Thirstquencher Empire's reign of terror (I told you there were food puns). Rescuing its citizens opens up new shops in the city, and finding hidden items to access new areas to save more people quickly turns into a completionist's paradise. You can even purchase action figures and either take them out of the packaging to play with them, or keep them mint to sell back later at a markup. There's a day/night cycle, a ton of abilities, and inventive puzzles - all the pieces are already there for this cult classic to become a modern hit.

The Bouncer is a 3D brawler. Think Streets of Rage, but in 3D and with floppier hair. When it was released near PS2's launch, it was graphically exceptional, with in-game graphics that were almost as good as the standard of pre-rendered cut-scenes at the time (unsurprising as that's been a common theme for Square-Enix's output ever since). But that was likely where most of the development time went, as it was too short and the fighting too simplistic to become a true classic.

It did, however, have a certain something. And the roster of playable characters and gradual unlocking of story scenes made for plenty of replay value. If that were expanded now, and the graphics given the same attention to detail using the might of PS4, The Bouncer 2 could be a modern classic. We haven't had a decent brawler like this in ages, and it's about time we did.

I defy you to name a better game involving opera houses, spontaneous combustion, and grenade launchers. This gem of an action RPG is so unlike Square's usual fare: it's set in modern-day Manhattan, revolves around themes of mutation and body horror, features quasi-real-time combat that prioritizes guns, and earns an M rating. But it also exhibits many of Square's greatest strengths, with gorgeous cinematics (which, for my money, still hold up), a stellar lead in the form of tenacious NYPD officer Aya Brea, and an engrossing narrative (albeit one of sci-fi rather than fantasy).

The original Parasite Eve could go a long way with some spruced-up visuals and full voice-acting, and you can be sure that those cutscenes of grotesque rat transformations would look even more horrifying in HD. But for the love of all that is holy, Square Enix, add the ability to skip cinematics you've already seen. Without spoiling anything, I had to watch the extremely creepy (and lengthy) cutscene before the final boss probably 18 times, because that fight is damn difficult. Oh, and it might be worth unlocking the roguelike-esque Chrysler Building challenge tower right from the get-go.

Final Fantasy 8 is a hot mess, and I say that with all the love in the world. The follow-up to one of Square's most gargantuan commercial successes, Square took the risky step of making it wildly different from the game that came before, and some really interesting ideas surfaced as a result. Sadly, surface is all some of them ever did, and trying to balance too many left FF8 a clutter of half-realized thoughts that swings at greatness and just misses the mark. It would take a complete rebuild to help FF8 reach its potential, but it needs to happen.

As opposed to a port or remaster that would bring along all the unfortunate plot problems of the original, a full remake could focus on making FF8's most pivotal elements work effectively. They could beef up the fascinating sorceress lore, focus on how growing up in a post-war society has affected the main characters, strengthen the Laguna segments to make them a fuller part of the game, and finally, finally develop the main romance into something that approaches believability. Square-Enix would have to completely tear it apart, but it'd be worth it, because then FF8 could finally become the game it was meant to be.

"Hey, didn't Square Enix just remake Final Fantasy X and X-2?"

Thank you for asking, disembodied voice. But no, Square Enix did not remake FFX/X-2 for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, it merely remastered them with upscaled textures and slightly better looking models. The game's voice acting remained as simultaneously charming and weird as before - sidenote: AH HA HA HA HA - and overall the experience was roughly 95 percent identical to what players experienced in 2001 (and 2003 for the sequel).

What we're talking about wanting for Final Fantasy X/X-2 is a full-blown remake. That means an entirely new graphics engine, new voice acting, new everything. Tidus and friends are some of the series' most fondly-remembered ragtag group of heroes ever assembled, and for good reason. They're distinct, memorable, have interesting relationships with one another, and they live in a unique, post-apocalyptic-but-still-futuristic setting. It's true that the HD remasters looked good, and we appreciate the work that went into them. But imagine Yuna summoning Ifrit, Shiva, Bahamut or any other number of strange creatures with today's graphical capabilities at the developer's fingertips. Plus glorious, glorious Blitzball.

So there are our picks for the Square games most deserving of a FF7-esque remake. However, I just can't shake the feeling that we forgot something. It's almost like there's a game out there everyone loves that seems like an obvious pick that just somehow didn't make it on this list. Oh well. Let us know which game gets your vote, either from the list or from your heart. State your case in the comments below. Hey, if a FF7 remake can happen, anything is possible.

Ever had a shadowy figure pass by in the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look nothings there? Your heart pounds with unnecessary adrenaline and the confidence boost of instant relief as you realise everything's fine. That feeling can be addictive, even if you suddenly find that your underpants are a little damp. Games are great at giving you those scares alongside the safety of knowing 'it's only a game. So here are nine of PlayStation’s biggest squinting-through-your-fingers shockers

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Creative Assembly’s love letter to Ridley Scott’s haunted house in space is stuffed with jump scares – thanks to a nine-and-a-half foot Xenomorph that’s powered by some seriously clever systemic AI. Learning from your stealth tactics, HR Giger’s beastie adapts, stalks and terrifies.

Another smashed window, another classic Capcom fright. Rather than dealing with decomposing canines (see number four), Dino Crisis’ Regina is confronted by the game’s Tyrannosaurus Rex in a shocking jump scare that makes Jurassic Park’s hairiest (or should that be scaliest?) bits look suitable for Sesame Street.

You call that a Batarang? This is a Batarang. Actually, we’d rather have Mick Dundee’s machete when atavistic badass Killer Croc first jumps out at the Dark Knight in Arkham’s sewage works. Cue a tense face-off as you sneak past a beast that constantly tries to ambush Bats from the water below.

The daddy of all digital ‘BOO’ moments, and one that likely sent many a pacemaker into a terrifying flutter back in ‘96. After entering the spooky halls of Spencer Mansion, your choice of STARS agent happens upon an innocuous corridor with a rather big windo... AH, RUN AWAY! UNDEAD DOBERMAN! That pouncing pooch was one masterful sight scare.

Good games bring out the best of E3 - and a good E3 brings out the best of games. That relationship is always true but not always adhered to, making E3 2015 one of the finest shows in years. Finally, the platform holders and big publishers are rolling up their sleeves for reasons other than showing off the latest military arm-hair rendering technology.

Both PlayStation and Xbox made investments in new, large-scale games, while the showing from independent studios came with a ferocity and appeal not seen in years past. As a result, and after 3 days of playing as much as we could, we’ve assembled this list of E3 2015's most exciting games. Just over half of them are original, one is available already, and those that return from existing properties really earned their spots. Good job, E3.

One stray white feather was all it took for all of us to collectively lose our minds during the Sony press conference because it has been so, so, long since we’d heard anything about The Last Guardian. Anyone familiar with Fumito Ueda’s Ico and Shadow of the Colossus may notice that his next game appears to be a mash up of themes from the two. It combines the massive sense of scale from Shadow of the Colossus with the touching, personal relationship portrayed in Ico. We don’t know much about the protagonist (a young boy who has been kidnapped under bizarre circumstances) but what we do know is that his griffin-like catbird friend Trico is there to help him get out.

We didn’t see any other living creatures this time, but danger doesn’t have to lurk in the shadows. The environment itself is treacherous, and from what we’ve seen you’re always surrounded by soaring towers with no hint of where the surface of the world is when you look down. Using Trico’s strength and the boy’s small stature, the two make the perfect puzzle-solving pair. It’s the details that make The Last Guardian something special, from the boy’s exaggerated animations to Trico’s dog-like mannerisms. And that’s what we’re dying to see more of: the budding relationship between the two, which will hopefully culminate in a beautiful happy ending where they both make it out and ride off into the sunset. No one needs to think about the alternative …

In addition to being one of the best games at E3 2015, Fallout 4 should also take home the award for being the most hyped game at E3 2015. After its official announcement during the Bethesda press conference, Fallout 4 has sent the industry into one giant fanboy freakout. You all can't get enough of it, we can't get enough of it, and pretty soon, come November, we're all going to get our chance to play it. And why shouldn't we be excited? The core Fallout series has always maintained that ideal balance of strategic gameplay and dark, apocalyptic humor. Fallout 4 promises all that, and so much more.

For starters, you can play the role of an urban planner. Fallout 4 will let you custom build your own home, which can then grow into a settlement and attract traveling item vendors to supply you with new goods. You can roam the countryside with Dogmeat, your indestructible canine companion who fetches items for you. Then you can use those items to fine-tune your makeshift weapons through numerous add-ons and modifications. Of course, these minor details are really just the tip of the iceberg as there are (probably) tons of surprises waiting to be revealed between now and November. Time to refill that Rad-X prescription, because we're headed back to the wasteland.

Amidst all the explosions and noise from Star Wars Battlefront (we’re not complaining) and fanfare around the latest sports title, it was great to see EA back a whimsical-looking game featuring a walking yarn creature, aptly named Yarny. As Yarny, you use the yarn that you’re made of to cross obstacles and swing yourself from one place to another. You make your way through lush gardens, rainy streets and other dreamy settings that were inspired by real-life locales in northern Sweden, where the developers from Coldwood Interactive are based.

This physics-based puzzle platformer comes with a sentimental story, as hinted in the trailer and described by the creator, Martin Sahlin. It’s hard not to get a bit misty-eyed when you see the struggles Yarny has to face in the harsh, real world. Okay, maybe it had more to do with the melancholy music. Either way, the red thread represents all the bonds that we form with people in our lives. But then, what happens when all that … unravels?

It’s a marvel for Mirror’s Edge Catalyst to even exist in its current form. Its priorities are at odds with many major franchises, more rooted in acts of graceful escape than full-on violence, and its vibrant look somehow finds beauty in a sterile, corporatized city. It’s now impossible to pick up a gun as you bounce between soon-to-be-KO’d enemies like a kung-fu bunny.

But what’s most interesting about Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, beyond the immediate quality of its motion, beyond its clever integration of speed-running challenges in a city of reflective shards, and beyond its intriguing heroine, Faith, is that much of this could have been said about the previous game. It had such an impact that you can’t help but view its return with suspicion, scanning for the catch, waiting for that whiff of a vision compromised in some disappointing way. But with no gunplay (for real), a three-dimensionally expanded world and a demonstrable attempt to rebuild Faith’s story, Catalyst looks like the game DICE really wanted to make all those years ago.

The creators of Killzone are working on a game that remarkably doesn’t look like a game from the creators of Killzone. Nature has reclaimed the world of Horizon: Zero Dawn, a thousand years after humanity has shriveled and settled itself as primitive counterpart to new breeds of cybernetic animals. You’ll hunt them as Aloy, a human warrior with a warm heart and quiver full of specialized arrows.

Horizon’s world seems fresh and imaginative, with thunderous cyber-beasts serving as both mystery (who made them?) and formidable opponents in combat. Guerrilla exudes an exceptional attention to detail in this aspect of Horizon: Zero Dawn, granting Aloy different arrows and ropes to pin beasts down, or tear off individual pieces of armor. And when their nuts-and-bolts spill out, she finds new uses for them in crafted armor and weapons. Aloy proves her mettle not only as hunter and engineer, though, but also as an emphatic, quick-witted personality.

Good ol' Mario. He's kept us entertained for 30 years with his his joyful koopa-stomping, princess-saving adventures, and Super Mario Maker is a celebration of that legacy. Dubious looks may have been shared over the concept from time to time (did Nintendo just design half a game and give the rest to the players?), but in practice Super Mario Maker is a solid experience that truly combines the fun of Mario's 2D adventures with a lot of creative fun.

Letting you change the style of your level between four different 2D Mario games, Super Mario Maker gives you access to almost all the different pieces of the Mushroom Kingdom and sends you out into the wild. It's a ton of fun designing impossible levels (which the game happily lets you do), putting a flying Koopa on top of five springs and watching the resulting mayhem. But once you get over your desire for chaos, Super Mario Maker gives you solid tools to design levels that are every bit as good as those in the original games. You can then share those levels with other players and try out their designs in return. Plus, no need to worry about trolls - a creator has to be able to beat their own level in its current form before releasing it to the world. Super Mario Maker is good, clean, creative fun that makes doing all the work fantastic.

ABZU is the ocean of wisdom. At least, that is what it means when you combine two ancient words “AB” for ocean and “ZU” meaning to know. ABZU stood out as one of the most serene experiences during the week of E3 2015. In this beautiful underwater exploration game, creator Matt Nava (and former lead artist on Journey) wants to create a fluid world for a player to explore and discover.

Where Journey made your destination fairly obvious, ABZU is more open, and designed in a way where you’ll naturally end up where you need to go next. The world beneath the waves is vast, and there’s so much to see. As a diver with no health gauge to worry about, you can swim around and explore, do flips, ride on the back of a manta ray or swim with a school of fish. It’s peaceful, refreshing, and easy to get lost in.

It isn't just Battlefield with Stormtroopers. Star Wars Battlefront takes an arcadey approach to large-scale online battles, one that's clearly in love with its source material even as it reshapes cinematic moments into thrilling multiplayer flashpoints. The hands-on E3 demo had 20 Rebels and 20 Imperials fighting in the Battle of Hoth, with Imperial forces escorting a pair of AT-ATs toward Echo Base's shield generators and the Rebels trying to destroy said walkers. Oh, and unlike in The Empire Strikes Back, the Rebels can win.

Trading blaster fire feels like a pretty standard first/third-person shooter, but movement is surprisingly bouncy, especially with a jetpack in your loadout. Picking up a TIE Fighter or Snow Speeder token lying around the map allows you to call in air support, sending the camera sweeping up and away to follow your new ride. It's immediately ready for action, letting you transition straight to aerial battles without interrupting your frontline momentum. Battlefront's full of smart, unexpected choices that all get you doing cool Star Wars stuff faster, making it far teresting (and fun) than just a force-flavored Battlefield clone.

When the Tomb Raider reboot came out in 2013, it felt like meeting an old for the first time in a long while. Lara was different, but in a good way. Always a scholar with the uncanny ability to go exactly where the trouble is, now she's also a survivor with an indomitable will. We didn't just want to go with her on an adventure - we wanted to see her beat everything the world tried to throw at her. Now she's back to it all over again, but this time she's on a personal journey to find her place in the world and become the person she was always meant to be. And that means raiding a lot of tombs.

Rise of the Tomb Raider takes what worked so well about the previous game - a revitalized Lara, refined combat, interesting collectibles, and fun sidequests - and mixes it together with improved stealth and crafting systems. Now you can customize weapons to fit your play style, and blast through packs of enemies without firing a single bullet. Most importantly of all, its tombs are several times as detailed, latching onto one of the taproots of the series that made us love it in the first place.

In Norse mythology, Eitr is a poisonous substance and yet the source of all life. At E3 2015, it was a surprisingly excellent action RPG, inspired in equal parts by Diablo and Dark Souls. As in Dark Souls, you may be able to take down a few monsters by mashing buttons, but all your little wounds will add up quickly. It's better to focus on an individual target, feinting, counter-attacking, and dodging in a deliberate tango which will vary by your creepy monstrous dance partner. It feels great, partly because managing all those little parries and thrusts as you keep track of foes is actually quite a bit easier with a Diablo-style isometric camera than in third-person 3D.

Of course, it wouldn't be a proper Diablo-like without scads of randomly generated loot. But equipping a shiny new weapon in Eitr feels much more substantial, since you're not just clicking on enemies until they're dead - different weapon combinations offer different combos and timing to keep in mind. Not to mention Eitr's heroine makes an impressive show of sweeping around the dark, crumbling, and beautiful world, and the minimalist, groaning soundtrack adds a freaky edge to intimidating boss battles. Eitr clearly hybridizes some familiar ideas, but each individual element feels even better for the transformation.

Dark Souls is a series obsessed with finding beauty in destruction; a death poem set in motion. Your hero - stoic and resolute - expresses himself from the tip of a sword, or a handful of gestures. Words are not needed in this shrouded land of death. Your weapons fill the silence, and in Dark Souls 3 they have more to say than ever before. Each armament - from longswords to bows to magic - has some unique action tied to it. The shortbow, for instance, lets you channel your inner Legolas by firing off quick shots after a dodge roll. The longsword can circumvent an enemy's shield with a rising slash that punches through it. The goal here is to create a more active Dark Souls, one that lets you personalize your fighting style let never before.

The backdrop for all this is a ruined world on the brink of oblivion. "Withered beauty," was how game director Hidetaka Miyazaki described it. An unspecified apocalypse looms heavy over this land, its withered denizens turning to the corpse of dragon and other fallen gods for some last-ditch hope of salvation. Not even direct sunlight reaches this place; the rays intercepted by perpetual cloud cover swirling the skies above. But while the end may be inevitable, how you choose to face it - right down to using a longsword over a shortbow - is entirely up to you.

“Not everything is going to make sense,” the narrator of What Remains of Edith Finch warns at the beginning of the game, and goodness, she is not kidding. What begins as a fairly straightforward visit to a childhood landmark very quickly turns into a bizarre tale involving the death of a little girl, an owl, a sea monster, and a family with a dark and mysterious history. There’s a lot to discover (not least of which is the question posed by the title), and none of it is ordinary.

Developer Giant Sparrow prides itself on “creating surreal experiences people have never had before,” and it certainly hits that mark with Edith Finch. Whatever may be going on in that house, it’s not your typical gaming experience. In much the same way that Giant Sparrow’s previous game, The Unfinished Swan, tapped into new areas of creativity to tell its story of a boy in search of closure, Edith Finch avoids the ordinary in favor of the intriguing. You think you know what’s coming, but you don’t; what’s coming is, at least from what we’ve seen so far, far more unsettling than anything you might imagine. How wonderful.

Mobile games often get snubbed at E3 because they’re not big or flashy and, if we’re being honest, not often thought of as "real" games. Bethesda’s Fallout Shelter, meant to tide us over until Fallout 4’s release in November isn’t big or flashy, but it is most certainly a real game, one with depth and personality. Perfectly tuned for its mobile format, Fallout Shelter is gorgeous to look at, has a surprising amount of detail, and its simple Vault-building concept is shockingly addictive. It is, dare I say, S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (I’m sorry. I just couldn’t resist.)

Plenty of mobile games are free to play and supported by microtransactions, but so many of them fail by letting those in-game purchases get in the way of the fun. Fallout Shelter doesn’t make that mistake; you can purchase bonus-containing lunchboxes if you like, but it’s entirely optional. You don’t have to shell out a single cent to enjoy Fallout Shelter’s irreverent and surprisingly challenging approach to rebuilding society. Keeping people happy and alive in a radiated wasteland is, as it turns out, really hard. You think they’d be content to just have a roof over their head, but nooooooo. They want food and water and power and music, too. Ungrateful jerks.

Wattam is what you would get if Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy had a baby - and then gave that baby crayons and cake. It's colorful, silly, and joyous. It's a celebration of everything that links us together; of our common bonds and togetherness. It’s about blowing things up in order to bring people together, which makes absolutely no sense, but that’s ok, it doesn’t really have to.

The Earth was fighting with a Bad Guy and in order to save everyone on the planet, she blew herself up and scattered her inhabitants to the four winds. (Yeah, it’s a weird choice, but run with it.) The Mayor is the sole survivor, and he wants to bring everyone back, which he does by forming increasingly large chains of friends, which he then explodes by setting off the bomb under his bowler hat. (Mm hmm, I know, just stick with me.) Wattam is simple to play, but there’s a lot to discover, like what happens when a coffee bean befriends a pillow or when The Mayor meets his long-lost siblings. The art style is utterly endearing; even the poop is cute. (Yes. There’s poop. Golden poop, even.) To make things even more charming, the characters you encounter take their names from your PSN and Facebook friends. Whether or not you tell your mom that she’s now a chibi lawn mower is up to you.

The little Kickstarter game that could, Flame in the Flood takes you with one simple objective: survive. Well, two objectives, since you're floating down a mammoth river toward something that I'll just call Hope. It's waiting for you at the river's end, but first you have to survive the miles of treacherous post-apocalyptic terrain that lies ahead. To do that, you'll have to keep yourself hydrated, well-fed, warm, and rested, all of which are difficult to do when everything from the wolves to the bacteria in the water is out to get you.

Flame in the Flood doesn't pull any punches, and you will die very quickly the first time you play. You'll have to master necessary survival skills by trial and error, and slowly build up a bank of knowledge to see you through. Dying of septic teaches you not to drink suspicious water. Collapsing from blood loss proves that you can't fight off wolves with just a stick. Starving after eating every plant you find highlight that meat is the key to survival. And you'll learn what objects are important when you realize they could have saved you. It's a slow build to success, but every time you get a little smarter, and feel an ever-stronger urge to push further.

Though didn’t impress us by venturing into new thematic waters, it did show Naughty Dog’s peerless approach to the blockbuster action game. The over-the-top destruction on display in the game’s wild car chase somehow reflected an elegant, economical approach to storytelling. When Nathan peers over a railing to take in a huge city crawling down a hillside, it’s not just for looks - we’re seeing the road to the next story beat, and by the time the chase concludes, we’ve traversed the entirety of what seemed like just a pretty picture before.

This willingness to devote resources – be it time, money or the hard work of artists – into a wide shot like that, only to have it become a “real” constructed environment and unfurl as part of the gameplay, is what put Uncharted on the map. The framing of the chase sequence borrows well from Hollywood, and the witty repartee brings the script up to a matching level. What’s even better, though, is the brewing mystery in the story’s title. Between our trio of thieves, Nathan Drake, brother Sam and companion Sully, we’re already wondering whose epitaph Uncharted 4 will be.

By all accounts, 2015 was a damn good year for E3, and the immediate future of video games is looking especially bright. But when we look back on the E3 that was, it's easy to see that - even though these many of these projects are all worked on in strict secrecy - they still share a lot of similarities with one another.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what causes everyone to suddenly jump aboard the same tracks of parallel thought. Maybe a few dozen grappling hook enthusiasts have wriggled their way into the gaming industry; perhaps everybody's got bigger budgets to spend on eye-catching CGI trailers. Call it coincidence, or call it the natural result of humanity's collective subconscious - these are some of the biggest trends that surfaced in the many amazing .

People watch E3 for the surprises, and this year was probably the best in recent memory to deliver on the impossible. Sony's conference was a megaton explosion of revivals, with the return of The Last Guardian, the arrival of Shenmue 3, and a remake for Square Enix's Final Fantasy 7. Square's own conference announced a brand new sequel to the cult-hit Nier. Microsoft even got in on the action, announcing the return of Rare to the world of game design and the arrival of backwards compatibility to the Xbox One. All of these things seemed unthinkable just last week. Now, they're more real than ever.

Look, this really shouldn't be considered a 'trend' - it should just 'be'. But this year's E3 was definitely a step in the right direction, as a good portion of the big-budget games we got to see star some admirable, . You can play as either a man or woman in Fallout 4, Emily Kaldwin is as much a main character as Corvo in Dishonored 2, Aloy slays mechanical dinosaurs in Horizon: Zero Dawn, Lara Croft was front and center in two press conferences, and many, many more games either star women, or at the very least allow players to choose their gender. Progress.

There's certainly no shortage of sequels that simply expand on prior ideas - Fallout 4 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided are basically like the old games but bigger - but several publishers are taking their beloved franchises in totally new directions. Persona 4: Dancing All Night takes the social-focused JRPG and thrusts it into the rhythm game genre. Two of Bethesda's biggest franchises are getting their own mobile titles: Elder Scrolls Legends takes the sprawling RPG and turns it into a collectible card game, while Fallout Shelter is a neat little life-in-a-Vault management game. Even Ghost Recon is transforming in a big way, taking a straightforward squad-based shooter and blowing it out to open-world proportions - much like Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain's own approach to breaking away from constrained level structure.

It's shocking how many CGI trailers we saw at E3 this year, but a lot of that has to do with how many games are slated for 2016 and beyond. We get it: publishers want to sell people on the high concept of their games, and they want to do it with some pizazz. Or maybe whatever game they're hawking isn't ready to be shown just yet. Regardless of the reason, CGI trailers are ultimately an empty promise. They're all style and no substance, filled with impossibly gorgeous visuals and highly-detailed action that will in no way be representative of the final, playable product. When you see a CGI trailer in a conference, it's basically your window of opportunity to grab a soda from the fridge, because other than the name, what you're seeing isn't going to exist.

If the popularity of Batman and Spider-Man tells us anything, it's that people love imagining what it would be like to swing off of anything and everything. And while trying to fashion your own real-life grappling hook will probably land you in the nearest emergency room, games let you zip around on a metal tether with all the freedom in the world. The grappling hook is one of the Just Cause series' biggest claims to fame, so of course it's back for ?

Seriously, Platinum Games went from making one or two projects at a time to making all of the games. They're working on Star Fox Zero for Nintendo, they're going to be working on Square Enix's sequel to the cult-hit RPG Nier, they're making a brand new Transformers game for Activision, and they've still got Scalebound for Microsoft (though we'll most likely see more of that at Gamescom). Three new announcements at E3 from a studio responsible for fantastic over-the-top action games. Everybody wins.

In 2015 and beyond, it's not just enough to play your games as designed. Publishers now want you to build and share your own creations made inside the game. With the popularity - or rather, cult-like devotion of millions - surrounding Minecraft, games have an increasing desire to cater to a generation of I'll-just-build-it-myself creators. Media Molecule's Dreams expands on lessons learned from its work on LittleBigPlanet, but that's expected. The bigger surprises come from companies like Nintendo and Bethesda. Super Mario Maker aims to be the only Mario game you'll ever need, as you can create and download custom stages across a variety of Super Mario styles. Bethesda's rolling out Doom Snapmap, which allows players to create their own arenas and gametypes within the ultra-violent shooter. Even , giving players the opportunity to construct their own settlements, and even do some light programming of their own.

They say that human beings are social animals, and while we all love to kill one another in multiplayer deathmatches, we also have an inherent need to unite and take out some aggression on emotionless computers. Many of the games at E3 2015 tapped into that sense of togetherness with tight squads of cooperative players squaring off against AI hordes. , and Star Wars Battlefront's co-op survival missions pit two Rebel players against an army of Imperial troopers. We would include The Division but... we've all seen how friendships crumble in those Dark Zones when there's loot to be had.