Fully faithful and flawless backwards compatibility is no easy feat. When the architecture is alien and outdated, as it with the Xbox 360 in comparison to its successor, it makes software emulation especially difficult and prone to erratic behavior. Even Microsoft, a giant in software development, needs time to finalize its solution: on the Xbox One, pinned to a hope that your old games don’t realize they’re living in a fake computer-generated world.

The Xbox One’s forthcoming ability to play Xbox 360 games is not only important from a game preservation standpoint, but from the interests of players, who have invested money and time in a library they love. And though not every game will be compatible from day one, the goal is to include everything from Arkham Asylum to Zuma. Sure, Red Dead Redemption and Skyrim are the obvious choices to start with, but now’s the time to speak up for the weirder games too.

The Xbox 360 is truly one of the console greats, ten years after it first greened up the world… but it didn’t start that way. Even compared to limp launches like Wii U, PlayStation 2, and others, the game selection was rocky. By the end of 2006, though, things were really coming together for the Xbox 360 thanks to a robust selection of original titles from unlikely places. The best of that crop: Burger King’s Sneak King.

Fine. Sneak King might not be the standard bearer other ‘06 360 games were. It wasn’t Dead Rising and it certainly wasn’t Gears of War. Sneak King was just the very first game that asks you to surprise people working at a construction site. With burgers. As a man with an enormous, crowned, leering face. Who is also wearing tights. And a cape. Anyone who played Sneak King on their Xbox 360 was changed by the experience and Xbox One owners deserve to share that magic.

To say that Rez's trippy atmosphere and electronica soundtrack make you feel like you're on drugs does this one-of-a-kind shooter a disservice. Instead, it'd be more accurate to say that it makes you feel like a cyberspace hacker zooming through a wireframe world, stacking layers of rhythm onto sonically astounding beats that drive you forward like a metronomic force of nature. In other words, it makes you feel amazing.

To think that Rez was originally released for Dreamcast is mind-boggling - and the Xbox 360 port delivers all the same trance-inducing action and transcendental abstractions of technology of the original, all HD-ified. Crimson Dragon on Xbox One was nice and all, but adding backwards-compatible support for Rez HD would get us even closer to the Panzer Dragoon experience on new-gen.

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is … well, ‘weird’ is putting it mildly. Designed by Devil May Cry and Okami lead developer Takeyasu Sawaki and inspired by the apocryphal book of Enoch, El Shaddai tells the story of fallen angels and the hero Enoch's quest to prevent a great flood. You wander around abstract yet gloriously cel-shaded environments, fighting off demons and receiving mission objectives from a man named Lucifel. He's your guardian angel, a snappy dresser, and he talks to God (yep, the Hebrew capital-G God) via cell phone. It's Western religion as told by Eastern game developers, and I guarantee it's unlike anything you've ever played.

But it's not just a strange interpretation of a long-abandoned book of the Bible - it's also one hell of an action game. Enoch has several weapons at his disposal, which he must first steal from enemies by weakening them with basic attacks. Different enemies are weak against specific weapons, and your weapons even degrade over time, requiring you to either purify it mid-battle or snag a new one off your foe. It's frantic yet nuanced, and hopefully backwards compatibility will help give this cult title a new lease on life.

Vanquish is the delirious climax in a game of cross-continental telephone, played between star designers in America and Japan. First, designer Shinji Mikami directed the future of third-person action games with Resident Evil 4, a deft blend of shooting, exploration and moments that compressed just the edge of your couch. It also inspired the stop-and-pop mayhem of Gears of War, which upped the pace and spectacle, and ultimately completed the groundwork for Mikami’s big post-Gears game for Platinum, called Vanquish.

Though Vanquish is a ‘cover-based shooter’ in classification, it’s a chaotic robo-skateboard assault game in execution. As a nimble man strapped inside an iPod-white rocket suit, you crash to the floor and slide back and forth between bits of cover, piercing through enemy lines and making hasty retreats as the shootouts oscillate. It’s an electric game of three-dimensional navigation, balanced on the edge of survival: blast around too much and you’ll overheat, stay too still and you’ll get crushed. That central tension has yet to be replicated in any other modern shooter, giving Vanquish a clearly defined space to fill on the Xbox One’s back-compat roster.

While Square Enix has been gallivanting about with Lightning and friends for the past few years, fans looking for a more traditional Final Fantasy experience have gone wanting - and yet the best Final Fantasy game in years has been under our noses this whole time. Helmed by series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, Lost Odyssey follows the voyage of Kaim, an immortal man struggling to regain his vanished memory. Many of these memories are revealed through short stories written by award-winning author Kiyoshi Shigematsu, and they're equal parts gripping and heart-breaking. The gameplay may adhere to traditional turn-based JRPG tropes, but the narrative is one of the best in the genre.

The shift to backwards compatibility might even do it some favors, too. Most of the biggest gripes about Lost Odyssey were focused on its exorbitant load times between the world map and random battles, though they're largely mitigated if you install the discs to the hard drive. Since backwards compatible games are downloaded to your Xbox One directly from Microsoft's servers, everyone should get the best Lost Odyssey experience regardless of whether they own a physical or digital copy of the game.

Before you play Crackdown on Xbox One some time in 2016, you have to play, er, Crackdown on Xbox 360. On paper it sounds like A Generic Videogame – super-soldiers from ‘the Agency’ roam around an open world leaping up and over buildings, picking up collectables and shooting bad guys – but Crackdown is the twist in the double helix of videogame DNA. It’s also the closest you’ll come to feeling like a superhero without being hemmed in by a crummy licence. Crackdown paved the way for Prototype and the sillier, less-mean Saints Row games, and will still leave you feeling like you’re about to lose your lunch while you bound up and over and down down down the other side of a skyscraper. There’s even an achievement for scaling and then leaping off the highest building in the game, but you’ll have to max your stats out to get up there in the first place by hunting orbs.

Playing original Crackdown will also ready you for the orb collectathon – which sounds about as appealing as picking up every single piece of confetti from a confetti festival that erupted across your neighbourhood, but nevertheless leaves you wide-eyed at 2am while your muscle-bound Agent slams into the concrete, hours after playing hopscotch on the city’s skyscrapers and rooting out over 500 of those glowing gems. Do we have to spell it out for you, Agent? Your. Xbox. One. Needs. This. Game.

Though it may as well be called Child of Rez, Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s blaring return to the rhythm shooter gave the Xbox 360 an eclectic, truly modern mash-up of music and visual combat. Child of Eden’s wildly colorful, freeform environments pair with the upbeat backing from Japanese electro-pop group Genki Rockets to form some kind of emotional shortcut to happiness – even if it all becomes nonsensical given more thought. In the moment, with the room swimming in neon colors and uplifting music making you buoyant in it, every level makes complete sense. It makes all the sense in the world to shoot the barnacles off a bedazzled space whale, which then transforms into a flaming phoenix.

Just so we’re clear: You’re shooting the barnacles off a bedazzled space whale, which then transforms into a flaming phoenix. That is something you can and must do in the video game called Child of Eden. We, the human race, could not be more compatible with the concept, so let’s get the darn thing working on the Xbox One.

The premise of 50 Cent Blood on the Sand is ridiculous: Fiddy and G-Unit are hired to play a concert in Some Middle Eastern Country (cultural sensitivity lacking somewhat in 2009) but instead of being paid, they’re given a human skull that’s peppered with diamonds and pearls. The skull is promptly stolen from them by a nefarious chap called Kamal, with Misters Cent and Unit giving chase. Guns battles and fist fights ensue.

Blood on the Sand plays like a hip-hop version of Gears of War or Army of Two, replete with satisfying co-op, but more arcadey. Fiddy’s own music plays in the background, and when you don’t have an automatic rifled glued into your hands, you battle up-close with the bad guys. Jackson also provides quips and one-liners that are far too expletive-laden for us to publish here. While the story is utter tripe, the cutscenes are hugely entertaining in a B-movie sort of way – and that, really, roughly sums up the whole game. Take a look at the Xbox One's upcoming release schedule: between the polished sequels and the hyperactive indie buffet, the middle ground is a wasteland. 50 Cent’s riotous, overblown ego trip is the game that’s like nothing else out there.

Nier looked like the very embodiment of Square-Enix’s weaknesses during the height of its fallow period that just so happened to coincide with the Xbox 360’s heyday. Convinced it had to chase the almighty bro dollar, Square’s Japanese studios eased off making idiosyncratic fare like Radiata Stories and started licensing its best properties to underfunded Western studios (Front Mission Evolved) and adding stoic, dull-eyed beefcake leads to its RPGs like it did with Nier. This action RPG is ugly. It opens with alienatingly boring, mechanically limp quests that last for hours. Its enemies literally look like mad, unfinished notebook doodles. It then blooms into one of the most affecting, beautiful games available on the console.

All the things that initially seem like weaknesses in Nier turn out to be strengths bolstered by the game’s hazy, surreal story of survival and its weirdly endearing characters. Grimoire Weiss is like a persnickety, snide cousin of C-3P0 who also happens to be a book. Kaine is a vicious, honorable trans champion that struggles with an evil spirit living inside her. They hang out with a puppet in dungeons that shift between bullet hell shooter challenges and text adventures. It takes a long time to get to Nier’s sweetest meats, but when you do it’s an incomparable experience that plays best on Xbox 360 compared to a rickety PS3 version. Fingers crossed that the backwards compatibility support keeps it that playable.

Far from the overgrown promises of the first Fable, where we still wait for an apple seed to grow into a tree, Fable 2 fully delivers on a simple idea: reward the player no matter what. It sounds like a Molyneux Special, the kind of promise that seems empty and in opposition to the challenge we seek in games, but it really works.

And so Fable 2 becomes this role-playing game where you can’t die, but you can lose your good looks. You can’t get lost, but you might not find every single, fascinating secret the world of Albion has to offer. You can’t truly be defeated, but your reputation might not grow in the way you’d hoped. There is always more treasure to find, more enemies to slay in fanciful combat, new magic spells to learn and minor rewards to push you toward eventual victory, even if you’re the worst Fable 2 player imaginable. It still doesn’t sound like good game design, but soon enough you stop thinking of victory and simply how you’re exploring and existing within a vivid world, free from thoughts of winning or losing. Now your choices feel less like bargaining with a game for a good outcome, and more like having a stake in how the land thrives or withers under your will.

Speaking of decisions: Who made the call to restrict this, the best Fable, to just the Xbox 360 after all this time?

Alan Wake is well known (though not nearly well-enough played), so hurrying it onto the backwards compatibility list isn’t really about exposing a new audience to the atmospheric adventure from Remedy. It’s about delivering, in one nice package, the entire tale - something the original game didn’t quite get right. To experience the full story of Alan and his missing wife, Alice, you have to complete not only the main game, but its two follow-up pieces of DLC as well, a fact that put off many players the first time around.

There’s a reason people keep begging Remedy to revisit its tortured writer; the world of Alan Wake is dark and scary and, above all, really interesting. Yeah, the game has some silly product placement and it holds your hand a wee bit too much at times, but overall its presentation is an immensely clever dive into the guilty conscience of a guy with a crippling (and possibly lethal) case of writer’s block. It’s a game that makes you as afraid of things that go bump in the night as you are of the things you say to your loved ones in the middle of an argument. It’s both supernatural and very human. So we can forgive a few Energizer logos here and there, right?

The sequel to a game that made players nearly break their controllers in rage (in a long, proud line of games that prompt the same ire), Ninja Gaiden 2 is every bit as tricky as its forbearers, and is so damn difficult that beating it can feel nearly impossible. Yet many of us took that as a challenge instead of a reason to quit, and Ninja Gaiden 2 delivered a powerful journey as our reward.

Sadly the series hasn't held up well in recent years, with Ninja Gaiden 3 and Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z going from bad to downright embarrassing. That makes Ninja Gaiden 2 the last great game in the series (at the moment at least), which only makes the case for making it part of Xbox One's backwards-compatible collection stronger. Keep the best Ninja Gaiden alive in the hearts and hard drives of players, so we remember how good the franchise used to be, and could well be again.

If you brushed aside the just-okay third-person shooter mechanics in Shadows of the Damned for a moment, you would find a unique tale of woe, vengeance and redemption, all told with a sense of humor that would make Conker blush. This is a game that gives us a sidekick named "Johnson" who turned into a "Big Boner" gun (he shoots bones, get it?) and a redneck demon who loves strawberries. It also introduces us to dear Garcia. Oh, what can I say about Garcia?

There are video game protagonists, and then there are video game protagonists. Garcia "I'm not sure I can type his nickname without getting into trouble" Hotspur is definitely the latter; a man I would follow into the depths of hell. And did! As rough around the edges as he is, Garcia gets major kudos for his taste in fashion, his love of puns and his relentless pursuit to rescue his beloved. We should all be so lucky to have a little Hotspur in our lives.

You might think that Project Gotham Racing is a racing game, but it’s really a skill tester fused with a gambling simulator. It just so happens that the wrapper around this machine of pure addiction is one of the most nuanced and perfectly balanced racers in history, and features a circuit list with some of the world’s most iconic locations. It’s also the precursor to the incredible Forza Horizon series – after Bizarre Creations was shuttered, its development team scattered, with a good number of them joining Playground Games.

That’s a lot to take in. PGR’s Kudos rewards system has evolved into Horizon’s own form of leveling up, which asks you to not only be awesome, but to keep being awesome for as long as possible to multiply your points. Keep your skill-chain going, hit the max multi, earn and repeat – or prove your stamina by not letting up for the whole race. Do it by the now-usual methods of drifting, drafting, launching off jumps and keeping your machine at max speed. In PGR4, though, there’s little room for error on the tight city circuits, and it takes only a brief, cruel, lapse in concentration to see your hard-earned streak fall away, the multiplier tumbling off the screen like a shooting star that’s been snuffed out mid-streak. God knows who owns the PGR licence, but this is a racer that deserves at least one more lap on Xbox One.

Despite its near-universal acclaim as a smart and fun evolution of Metroid-style platform adventures, Shadow Complex has yet to receive any kind of port almost six years later. Early Xbox Live Arcade favorites like Super Meat Boy, Braid, and Castle Crashers have gone on to enjoy lasting success across multiple platforms, but there's been no such luck for Shadow Complex … probably because developer Chair has been too busy making the equally brilliant (and way more lucrative) Infinity Blade games to worry about it since then.

So Shadow Complex should be made backwards compatible on Xbox One for the sake of cultural preservation alone. But historical significance aside, it's a killer little game about blasting your way through a secret paramilitary installation, collecting new equipment, and levelling up like a freakishly fun hydra of Samus Aran, Alucard, and Bill Rizer. That's gotta be worth something.

Bayonetta has been the subject of much controversy over the years, not limited to hyper-sexual moves of its protagonist, the Wii U-exclusive release of Bayonetta 2, to seriously, are you seeing this outfit? But despite all that, Bayonetta stands as a pinnacle of quality in the gaming world, an air-tight beat 'em up with huge and hugely satisfying battles that made it into an instant classic. Both in art and mechanical execution, it's stood as a strong genre contender, making it a perfect candidate to get some of that backwards compatibility love.

Coming from the same school of over-the-top violence from which Devil May Cry and God of War graduated, Bayonetta gives the genre a sexy twist in more than just the obvious ways. You can destroy your enemies with semi-sexual (but mostly just painful) torture devices, and you do not know true power until you summon a vicious hair-demon and turn a mansion-sized enemy into gorey chunks with a few strong button presses. It's a system that's as gratifying now as it was back then, and going straight to hell alongside the game's gun-heeled heroine would have just as much kick on a brand new console.

It gets waved off as a “hobo punching sim”, but Condemned is a well-tuned, creepy game that consistently makes smart choices about how to make you feel vulnerable and frightened. First, it takes away the buckets of ammo that you’re used to in first-person games, forcing you to rely on melee combat with whatever’s close to hand. Second, it lets your opponents pick up whatever you’ve left behind and use it against you - including that pistol that wasn’t worth hanging onto because it had only two bullets in it. Even its collectibles are disturbing; normally scouring levels for hidden trinkets is a distraction, but finding Condemned’s dead birds and shards of metal just adds to the overall feeling of unease. It also has one of the flat-out scariest moments in gaming history. You’ll never feel quite the same in a department store after playing it.

Not a lot of people got around to playing Condemned; it was a 360 launch title, it was a new IP, and its emphasis on fisticuffs belied its intriguing story and excellent voice acting. What looked like a dumb beat-em-up was actually a sharp detective adventure about a cop trying to clear his name while hunting down a mysterious and exceptionally lethal opponent. There was even some clue-hunting with forensic equipment. Its graphics suffer a bit with the passage of time - Condemned certainly looks like a 360 launch title - but it has more than enough great ideas in it to deserve a second chance.

Let’s be honest about this: the combat in Enslaved is terrible. It’s not deep or interesting or even particularly challenging. It’s not broken or painful, but it’s just kind of there and not in any way a thing you would play Enslaved for. But that’s ok, because that’s not why Enslaved is on this list. Enslaved is on this list because it offers one of the best - perhaps the best - performances in a video game. As hero Monkey, Andy Serkis raises the bar for game acting so high that you’d need a rocket to clear it. Seriously, he’s that good.

Beyond that, though, Enslaved’s vision of a world slowly being reclaimed by nature after an apocalyptic catastrophe is stunning and, in a rare move for games in which you’re the star, humbling. It shows that whatever might happen to people, life will go on. Trees will grow as our monuments to our own cleverness rust and decay, flowers will bloom while we grapple with the realization that we’re not actually the most powerful thing on the planet. On top of all of that, Enslaved also has an outstanding soundtrack and a pretty darn good story. The ending is a bit controversial (I personally enjoyed it), but if you found yourself at all intrigued by Horizon’s version of a green post-apocalypse, Enslaved is certainly worth playing.

We already know that Microsoft has a soft spot (in its wallet) for Symphony of the Night, and is willing to go out of its way to accommodate the title in the Xbox library. Back in the days when there was a strict 50MB size limit on all Xbox Live Arcade games, a special exception was made for the 95.32 MB Symphony, with Microsoft confirming the game would be released without cuts. That didn't seem as special after Microsoft raised the cap to 150MB two months later, but that's not the point. The point is that Symphony has something going for it, and now it's even easier to make it available for an up-to-date console, so the process should surely repeat again.

Of course, all that effort was a reaction to fan interest, and given the game's quality, that isn't surprising. The first Castlevania title to utilize RPG-style leveling and a map that could be explored in any order you choose, Symphony makes big, inspired changes to a well-loved franchise and still respects what made it great. The result is the most highly acclaimed Castlevania game to date, and its 2D exploration and fighting is as fun as it's ever been. With that and their shared history, how could Microsoft not awaken Symphony of the Night anew?

It's hard to beat the value of a 5-in-1 game package, especially when those five are some of the most highly regarded games of the last generation - or any, if you ask PC players. A veritable gift-basket of games from the folks at Valve, The Orange Box brings together some of the company's most recent single-player games (sob) through the Half Life 2 collection and Portal, plus a handsome helping of Team Fortress 2 that is forever free to play. And these days, the whole thing retails for $20. Seriously, it's a hell of a deal.

The Orange Box admittedly has a few downsides, specifically that Half Life 1 isn't part of the package and Team Fortress 2 can't receive updates, so there's nary a ridiculous hat in sight. But for players who are Xbox-centered and don't have or want ready access to the PC versions, The Orange Box is still a powerhouse of games that have aged remarkably well and are still fun to play. Yes, even without the hats.

Bulletstorm is the same sort of crunchy, primal fun you got from games like Unreal Tournament and Doom. It's all about shooting really big guns that transform enemies into really big piles of Kibbles 'n Bits. The recoil, sound effects, and amount of gib these weapons produce makes you feel like you're firing off cinder blocks instead of bullets. But the guns are just half the fun. Bulletstorm actively encourages - and rewards - you for utilizing giant cactuses, electrified fences, and (of course) exploding barrels to dispatch your foes. It's a veritable playground of murder.

For those of you who have seen Mad Max: Fury Road, remember how everything was loud and crazy and there was rock music all the time? Yeah, welcome to Bulletstorm. If there was a guy wearing red pajamas playing a flaming guitar in this game, he'd fit right in. Everything is pushed to the extreme here, from the over-the-top executions to the amount of curse words flying out of voice actor Steve Blum's mouth. Also there's a cyborg who openly resents you and wants you to die. And he's your sidekick. This game is great.

Dun nuh. Duh nuh, duh nuh, duh nuh - AI AI AI! That's a lackluster text-based rendition of the intro to Ozzy Osbourne's 'Crazy Train', the song that'll inevitably start running through your mind as you surrender yourself to the neon wonders of Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. That's because racking up points in this feverish, fiendishly addictive arcade reboot revolves around racking up a crazy train of ghosts nipping at your heels.

As you alert hordes of sleeping ghosts, zig-zagging through randomly selected bits of classic Pac-Man level layouts, the pressure builds and builds - until finally, you decide it's time to gobble up a Power Pellet. As expected, those ghosts suddenly turn blue and turn tail - but instead of four measly targets, you're now devouring a massive conga line of delicious, shadowy morsels. That euphoric sensation is just as endorphin-spiking now as it was then, and the bolstered rumble of the Xbox One controller would make it all the sweeter.

Asura’s Wrath ignited debate, even among its own developers, on whether it was even really a video game. We now know that:

1) it was obviously a video game and
2) considering the scene where you get stabbed by a sword so huge it goes right through THE MOON, it was extremely, ridiculously, irrevocably SUCH a video game.

Though open-ended action is light throughout Asura’s Wrath (hence the debate), its tale of revenge hinges on button-prompts that appear during numerous and titanic cutscenes. Think: God of War, but with a spaceship-infused Indian mysticism and an over-the-top trajectory that doesn’t forsake the oddly heartfelt story at the bottom. The passively felt creativity on display in every frame may have robbed it of becoming an action classic, but Asura’s Wrath still emerges as one of gaming’s weirdest and most exciting stories.

Xbox and Metal Gear Solid have a strange relationship, especially considering that two of the main (and arguably most important) games in the series are still exclusive to Sony platforms. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain will be available in just a couple of months, and while you probably won't get to play much of Solid Snake's adventures on the Xbox, you can catch up on the storied life of his father, Big Boss, with the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection.

Like The Orange Box, this collection is a hell of a value, combining three of the greatest, most idiosyncratic stealth-action titles ever created. Follow the rise of Big Boss in MGS 3: Snake Eater as you sneak through unforgiving jungles to stop Metal Gear precursor Shagohod from launching an all-out nuclear war. Then, build up the Boss' empire in the Monster Hunter-inspired Peace Walker. If you're only looking for backstory for Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, these two games will get you nicely up to speed. MGS 2: Sons of Liberty rounds out the package; a strange and oddly prophetic sequel to the PlayStation classic. While the Xbox may never get the complete saga, this collection compiles three of gaming's most virtuous missions.

Though the odds are incredibly low for us ever seeing Wet again in any form, I have to admit: I genuinely like that game for providing a unique experience that we haven't seen since … ever, really. Foul-mouthed anti-hero Rubi Malone deserves another shot at glory.

Wet takes the grindhouse film feel of mob bosses and over-the-top violence playing on a grainy film reel and upped the action to something on par with The Matrix. Rubi doesn't just run-and-gun her way through bad guys; she slows down time, dives through the air, powerslides into danger, runs on walls, leaps from car to exploding car and freefalls from airplanes as the world crumbles around her. There are plenty of games out there that give us awesome power fantasies, but nothing comes close to the Max Payne-meets-Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon trip that is Wet.

Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo is undoubtedly among the greatest competitive puzzle games in existence, and Puzzle Fighter HD gives it a glossy widescreen touch-up and some welcome rebalancing (including a mode that removes a learn-this-or-you'll-never-win bug involving the color-clearing diamond piece). Like so many great puzzlers, it's a simple premise: stack multicolored, domino-like blocks into colossal gems, then shatter them with bomb pieces to rain down trash blocks on your opponent. But the theme of chibi Capcom fighters, a '90s-tastic soundtrack, and astonishing gameplay depth make it endlessly playable.

Fellow editor Maxwell and I still play this on a semi-regular basis, and I successfully got my college roommates hooked on the bliss of the bombs (not a drug euphemism). The addiction comes from the back-and-forth nature of the best-of-three matches: if you don't close out a win with an all-out attack, those trash blocks will eventually revert to gems that your opponent can use to crush you instead. It's risky, rewarding, and rambunctious one-on-one fun that I'm still enjoying after nearly 10 years of play.

Nothing beats the feeling of a cool breeze whistling through your dreadlocks. This is doubly true when that breeze is hitting you at 90 miles-per-hour as you swing from rooftop to rooftop. Bionic Commando, specifically the remake developed by GRIN and released in 2009, shares a lot in common with the Fast and the Furious franchise. It's full of cheesy characters, cheesier dialog, and a paper-thin plot that just a vehicle for delivering action setpieces; but when that action gets going, hoo boy, it is a trip.

GRIN had one job when making a 3D Bionic Commando: make the grappling fun. And they nailed it. Leaping off a 30-story building, grappling a traffic light right before you land, and using the momentum to swing yourself halfway across the map is a breeze. And you can easily transition from tossing enemies around in combat to tossing yourself around the environment. Mechanically, everything in this game flows together very well. But that's not how this game is remember. Instead, it's remembered for the 'Wife Arm' or for being yet another needlessly gritty reboot. Bionic Commando deserves to live on the Xbox One library as one of gaming's best B-movies.

Make no mistake: Onechanbara on 360 is mediocre at best. It's a simplistic hack-'n'-slash swordfighter, with stark, empty levels populated by goofily animated zombies and ... that's about it. The blood effects are snazzy, but spurts of crimson vital fluids can only excite for so long. Onechanbara foregoes substance for a distinctly Japanese style: hilariously campy and embarrassingly pervy in equal measure. This should become clear when the opening cutscene almost instantly features our heroine Aya in a shower scene, quickly transitioning into a Batman-esque 'suit up' montage with Aya's schoolgirl-outfitted little sister, Saki.

But adding this entirely skippable game to the Xbox One's back-comp list would send a message. Backwards compatibility isn't about reviving only the best and brightest experiences that a preceding console has to offer - it should ultimately be an effort to support all that console's games, no matter how schlocky or low-budget they might be. Bringing over an oddity like Onechanbara could encourage other publishers to feel comfortable letting their weird sides show - even if such a gesture brings joy to only a small niche of gamers.

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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