The United States is a vast country, filled with a wide variety of cities and individual pockets of culture, so it makes sense that many American developers often look to their own hometowns for inspiration. But game design is a worldwide industry, with studios found all over the globe, and many of them are just as intrigued by the American way of life as the people who actually live there. But in many ways, the outsider's perspective of the good ol' US of A is far teresting, because these games often provide a different look into how the country presents itself to the rest of the world.

Sure, America eats a lot of cheeseburgers and drinks more coffee than tea, but the American experience is much more than just a few stereotypes. That's what makes these video games so fascinating: they're games about America, made outside America, and they all seem to have their own interpretations of what makes the United States tick. Whether they're focusing on American culture, a specific region in the country, or an aspect of America's own history, these games all focus on something Americans find important, and hope to give a different take from a unique perspective.

Made in: Japan

Technically EarthBound takes place in Eagleland, but it's basically the United States in everything but name, and the cities in the game certainly feel like their US counterparts. You've got the sleepy burg of Onett, the busier suburbs of Twoson, and even the bustling metropolis Fourside. Only things are... off. The skate punks run around wearing onesies and brandish hula hoops. The country's biggest band, The Runaway Five, has six people in it. The town of Threed is overrun by zombies. And you're constantly accosted by Unassuming Local Guys and New Age Retro Hippies.

The best part about EarthBound isn't how it combines so many different American pop culture references and analyzes them from a completely different cultural perspective. No, the best part is that it's so sincere about it, like eating a slice of warm apple pie while watching Leave It to Beaver re-runs. EarthBound clearly comes from a place of love, even when it's portraying an evil blue-loving cult or corrupt politicians. It's a game that lets you bask in the joy of wandering through department stores or without judging you for partaking in empty consumerism. While a game this goofy could easily come off as as mean and sarcastic, Earthbound is anything but.

Made in: UK

If EarthBound is the optimistic, "Gee, isn't this country swell?" vision of America, then Grand Theft Auto is its polar opposite. America is often referred to as 'The Land of Opportunity', but GTA asks a question that nags Americans in the back of their minds when someone refers to the 'American Dream': "Does the 'Dream' really exist, and if it does, is it worth the paying the price to achieve it?" GTA's answer comes with big, sardonic sneer. Many of the businesses and products sport self-aware puns for names, like Ammu-Nation or GoPostal, and many of the ads for these products make snide, pithy comments. The biggest social media platform is called Lifeinvader. And everyone is so self-absorbed it's a wonder society hasn't fallen apart at the seams. GTA's satire is incredibly over-the-top, a caricature of what America is really like, but there is truth there.

While GTA 5's depiction of Los Angeles is perhaps the most authentic, GTA 4 distinctly captures the outsider's view of what America is, as it's about Niko Bellic, a Serbian who arrives in America for the very first time in order to escape his past. To Niko, Liberty City is a massive culture shock from his relatively simple life overseas, and while his cousin Roman has acclimated to his new life of excess well enough, Niko finds the opportunity the city offers to be fleeting and empty. The one thing it does share in common with Niko's home is the one thing Niko is trying to escape: an endless cycle of violence. GTA's vision of the American Dream is distinctly pessimistic, considering the evils one has to go through in these games to attain it.

Made in: Japan

Did you know that there's an airstrip under the White House? Yeah, the whole ground opens up so Air Force One can take off in case Washington, D.C. is overrun by an enemy invasion. Oh, and the President of the United States is also a damn good mecha pilot. Wait, you say you missed all that stuff in history class? That's OK, because Metal Wolf Chaos is here to educate you with a patriotic grand slam of a video game.

Metal Wolf Chaos is essentially Team America: World Police: The Game as made by Japan. It is pure, jingoistic Michael Bay-hem in video game form. Evil Vice President Richard Hawk has stolen the presidency from Michael Wilson, reinstated such American gems like slavery, and is generally responsible for a litany of war crimes. So it's up to Wilson to take the White House back, which of course means travelling across the country in a giant flying mech and unleashing burning American justice on anyone who opposes him. Metal Wolf Chaos is a celebration of patriotic excess, a game that you can't help but laugh at while pumping your fist and shouting "USA!", and it's a crime that this game .

Made in: Finland

Ever since Twin Peaks became a cult TV phenomenon, the wooded, rural areas of the Pacific Northwest have become synonymous with creeping psychological dread. It's not entirely unwarranted: some of the smaller towns you can drive through are disturbingly eerie in that 1950s-America-as-seen-through-the-Twilight-Zone kind of way (especially at night), and the constant fog and rainfall certainly don't help. Alan Wake takes these inspirations and uses them craft a truly unique horror game that feels like an HBO mini-series.

The town of Bright Falls, Washington looks like your average secluded logging town, and it's got the small town charm that goes along with that; the diner that looks like it never made it out of the mid-20th century, the kitschy city-wide festival that everyone takes part in, the dense, sprawling forest parks that are begging to be explored. It's also got a bunch of creepy shadow monsters that come out at night, but I doubt those are on the travel brochure. But it's not just the setting of Alan Wake that evokes strains of America; the game's very narrative structure resembles that of a hit American TV show. Broken up into six distinct episodes, playing Alan Wake is like experiencing an interactive version of Twin Peaks or The Twilight Zone, taking as much inspiration from American television dramas and horror fiction as it does from the rural Pacific Northwest.

Made in: Japan

The Metal Gear series has always had an ample supply of self-aware anime and video game weirdness, but applying that weirdness to something as intimate to Americans as its own history and government only multiplies that feeling exponentially. It's one thing to hear a fictional conversation between world leaders Lyndon B. Johnson and Nikita Khrushchev; it's another entirely to realize one of the world's superpowers is dealing in walking nuclear-armed mechs. But despite its most absurd moments, there's a bizarre truth underlying how Metal Gear envisions the American government.

Take the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2, for instance. At the time, it seemed like total nonsense, as the AI that has been directing your every move exposes its plans for world domination. But the things it talks about - how information never disappears, so anyone can cling to a specific 'truth' they believe in - is particularly prophetic in hindsight, especially in the face of what's going on with the Internet, the 24-hour news cycle, and current events in American government. And Metal Gear Solid 4's exploration of private military corporations may be exaggerated (never mind the presence of numerous bipedal battle tanks), but it's no secret that the US government uses PMCs to sub-contract much of its work. Metal Gear Solid may go way beyond realism in many respects, but many of its core concepts are generally based on fact. In many ways, the series isn't about what 'is' or 'was' in American history, but rather what 'could be' or 'could have been' - if things were a bit more like one of Otacon's Japanese animes, anyway.

Made in: Czech Republic

Like Alan Wake, Mafia 2 makes no effort to hide where its influences come from. Evoking strains of classic gangster movies, Mafia 2 takes bits and pieces from films like The Godfather, Goodfellas, and On the Waterfront, sprinkles in some classic 1950's tunes, and sets it all in a GTA-style open world that uses its city to flesh out its setting and story, rather than fill it with a bunch of random minigames and side missions.

The game opens on protagonist Vito Scaletta as he reminisces on his past while looking through an old photo album. Born and raised in Sicily, Vito immigrated to Empire City along with his family when he was a young boy. Once again, the 'American Dream' turns out to be a sham, as his father can barely afford to make ends meet at his grueling job on the docks, so Vito does what he can to help his family: he turns to a life of crime. The fictional city is an amalgamation of New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Detroit during the mid-20th century, and while it doesn't feel like any one of them in particular, it certainly evokes nostalgia of America's biggest metropolises post-World War Two. Mafia 2 is essentially a pastiche of gangster movie tropes, but 2K Czech uses those tropes to tell a surprisingly authentic story of the difficulties of rising out of poverty in a large city, the rise of modernity in American society, and the racial tensions of the era.

Made in: Japan

Ahh, consumerism - the hallmark of the American economy. And what better way to celebrate consumerism than to head to your local shopping mall and spend, spend, spend? Well, unless the mall’s overrun with mindless zombies, that is. There's probably a metaphor in here somewhere, but hell if I know what it is. Anyway, the classic tale was initially told by the George Romero flick Dawn of the Dead, but Capcom takes that idea and lets you fend off zombies while shopping until you drop.

The mall itself is enormous, featuring everything you could ever possibly want in a single shopping center. It's your one-stop-shop for televisions, CDs, children's clothing, power drills, books, restaurants, swords (!), and more. It's even got a roller coaster! Virtually everything that isn't nailed down can be turned into a weapon, or worn, or eaten, leading to situations where our hero Frank West is bashing zombie skulls with a sledgehammer while wearing a tutu. It seems a bit ridiculous to run around in a mall this huge, but it's actually loosely based on the in the center. If there's one thing Dead Rising gets right, it's that Americans sure love to shop - but most of America's malls aren't even close to being as big as they are in this game.

Made in: Canada

Many games on this list try to evoke the feeling of being in America, but as much as Liberty City or Empire Bay feel like New York, their cities are facsimiles of the real thing. Ubisoft's futuristic crime thriller Watch Dogs, on the other hand, tries to replicate Chicago with painstaking accuracy. While it takes some liberties with the size of the city and the landmarks inside it, Watch Dogs' version of Chicago is actually stunningly accurate.

Chicago has a vast history, filled with legendary gangsters, dramatic shootouts, and iconic architecture, and Watch Dogs serves as pretty decent virtual tour guide through the city's greatest hits. You can hop in your virtual car and drive to the exact virtual spot where the . The plot itself is rather ridiculous, a high-tech tale of corruption and revenge, but parts of it do have roots in the city's long history with organized crime.

Made in: Japan

Admittedly, No More Heroes is probably the most over-the-top entry here, but at first glance, the city of Santa Destroy looks like any other Californian city. It's got the palm trees, the wide stretches of sandy beaches, and the endless sunshine. But if you look closer, you'll notice that the entire city has an absurdly violent streak, and you'll find that No More Heroes becomes a commentary on America's fetishization of violence as its gameplay revels in gleeful geysers of pixelated blood.

First, there's the name of the city itself: Santa Destroy, a peculiar combination of words that immediately evokes an air of wanton violence. A quick drive around the city on your massive Akira-style motorcycle will reveal a wide variety of shops and locations, each with names that feature a strange fascination with violent activities, with a heavy focus on wrestling. There's Burger Suplex and Destroyer Antiques, and locations like the Atomic Drop Ward and Body Slam Beach fill out the rest of the city. Local ad company K-Entertainment is actually a front for a corrupt organization that assigns contract killings. There's also the Destroy Stadium, home of the Santa Destroy Warriors, who, according to the in-game map, lead the league in "violence towards fans." And the main character, Travis Touchdown, has no problem murdering people with the beam katana he won in an online auction. Despite how obsessed the city is with violence, Santa Destroy is a surprisingly safe place to live - outside of the events put on by the United Assassinations Association, of course.

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.

As we edge closer to a new chapter in , now feels like a perfect time to burrow down to the roots of the series and see exactly how the legend began. We spoke to Jim Brown, the lead level designer at Epic Games, to find out some of the secrets behind the original Gears of War.

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Between the original reveal trailer and the game appearing on shelves, Marcus’s character model and voice actor were both changed entirely. Cole and Baird’s roles were entirely reversed at one point – with Baird’s original sports star persona partly inspired by David Beckham. Look at the haircut, and it all makes sense. Eventually the team decided to swap the two, using Jamie Foxx’s character from the film Any Given Sunday as their archetype for Cole.

The original plan for Gears of War was very different. The initial concept was based on large-scale multiplayer warfare with an emphasis on vehicle combat. This was dumped in favour of the cover-based shooting style eventually seen in the final game, while the original concept eventually morphed into Unreal Tournament 3’s Warfare mode.

General Raam was a last-minute addition to the game, and almost didn’t make the cut. Due to production deadlines, the development team didn’t have time to entirely explain how Marcus and the team ended up fighting him on the back of a train. His story has since been fleshed out and is being completely revamped for the Ultimate edition

Many of the characters in Gears are inspired by the lives of the Epic development team. Damon Baird was named after a childhood friend of Cliffy B, and ‘The Cole Train’ was named after Epic’s level designer Phil Cole. Best of all is Raam, who was named after the owner of the team’s favourite Indian restaurant. We’re not sure we’d have the balls to ask General Raam for a lamb bhuna, if we’re honest.

The third Gears game was the first to include playable female characters, but it’s something the team had been thinking about for a while. At one point during development, the team considered letting players choose the gender of Dom – opening up the opportunity to play as Dominique Santiago.

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 a few things about the Souls game formula: fighting without a shield is exceptionally entertaining. Bloodborne added health regeneration mechanics and faster movement speed to compensate for the lack of defenses, making things a bit 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 are the safety blankets of Dark Souls, 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 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 a certain point in the Dark Souls games and Bloodborne, you gain 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 the first Dark Souls, warping across the world is wonderfully convenient.

Bloodborne almost got its travel system right, but you had to wait through an additional loading screen because the game forced you to go to the Hunter's Dream hub before you could travel to your desired location. If Dark Souls 3 has a warp mechanic, 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 (and, in turn, perfect for a Dark Souls game)? 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 spot 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, Gaping Dragon, and Ceaseless Discharge (ew) bosses 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 because Director Hidetaka Miyazaki is back on for the third sequel, we should expect nothing less.

Bloodborne has bosses that are out of this world, but also fit into the Victorian horror setting of Yharnam. There are bosses that are giant spiders covered in hundreds of eyes, vomit spewing monstrosities, and speedy, fellow hunters that pose the greatest challenges of all. The variety makes it so players never know what to expect when the boss's cutscene starts to play. Dark Souls 3's bosses are going to need to be on point to top some of the From bosses so far. But if the DS3 bosses are a mix of massive, inventive, and just gross, they won't be overshadowed by 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. That is easy to understand and it's all you need, really. You can ignore the lore almost completely, and the things you do and see in the game still make sense. 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 spider things everywhere, or why Gherman does the things he does. You had to read into Bloodborne's story much more than the Souls games, and while I know that's just a thing From games do, Bloodborne's more explicit - but still unexplained - 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 so I'm not forced 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 reason players stick around for new game+, and bringing in more multiplayer options can make DS3 stand above its predecessors.

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 2's worlds worked with a hub-style layout. Demon's Souls had players teleporting to the different environments, and Dark Souls 2 sent players down semi-linear branches that typically ended 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 Dark Souls and Bloodborne, you never know where the door in front of you will go. It could lead to a completely new area with enemies you've never seen, a humongous boss waiting to eviscerate you, or create a shortcut to a location you've already explored. Trudging through these environments is so much teresting and rewarding. If Dark Souls 3 sticks to the interconnected, open-world, it's a step in the right direction.

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

It's finally happened: Bethesda has gone toe to toe with Minecraft. The publisher has been toying with in-game map editing tools for its core RPG franchises for some time – Skyrim's Hearthfire expansion allows you to build and decorate houses, on top of a robust physics system that lets you drag objects around willy-nilly – but not ‘til has it handed us more or less a level designer’s power over an area's layout and contents.

In certain parts of the new game, you'll be able to convert objects into component resources such as wood and rubber, then buy and place walls, props and interactive fixtures to form your very own town. What's more, NPCs will come to live in these towns and you'll need to keep them fed, watered, happy, and protected, placing resources such as crops and automated defences to head off raider attacks. OK, so you can't (that we know of) dig into the very terrain, but everything above ground is yours to meddle with.

There are a fair few games with map-editing features on the shop right now, of course, and certain design “trends” have emerged, from the obligatory giant penis effigy to those terrifyingly adept works of urban planning I keep bumping into on Youtube. Here are a few varieties of user-created settlement you're all but guaranteed to encounter at least once in the average Fallout 4 savegame.

Fallout 4's editing toolset includes switches (terminals) that can be hooked up to components such as power generators and signboards to control their behaviour. From the E3 videos, it appears that you can bodge together quite complex sequences of interactions, calling on more advanced gadgets such as laser tripwires and components that all map to the same terminal. My knowledge of programming is admittedly sketchy, but it sounds like you could even create your own analytical engine inside the simulation, following in the footsteps of this from Dwarf Fortress.

Quite why people keep feeling the urge to build computers inside other computers eludes me. True, it's cheaper than buying another laptop, but it's also months of work for a machine that's just about powerful enough to add and subtract. One of these days somebody will build a computer inside a computer inside a computer, and humanity will evaporate in a blaze of meta-textuality.

Or Winterhold. Or Whiterun. Or the Starship Enterprise. Or the DisneyLand castle. Or Lordran. Or the set of Carry On Cleo. Probably all of them, in fact, plus the Los Angeles convention centre (complete with NPCs queueing by flickering TV sets), six thousand casino-style billboard animations of Mario doing non-canonical things to Princess Peach, and the meth lab from Breaking Bad. Lengthy trawls of various Reddit boards have taught me that there is nothing committed level editors enjoy more than transplanting pop culture landmarks between or into games, blurring their DNA in a manner calculated to rouse Twitter's shock and admiration. And annoy the hell out of various copyright lawyers.

Fallout 4's aesthetic poses a bit of an obstacle – it's hard to believe you're living in the Smurf Village when there are 200-year-old shopping trolleys all over, and everything looks like it's made of rat droppings – but I have faith in you, fans of license splicing. On PC, of course, you can look forward to skin and texture mods to help complete the illusion. These will migrate to the Xbox One version, with mod support on PS4 still TBC at the time of writing.

For every 10 half-finished eyesores or giant penis sculptures, there should (we hope) be at least one player who sets out boldly to create something that actually works as a town should. A town in which the arrangement of farms, markets, homesteads and so forth is genuinely reminiscent of the practical and emotional needs of living creatures. A town where morale is always high, where nobody wants for potable water, a bar to lean on or a place to lay their head. A town that can hold off raiders and sustain itself without the player needing to pop back continually to fix up the barricades and ensure all the guards are pointing in the right direction.

A town, moreover, that feels like a plausible part of the game's storyline. Bethesda's tools allow for fine-grained object placement – you might spend half-an-hour moving a single lightbulb around in order to precisely illuminate an arresting tableau. It'll be intriguing to see whether the most ambitious town creators can hint at forgotten backstories as successfully as the game's own designers.

Some will see AI raids on player-owned towns as a nuisance, but look at it this way: you're almost certainly going to kill a lot of people in Fallout 4 regardless. At least in this case they have the courtesy to come to you. And think of the loot! The bottle caps! The unending shrieks of pain and terror from without the walls as you recline on your throne at the centre of a maze of tripwires, turrets, landmines and guard towers – a capricious and uncaring despot, growing fat off the suicidal imbecility of scavenger tribes.

The idea of auto-farming enemies in open world games for XP or items has a long, illustrious history – in particular, Minecraft players have learned to bump off whole armies of mobs by placing spawn points near natural hazards. With any luck, Fallout 4's crafting system will be sophisticated enough to allow creation of . Imagine opening a bridge trapdoor below a raiding party to plunge them into a river of nuclear sewage, which then sweeps dropped items beneath a walkway where they can be safely harvested. Every frontier town should have one! Who knows, perhaps you'll find the corpse of the game's final boss in there.

Bethesda-brand NPCs are characterised by two things. One, facial animations that put you in mind of The Exorcist. And two, an endearing mixture of independent thinking and rampant bloody stupidity. Yes, the average Skyrim resident might sleep in an actual bed at night, sell armour by day and hunt the game's wildlife for sport, but you can also to stop him noticing when you nick his stuff. It's not exactly Deus Ex Machina.

For many, these AI foibles are all part of the fun – hey, what's not to love about tavern-goers who ? - but now imagine a Fallout 4 NPC attempting to navigate a town laid out not by a trained designer but some half-arsed teenager. A smashed labyrinth of doorless rooms and free-standing walls through which crusty residents trundle forever, searching in despair for the crops they're supposed to water, stalls they're supposed to run. Truly pitiful.

Let's say you've just gotten hold of a Fat Man, the returning heavy launcher from Fallout 3. You're itching to try it out on something, but the Fat Man is not a weapon you can fire off just anywhere. Put it this way - it's not the kind of weapon that wounds. Were you playing as an utter villain, kicking the legs out from under civilisation as it struggles to its feet, this wouldn't be a problem. But you've resolved to play as a goddamn do-gooder. You're also a stealth specialist. How on Earth are you going to dig yourself a nice cathartic crater without losing karma and making a mockery of your ninja pretensions?

Ah but wait. There is that rubbish, mostly deserted village you set up the other week, isn't there? The one you filled with custom shop window mannequins, who you gave individual names and backstories, so as to create a cathartic mini-realm of guilt-free violent oppression. So that you could do all kinds of evil stuff to people, without losing your hero rating. Because you’re possibly a bit mad. Perhaps you should pay a visit. The kind of visit that ends about, oh, let's say a hundred metres outside the city limits. It's just a shame Fallout 4 doesn't appear to support the same level of realistic building destruction you'd get in, say, Red Faction: Guerrilla. Still, those mannequin minions will fly.

You can build towns on several sites in Fallout 4. Assuming an only-human level of dedication, at least one of the towns you build is probably going to consist of the bare necessities – a shack with a workbench, a roof turret, a strongbox, and a lonely-looking trader peering at the horizon.

It raises an important question: exactly how punishing are the raiding and town morale aspects? Will players be obliged to think big, fleshing out their settlements to satisfy NPC requirements and head off attacks, or will we be able to throw together the odd homestead purely for the sake of a fast-travel point? If the town-building is too much of a chore, its appeal may be limited - much like maintaining a social life in Grand Theft Auto 4.

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.

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.