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.

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.