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.