In games, nothing can be said to be certain except death and… well, mostly that. Death as a consequence of failure has been a part of games since the days of , and what came after has stayed pretty much the same: a Game Over screen, a Continue? prompt (maybe with an exchange of quarters in there somewhere), and you begin again as if nothing happened. That's been the gaming standard for decades and it's practical enough, but it can make death insignificant.

But not all games play to that standard - some choose not to ignore that you were a corpse just a moment ago, opting instead to weave the reason for your resurrection into the gameplay. Death isn't merely an inconvenience that loudly reminds you you're in a video game!, but a real part of the game with a place in its world. It’s not the right fit for every situation, of course, but a creative workaround for death can genuinely enhance your playing experience.

As seen in: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Assassin's Creed, Tales from the Borderlands

We all know how it goes when you tell your friends some incredible personal story: you fudge the details and forget things, so you sometimes have to back up and correct yourself. Most of us stop short of claiming we died during our travels, but video game protagonists have a habit of trading in extremes. When they describe their adventures after the fact, they'll detail their own demise before remembering that they're very much alive, and none of that actually happened.

Being able to explain away death as overenthusiastic storytelling is a happy accident - the frame exists for bigger reasons, to keep you wondering how (rather than if) the hero escapes deadly harm to recount the story later. That makes this non-death a close cousin of the standard revert-to-checkpoint approach, but one thing saves it: its sense of humor. You get to feel like you're in on the joke, and hearing how the protagonist explains away their mistake can be worth the failure. It can even seem logical, if it's .

As seen in: BioShock, Borderlands, Crackdown

In the very near future (sometimes so near that it's actually the past), mankind hammers out all the ethical and biological ramifications of cloning and starts mass production on personal body copies. Now you can get clones like snacks out of a vending machine, which is convenient when your job involves being repeatedly destroyed by enemies who want to nail you into the ground like a tent spike.

This kind of death-dodging works best in games that are meant to be challenging, but also aim to create a certain feeling around each fight. For instance, the most satisfying conclusion to a Big Daddy battle in BioShock is watching a giant monster go down after throwing everything you have at it, which doesn't work as well if you have to completely restart the fight every time it kills you. Fighting your way through Rapture has to feel difficult if the struggle is going to be meaningful, but you don't want to lose out on the rhythm each fight is meant to have. Having another you waiting in the wings, ready to be spawned on a moment's notice, keeps you on beat.

As seen in: Dark Souls, Shadow of Mordor, Bloodborne

If used incorrectly, this can quickly become the narrative equivalent of the creators throwing up their hands and storming out of the room. Given that you do technically come back to life time and time again, immortality is the laziest possible explanation if nothing more is done with it. Thankfully, the games that use this concept best avoid that by making immortality an even bigger part of the game.

The immortality method takes some serious commitment from the game to avoid looking like a cop-out. By planting the concept deep in their world lore (the way, for example, Dark Souls does by making you an Undead out to destroy the source of your reanimation), unending life becomes as much a part of the plot as it is a gameplay device. It never feels like there's an unnatural break when the protagonist dies, because it falls perfectly in line with the storyline.

As seen in: Grand Theft Auto, City of Heroes

There's little way to play this one straight, but that's half the fun. Regardless of what sort of damage your character is subjected to - falling from a ten-story building, getting run over by a Jeep, slamming a jet into a suspension bridge and succumbing to the resulting inferno - nothing actually kills them. Instead, after the loading screen comes and goes, they trot out of the nearest hospital, with nothing to indicate their misadventure except a slightly lighter wallet.

This undeath is sure to get a few laughs on principle, which is part of its appeal: it's the game giving you a wink and a nod over your unfortunate and likely stupid demise while showing it doesn't really care to punish you. In fact, it purposefully moves you from the place where you died so you can start fresh somewhere else and not have to immediately deal with what just killed you. That's why you mostly see this in sandbox games - where it would be incredibly annoying to restart far away from your goal in a linear title, in an open-world it feels like a respite, so you're free to go cause mayhem elsewhere.

As seen in: Destiny, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Too Human

It's good to have friends in high places - or low ones, depending on your perspective. While the hero may not have a supply of body copies on hand, they do have a patron deity who's interested in keeping them alive. That means whenever they bite it, their connection to those divine beings is what raises them from the dead, just in time for to charge back into the fight and send their enemies into cardiac arrest.

This one can both be taken seriously or played for laughs, based on how the game frames the situation. The ethereal Traveler in Destiny is taken very seriously, so it's a matter of grave importance when its power is used to raise a fallen guardian. Same goes for Too Human, where you're resurrected by Valkyries. Meanwhile, in Conker's Bad Fur Day, a drunken squirrel makes a deal with the Grim Reaper to pay for new lives with severed squirrel tails, which everyone involved knows is weird. In either case, it gives the main character an even greater sense of importance: not only are they untouchable, but they have a patron god keeping them that way, because they're just that important to the survival of the world (or whatever's going on in Conker).

As seen in: Psychonauts, The Talos Principle, Ether One

We're getting downright here, when death adversion is based on the idea that you have no physical form to kill. Whether that's because you're a robot, or are projecting into a digital world, the result is the same: you get an infinite amount of 'lives' because dying kills the image of you, not your essence. Deep.

While that seems like a simple way to handwave in-game death, since your synthetic form can be mentioned once and never again, it takes serious legwork to implement it in any game with a hint of story. Portal's co-op mode gets away with it because the robot bodies are just there to facilitate you shooting holes in the wall, but something like The Talos Principle has to explain why you, robot, need so many bodies to accomplish your objective. Robot-projection death only works if it's built into the bedrock of the game, but when it is, your mechanical immortality can itself open up interesting questions. Reaching your goal is the only way for this all to end, but what could be so important that the game keeps endlessly rebuilding you to do it?

As seen in: Super Meat Boy

You're not a creature of this world. For whatever reason the laws of physics and biology don't apply to you, and after being mercilessly splattered against a stray sawblade, you're able to gather up your own remains and reconstitute yourself. There's no pretenses of logic here, no attempt to explain how you flagrantly defy the blueprint of the universe. Just you, reforming yourself at the end of every death, the game daring you to question it.

This approach only really works if a game is willing to commit to the levels of absurdity it demands. But once that's accomplished, this may well be the most indisputable death dodge out there, because it isn't really a dodge at all. You die, and have enough will left to rebuild yourself through a means that only the unforgiving cosmos understands. That, in a weird way, becomes the epitome of persistence. If the protagonist is willing to scrape what remains of their flesh off yet another death contraption and do it all over again, what excuse do you have?

The creative twists on death I've described here range from stiff-lipped serious to unapologetically silly, but all have the same aim: give in-game death as much consideration and coherence as every other part of the story.

When death is tweaked to fit the game, rather than the other way around, that attention to detail makes the world of the game feel so much fuller, and death itself more genuine. Many of these death-aversions are just as strange as time-reserved regeneration, if not more so. Most players will buy the idea of a restart without a second thought, while walking out of a hospital unscathed after falling out of a helicopter might be hard to buy. But it's the effort that makes it believable, to carve death into the proper shape that makes it fit into the overall puzzle. And so you have a better game, even when it involves a helium-inhaling Grim Reaper.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain finally launches on September 1st, but the number in its title is misleading - The Phantom Pain will actually be the twentieth game in the increasingly sprawling and convoluted Metal Gear universe. If you're just tuning in, it can be difficult to sort through nearly 30 years of tactical espionage action, walking nuclear missile-equipped battle tanks, and hours upon hours of expertly directed cut-scenes - and of course, not all Metal Gears are created equal.

While Metal Gear will forever be series creator Hideo Kojima's brainchild (and the series ), it's also much bigger than one man, spiraling out into countless spin-offs and side entries, each one forming a piece of a much larger story. Some of them are far more important to the overall canon - or simply more fun - than the others, though, so I've taken it upon myself to look back over Metal Gear's entire legacy and rank every single game that made it to the West. If you're looking to catch up on the best Metal Gear games before The Phantom Pain hits or simply want to know the best place to start your descent into Outer Heaven, look no further.

While not technically a separate release in the US or Europe (it was only released as a stand-alone disc and as an arcade cabinet in Japan) Metal Gear Online deserves special recognition for its multiplayer ambitions. Taking the core gameplay ideas from Metal Gear Solid 4 and expanding them to take advantage of its online nature, MGO may not have been the best multiplayer game ever, but it was not short of ideas.

MGO brings all the weapons, stealthy moves, and cardboard boxes over from MGS4, but it also makes use of the Sons of the Patriots network of nanomachines to tie everything together. You won't just be able to see where your teammates are - you can even keep track of your enemies by hacking into their nanomachines. Sadly, Konami shut the servers off back in 2012 and effectively patched the game out of existence, though some dedicated fans have found a way to , even if it's practically on life-support.

There are ways to convert popular console franchises to mobile devices without sacrificing what makes those games so special, but everything about Metal Gear Solid Touch screams ‘soulless cash grab’. Loosely following the plot of MGS4, Touch takes the series' trademark open-ended stealth action and converts it into a bland, uninspired shooting gallery. Enemy soldiers appear on each stage, and you swipe your finger on the screen to aim and tap to fire. Occasionally you have to zoom in to shoot a distant enemy or switch to your rocket launcher to take out a lumbering Gekko. That's about it.

Everything about MGS Touch feels cheap - characters and environments look like they've been poorly Photoshopped out of MGS4, enemies fall down in three jarring frames of animation when shot, and the gameplay is far too basic to be engaging. Unless you're so desperate that you absolutely have to have a Metal Gear fix available at all times, it's best to pretend MGS Touch doesn't exist.

Snake's Revenge isn't low on this list because it's a bad game. As a follow-up to the NES version of Metal Gear, it's actually surprisingly decent, providing more of the same stealth gameplay with an all new story. It even has a few interesting gameplay twists of its own, as you can actually interrogate enemy commanders for information by hitting them with a canister of truth gas.

But Snake's Revenge isn't really a Metal Gear game. It was made specifically for North America and Europe because of the popularity of the first game, and series creator Hideo Kojima had no knowledge that the game was even being worked on until well into its development. Kojima began work on a true sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, which released exclusively in Japan six months after Snake's Revenge. Kojima's game went on to become series canon, while Snake's Revenge became apocrypha - an interesting curiosity, but nothing more.

If you follow a franchise long enough, you're bound to see strange spin-offs into completely new genres. While we haven't had a Metal Gear Soccer game (yet), Konami converted the classic stealth series into a turn-based strategy/collectable card game called Metal Gear Acid for the launch of PSP. The most surprising thing? Despite its flaws, it actually works.

Acid takes the sneaking, shooting, and cardboard-box wearing action found in the core titles, and puts them all into the most bizarre board game you've ever played. Actions and items are relegated to cards that you can earn while you play, and Metal Gear Acid is as much about building your deck for each level as it is about figuring out the opportune moment to play your cards. Its pacing isn't for everyone, its story isn't canon, and many of its biggest issues end up getting fixed in the sequel, but Metal Gear Acid is still an interesting experiment.

The first game developed by the (allegedly) recently dissolved Kojima Productions, Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops marks the very first time a canonical entry has appeared on a handheld… kind of. Set six years after the events of Snake Eater, Portable Ops follows the exploits of Big Boss and his attempts to build the beginnings of a soldier's paradise. Since Kojima was only a producer on Portable Ops, though, its importance to the overall storyline is debatable.

Portable Ops does, however, introduce the neat ability to find and recruit soldiers in the field - an idea expanded on by Peace Walker and more fully fleshed out in The Phantom Pain. The controls aren't great (curse the PSP's lack of a second analog stick), but it does a decent job of taking the modern 3D Metal Gear style and making it playable on the go. Just be careful: if you want the story, get Portable Ops, as PO Plus is a stand-alone expansion that rips out the story entirely.

The original Metal Gear may not have aged as gracefully as some classic games, but many of the ideas found in Solid Snake's first outing still show up, even in recent entries. Metal Gear introduces the cardboard box, iconic characters like Solid Snake, Grey Fox, and Big Boss, and the stealth gameplay that would become the series' hallmark. Ironically, this was a design necessity at the time thanks to the limitations of the Japanese MSX2 computer. While both the MSX2 and Nintendo Entertainment System versions are similar in how they play, the MSX2 is officially considered canon, thanks to the host of changes made to the NES version without Kojima's consent.

In order to fit Metal Gear on the inferior NES hardware, Metal Gear was forced to undergo a graphical downgrade - but the changes don't stop there. Plot points were removed, a new intro sequence and additional story elements were added, and the difficulty was greatly increased. Heck, the titular Metal Gear doesn't even show up in the NES version, instead sending Snake into a boss fight against a giant supercomputer. Much of the gameplay remains exactly the same despite these changes, but the MSX2 version is without a doubt the superior entry.

Ground Zeroes is the cold open to a much larger game, a glorified demo sold at a premium as a way to tide die-hard Metal Gear fans over until The Phantom Pain finally launches this year. It's like taking the Tanker chapter from Metal Gear Solid 2 and breaking it out into its own separate release - only worse, because the single story mission offered in Ground Zeroes will only take about an hour to finish. The Side Ops try to add a little more substance, but there's no denying that Ground Zeroes is extremely light on content.

What Ground Zeroes does best, though, is show off the graphical potential of the Fox Engine and the evolution of the series' stealth gameplay - and the gameplay is great. Streamlining many of Metal Gear's more obtuse systems, Ground Zeroes is more accessible to new players while still offering a surprising amount of depth and strategic options. Ultimately, Ground Zeroes currently exists as pure, unfiltered potential of what open-world stealth can look like, and we won't know how successful this experiment really is until The Phantom Pain closes the book on Metal Gear Solid 5 in September.

VR Missions isn't quite a ‘full game’, as there's no campaign or story to speak of, but that doesn't mean it's short on content. Instead, think of VR Missions as a stand-alone expansion to one of the greatest stealth games of all time, taking its core concepts and devising a wide array of sneaking time trials and puzzles to go with them.

Featuring over 300 bite-sized stages, VR Missions runs the gamut, from weapon-based challenges to pure stealth gauntlets. VR Missions isn't afraid to explore the weird side of Metal Gear Solid either, letting you solve murder mysteries, take on Godzilla-sized genome soldiers, or even play as the coolest cyborg ninja ever. If Metal Gear Solid is the main course, then VR Missions is one hell of a dessert.

Metal Gear Acid 2 takes the unique card-battling board game introduced in the first game, and makes everything better. The controls are more refined, turns are faster-paced, and your turn no longer ends when you open doors - a huge improvement from the first game. There are also way more cards to collect, with over 500 this time around, each one representing a different weapon, item, or moment from the storied franchise.

The additions don't stop there, though. An arena mode lets you fight against iconic bosses like Liquid Snake with Acid's unique turn-based system, allowing you to earn points outside of the story to buy new cards. Improved tutorials and guides explain and inform you of Acid's various systems, and are available for perusal at any moment. And the game even comes with a bizarre cardboard contraption called the Solid Eye, which lets you play in 3D for literally no other reason than because it looks cool.

The true, canonical sequel to Metal Gear is better than the first game in almost every way, and it makes the unofficial Snake's Revenge look primitive by comparison. The music is better, the animations are more fluid, and the story is deeper and more complex - which makes it all the more surprising that the game wouldn't officially leave its native Japan for nearly 16 years. Thankfully, the Western release of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence finally gave us a chance to experience this lost chapter in the series' history.

Metal Gear 2 didn't just improve the enemy AI or give Snake a radar and the ability to crawl into tight spots; it's also the first entry that forces the player to break the fourth wall and scan their instruction manual for tap codes and other clues to find new codec frequencies. If not for some unfortunate backtracking, Metal Gear 2 would be the perfect 2D entry in the series.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is the glorious result of the unlikeliest of partnerships. Helmed by Eternal Darkness developer Silicon Knights, produced by Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto, and featuring new cutscenes by Japanese action flick director Ryuhei Kitamura, The Twin Snakes takes the classic Metal Gear Solid experience and completely overhauls it for the GameCube, featuring updated graphics and controls found in Metal Gear Solid 2, as well as a re-translated and re-recorded script.

So if Twin Snakes is such an improvement over the original, why does it end up ranking lower? Well, for one, the changes to the gameplay actually make Metal Gear Solid way easier, as the level design and boss encounters weren't originally meant to be tackled with first-person shooting, tranquilizer darts, or by hanging from ledges. Plus, Twin Snakes' cut-scenes are perhaps a bit too over-the-top, as and performs other feats of anime ridiculousness. Twin Snakes is still one hell of a trip, even if some of the magic gets lost in the transition.

Metal Gear Solid 2 ended on a bizarre cliffhanger, raising far more questions than it actually answered, and when Kojima wanted to end the trilogy with a detour to the 1960s, fans begged for proper closure to the story that began in Metal Gear Solid. And boy, did Kojima deliver, tying up every single loose thread of Metal Gear's labyrinthine narrative - almost to a fault.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is layered with brilliant systems. Snake's OctoCamo lets him blend seamlessly into his environment like a chameleon. Rebel factions are constantly at war with PMCs, and both sides can be played against each other, allowing Snake to sneak past undetected. Extra guns can be snagged and converted into Drebin points, allowing you to buy new gear and weapon upgrades. But it's all in service to the countless 30-minute-or-longer cut-scenes the game funnels you into. MGS4 offers a satisfyingly outrageous conclusion to one of the most convoluted franchises ever - if only the gameplay had more room to breathe.

Revengeance better than MGS4? Yup. While the Metal Gear series constantly waffles between melodrama and goofiness, Revengeance is pure fan-service, taking Metal Gear's themes and slicing them all up into tiny pieces. It even turns the series' most reviled character into an unstoppable badass. It follows the events of MGS4, as Raiden investigates the fallout caused by the sudden implosion of corporate militarization. His hyper-violent journey leads him right to the doorstep of Senator Anderson, a cyborg who delivers the .

In Revengeance stealth is secondary, a way to thin the field a bit before you inevitably get spotted. But, honestly, who needs to sneak around when you have a sword capable of severing limbs like a hot knife cuts through butter? With a strategic series of cuts, you can remove arms or legs to cripple your foes, or simply rend them in half to reveal their juicy, life-replenishing innards. Don't question it - just go along for the highly entertaining, ridiculously satisfying ride.

It doesn't matter that the Game Boy Color version of Metal Gear Solid (known as Ghost Babel in Japan) isn't canon, taking place on an alternate timeline seven years after the events of the original Metal Gear. It doesn't matter that the Game Boy Color isn't that much more powerful than the NES and sports as many buttons. Somehow, Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color manages to blend the retro stylings of the MSX2 entries with the modern improvements made by the classic PlayStation entry, culminating in the greatest 2D Metal Gear game ever made.

Despite its small stature, Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color packs in a deep, mature storyline (while still being rated 'E', no less), following Snake as he battles a separatist force in Central Africa and listens to (or reads, in this case) reams of codec dialog. It's still amazing what the developers were able to pack into such a small cartridge, how nothing was sacrificed to make a seemingly simple-looking game with all the complexity of its bigger console brothers. Don't write it off just because it's on a Game Boy - this Metal Gear is one of the best.

Hideo Kojima is a master manipulator, and no game proves this more than Metal Gear Solid 2. In the run up to its release, he teased videos showcasing series hero Solid Snake front and center - then pulled the rug out from everyone by replacing him with the inexperienced Raiden for the game's second half. Highly contentious at the time, the dust has settled since its release, and Sons of Liberty is finally appreciated for what it is: one of the first and finest post-modern video games.

As a sequel to one the most highly regarded action games of all time, Kojima was aware of the expectations heaped upon MGS2, and played on them perfectly. The jump from PlayStation to PS2 allowed Kojima to deliver an absurd attention to detail, as well as some of the best graphics of the era (only a year into the PS2's lifespan, too!). But he also used it as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of sequels, effectively reusing the same story beats from Metal Gear Solid and flipping them upside down. By the end of Sons of Liberty, it's hard to separate reality from fiction - which means it's working exactly as Kojima intended.

Some people complain that Metal Gear games have way too many cutscenes and not enough gameplay, and for some entries it's a valid concern (see: Metal Gear Solid 4). But Peace Walker takes those complaints and jettisons them into the ocean, making this portable title one of the biggest, most expansive Metal Gear outings yet.

Taking place a few years after Portable Ops, Peace Walker sees Big Boss continuing to build his mercenary army - only this time, you'll have a full-on outpost called Mother Base to grow. Big Boss undertakes a wide variety of missions set during the backdrop of the Nicaraguan Revolution of the 1970s, recruiting new soldiers, researching gear upgrades, and even developing a Metal Gear of his own. The sweeping story is still here, but between building out Mother Base and fighting actual monsters from Monster Hunter, there's enough gameplay to fill up a dozen Metal Gear titles. The HD release greatly improves the controls and adds online multiplayer, making it the definitive version of the game. If not for its lackluster boss fights and some unfortunate resource grinding, Peace Walker would be the number one game in the series - it's that good.

The original PlayStation hit Metal Gear Solid is still one of the best, as almost every single one of its sequels and spin-offs ends up living in the shadow of this classic. Its story deals in a heady mix of nuclear proliferation, illegal cloning, double-crosses, and paranormal activity, and it moves at a rapid-fire pace for the duration of its 10-hour campaign. It was a revelation at the time, wearing its Hollywood aspirations on its sleeve while never forgetting that it's still a video game at heart.

Few games can boast the sheer amount of amazing twists in Metal Gear Solid. The mysterious death of the DARPA Chief; finding Meryl's Codec frequency on the back of the game's actual CD case; the fourth wall-breaking battle against Psycho Mantis; Snake's capture and escape from prison; and so many more that I could fill this entire slide and still not have enough space to gush about everything cool that happens. Even with its rudimentary 3D graphics, Metal Gear Solid remains a masterpiece, second only to...

The Metal Gear series' hard left turn into the Cold War era remains its best, taking everything fans love about the series' narrative and gameplay and executing on them to near-perfection. Its story is the tightest and most thrilling of the bunch, using a pastiche of 1960s spy movies to tell the origin of just about every single narrative thread in the series. Plus, the story just feels so much more human than the rest, dropping a convoluted web of nanomachines and artificial intelligence to focus on Naked Snake and his subsequent fall from grace as he discovers the truth behind the betrayal of his mentor and friend, The Boss.

The jungles of Russia change up Metal Gear's stealth gameplay for the better, forcing Snake to utilize a wide variety of camouflage to tip-toe through Snake Eater's various locales without getting spotted. But it's not enough just to sneak - Snake has to survive, foraging for food among the flora and fauna of the untamed wilds and tending to wounds he receives on the battlefield. It's hard to top a classic such as Metal Gear Solid, but Snake Eater manages to surpass its predecessors with dozens of memorable moments of its own and gameplay that has yet to be matched - and if you're new to the series, .

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain finally launches on September 1st, but the number in its title is misleading - The Phantom Pain will actually be the twentieth game in the increasingly sprawling and convoluted Metal Gear universe. If you're just tuning in, it can be difficult to sort through nearly 30 years of tactical espionage action, walking nuclear missile-equipped battle tanks, and hours upon hours of expertly directed cut-scenes - and of course, not all Metal Gears are created equal.

While Metal Gear will forever be series creator Hideo Kojima's brainchild (and the series ), it's also much bigger than one man, spiraling out into countless spin-offs and side entries, each one forming a piece of a much larger story. Some of them are far more important to the overall canon - or simply more fun - than the others, though, so I've taken it upon myself to look back over Metal Gear's entire legacy and rank every single game that made it to the West. If you're looking to catch up on the best Metal Gear games before The Phantom Pain hits or simply want to know the best place to start your descent into Outer Heaven, look no further.

While not technically a separate release in the US or Europe (it was only released as a stand-alone disc and as an arcade cabinet in Japan) Metal Gear Online deserves special recognition for its multiplayer ambitions. Taking the core gameplay ideas from Metal Gear Solid 4 and expanding them to take advantage of its online nature, MGO may not have been the best multiplayer game ever, but it was not short of ideas.

MGO brings all the weapons, stealthy moves, and cardboard boxes over from MGS4, but it also makes use of the Sons of the Patriots network of nanomachines to tie everything together. You won't just be able to see where your teammates are - you can even keep track of your enemies by hacking into their nanomachines. Sadly, Konami shut the servers off back in 2012 and effectively patched the game out of existence, though some dedicated fans have found a way to , even if it's practically on life-support.

There are ways to convert popular console franchises to mobile devices without sacrificing what makes those games so special, but everything about Metal Gear Solid Touch screams ‘soulless cash grab’. Loosely following the plot of MGS4, Touch takes the series' trademark open-ended stealth action and converts it into a bland, uninspired shooting gallery. Enemy soldiers appear on each stage, and you swipe your finger on the screen to aim and tap to fire. Occasionally you have to zoom in to shoot a distant enemy or switch to your rocket launcher to take out a lumbering Gekko. That's about it.

Everything about MGS Touch feels cheap - characters and environments look like they've been poorly Photoshopped out of MGS4, enemies fall down in three jarring frames of animation when shot, and the gameplay is far too basic to be engaging. Unless you're so desperate that you absolutely have to have a Metal Gear fix available at all times, it's best to pretend MGS Touch doesn't exist.

Snake's Revenge isn't low on this list because it's a bad game. As a follow-up to the NES version of Metal Gear, it's actually surprisingly decent, providing more of the same stealth gameplay with an all new story. It even has a few interesting gameplay twists of its own, as you can actually interrogate enemy commanders for information by hitting them with a canister of truth gas.

But Snake's Revenge isn't really a Metal Gear game. It was made specifically for North America and Europe because of the popularity of the first game, and series creator Hideo Kojima had no knowledge that the game was even being worked on until well into its development. Kojima began work on a true sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, which released exclusively in Japan six months after Snake's Revenge. Kojima's game went on to become series canon, while Snake's Revenge became apocrypha - an interesting curiosity, but nothing more.

If you follow a franchise long enough, you're bound to see strange spin-offs into completely new genres. While we haven't had a Metal Gear Soccer game (yet), Konami converted the classic stealth series into a turn-based strategy/collectable card game called Metal Gear Acid for the launch of PSP. The most surprising thing? Despite its flaws, it actually works.

Acid takes the sneaking, shooting, and cardboard-box wearing action found in the core titles, and puts them all into the most bizarre board game you've ever played. Actions and items are relegated to cards that you can earn while you play, and Metal Gear Acid is as much about building your deck for each level as it is about figuring out the opportune moment to play your cards. Its pacing isn't for everyone, its story isn't canon, and many of its biggest issues end up getting fixed in the sequel, but Metal Gear Acid is still an interesting experiment.

The first game developed by the (allegedly) recently dissolved Kojima Productions, Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops marks the very first time a canonical entry has appeared on a handheld… kind of. Set six years after the events of Snake Eater, Portable Ops follows the exploits of Big Boss and his attempts to build the beginnings of a soldier's paradise. Since Kojima was only a producer on Portable Ops, though, its importance to the overall storyline is debatable.

Portable Ops does, however, introduce the neat ability to find and recruit soldiers in the field - an idea expanded on by Peace Walker and more fully fleshed out in The Phantom Pain. The controls aren't great (curse the PSP's lack of a second analog stick), but it does a decent job of taking the modern 3D Metal Gear style and making it playable on the go. Just be careful: if you want the story, get Portable Ops, as PO Plus is a stand-alone expansion that rips out the story entirely.

The original Metal Gear may not have aged as gracefully as some classic games, but many of the ideas found in Solid Snake's first outing still show up, even in recent entries. Metal Gear introduces the cardboard box, iconic characters like Solid Snake, Grey Fox, and Big Boss, and the stealth gameplay that would become the series' hallmark. Ironically, this was a design necessity at the time thanks to the limitations of the Japanese MSX2 computer. While both the MSX2 and Nintendo Entertainment System versions are similar in how they play, the MSX2 is officially considered canon, thanks to the host of changes made to the NES version without Kojima's consent.

In order to fit Metal Gear on the inferior NES hardware, Metal Gear was forced to undergo a graphical downgrade - but the changes don't stop there. Plot points were removed, a new intro sequence and additional story elements were added, and the difficulty was greatly increased. Heck, the titular Metal Gear doesn't even show up in the NES version, instead sending Snake into a boss fight against a giant supercomputer. Much of the gameplay remains exactly the same despite these changes, but the MSX2 version is without a doubt the superior entry.

Ground Zeroes is the cold open to a much larger game, a glorified demo sold at a premium as a way to tide die-hard Metal Gear fans over until The Phantom Pain finally launches this year. It's like taking the Tanker chapter from Metal Gear Solid 2 and breaking it out into its own separate release - only worse, because the single story mission offered in Ground Zeroes will only take about an hour to finish. The Side Ops try to add a little more substance, but there's no denying that Ground Zeroes is extremely light on content.

What Ground Zeroes does best, though, is show off the graphical potential of the Fox Engine and the evolution of the series' stealth gameplay - and the gameplay is great. Streamlining many of Metal Gear's more obtuse systems, Ground Zeroes is more accessible to new players while still offering a surprising amount of depth and strategic options. Ultimately, Ground Zeroes currently exists as pure, unfiltered potential of what open-world stealth can look like, and we won't know how successful this experiment really is until The Phantom Pain closes the book on Metal Gear Solid 5 in September.

VR Missions isn't quite a ‘full game’, as there's no campaign or story to speak of, but that doesn't mean it's short on content. Instead, think of VR Missions as a stand-alone expansion to one of the greatest stealth games of all time, taking its core concepts and devising a wide array of sneaking time trials and puzzles to go with them.

Featuring over 300 bite-sized stages, VR Missions runs the gamut, from weapon-based challenges to pure stealth gauntlets. VR Missions isn't afraid to explore the weird side of Metal Gear Solid either, letting you solve murder mysteries, take on Godzilla-sized genome soldiers, or even play as the coolest cyborg ninja ever. If Metal Gear Solid is the main course, then VR Missions is one hell of a dessert.

Metal Gear Acid 2 takes the unique card-battling board game introduced in the first game, and makes everything better. The controls are more refined, turns are faster-paced, and your turn no longer ends when you open doors - a huge improvement from the first game. There are also way more cards to collect, with over 500 this time around, each one representing a different weapon, item, or moment from the storied franchise.

The additions don't stop there, though. An arena mode lets you fight against iconic bosses like Liquid Snake with Acid's unique turn-based system, allowing you to earn points outside of the story to buy new cards. Improved tutorials and guides explain and inform you of Acid's various systems, and are available for perusal at any moment. And the game even comes with a bizarre cardboard contraption called the Solid Eye, which lets you play in 3D for literally no other reason than because it looks cool.

The true, canonical sequel to Metal Gear is better than the first game in almost every way, and it makes the unofficial Snake's Revenge look primitive by comparison. The music is better, the animations are more fluid, and the story is deeper and more complex - which makes it all the more surprising that the game wouldn't officially leave its native Japan for nearly 16 years. Thankfully, the Western release of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence finally gave us a chance to experience this lost chapter in the series' history.

Metal Gear 2 didn't just improve the enemy AI or give Snake a radar and the ability to crawl into tight spots; it's also the first entry that forces the player to break the fourth wall and scan their instruction manual for tap codes and other clues to find new codec frequencies. If not for some unfortunate backtracking, Metal Gear 2 would be the perfect 2D entry in the series.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is the glorious result of the unlikeliest of partnerships. Helmed by Eternal Darkness developer Silicon Knights, produced by Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto, and featuring new cutscenes by Japanese action flick director Ryuhei Kitamura, The Twin Snakes takes the classic Metal Gear Solid experience and completely overhauls it for the GameCube, featuring updated graphics and controls found in Metal Gear Solid 2, as well as a re-translated and re-recorded script.

So if Twin Snakes is such an improvement over the original, why does it end up ranking lower? Well, for one, the changes to the gameplay actually make Metal Gear Solid way easier, as the level design and boss encounters weren't originally meant to be tackled with first-person shooting, tranquilizer darts, or by hanging from ledges. Plus, Twin Snakes' cut-scenes are perhaps a bit too over-the-top, as and performs other feats of anime ridiculousness. Twin Snakes is still one hell of a trip, even if some of the magic gets lost in the transition.

Metal Gear Solid 2 ended on a bizarre cliffhanger, raising far more questions than it actually answered, and when Kojima wanted to end the trilogy with a detour to the 1960s, fans begged for proper closure to the story that began in Metal Gear Solid. And boy, did Kojima deliver, tying up every single loose thread of Metal Gear's labyrinthine narrative - almost to a fault.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is layered with brilliant systems. Snake's OctoCamo lets him blend seamlessly into his environment like a chameleon. Rebel factions are constantly at war with PMCs, and both sides can be played against each other, allowing Snake to sneak past undetected. Extra guns can be snagged and converted into Drebin points, allowing you to buy new gear and weapon upgrades. But it's all in service to the countless 30-minute-or-longer cut-scenes the game funnels you into. MGS4 offers a satisfyingly outrageous conclusion to one of the most convoluted franchises ever - if only the gameplay had more room to breathe.

Revengeance better than MGS4? Yup. While the Metal Gear series constantly waffles between melodrama and goofiness, Revengeance is pure fan-service, taking Metal Gear's themes and slicing them all up into tiny pieces. It even turns the series' most reviled character into an unstoppable badass. It follows the events of MGS4, as Raiden investigates the fallout caused by the sudden implosion of corporate militarization. His hyper-violent journey leads him right to the doorstep of Senator Anderson, a cyborg who delivers the .

In Revengeance stealth is secondary, a way to thin the field a bit before you inevitably get spotted. But, honestly, who needs to sneak around when you have a sword capable of severing limbs like a hot knife cuts through butter? With a strategic series of cuts, you can remove arms or legs to cripple your foes, or simply rend them in half to reveal their juicy, life-replenishing innards. Don't question it - just go along for the highly entertaining, ridiculously satisfying ride.

It doesn't matter that the Game Boy Color version of Metal Gear Solid (known as Ghost Babel in Japan) isn't canon, taking place on an alternate timeline seven years after the events of the original Metal Gear. It doesn't matter that the Game Boy Color isn't that much more powerful than the NES and sports as many buttons. Somehow, Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color manages to blend the retro stylings of the MSX2 entries with the modern improvements made by the classic PlayStation entry, culminating in the greatest 2D Metal Gear game ever made.

Despite its small stature, Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color packs in a deep, mature storyline (while still being rated 'E', no less), following Snake as he battles a separatist force in Central Africa and listens to (or reads, in this case) reams of codec dialog. It's still amazing what the developers were able to pack into such a small cartridge, how nothing was sacrificed to make a seemingly simple-looking game with all the complexity of its bigger console brothers. Don't write it off just because it's on a Game Boy - this Metal Gear is one of the best.

Hideo Kojima is a master manipulator, and no game proves this more than Metal Gear Solid 2. In the run up to its release, he teased videos showcasing series hero Solid Snake front and center - then pulled the rug out from everyone by replacing him with the inexperienced Raiden for the game's second half. Highly contentious at the time, the dust has settled since its release, and Sons of Liberty is finally appreciated for what it is: one of the first and finest post-modern video games.

As a sequel to one the most highly regarded action games of all time, Kojima was aware of the expectations heaped upon MGS2, and played on them perfectly. The jump from PlayStation to PS2 allowed Kojima to deliver an absurd attention to detail, as well as some of the best graphics of the era (only a year into the PS2's lifespan, too!). But he also used it as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of sequels, effectively reusing the same story beats from Metal Gear Solid and flipping them upside down. By the end of Sons of Liberty, it's hard to separate reality from fiction - which means it's working exactly as Kojima intended.

Some people complain that Metal Gear games have way too many cutscenes and not enough gameplay, and for some entries it's a valid concern (see: Metal Gear Solid 4). But Peace Walker takes those complaints and jettisons them into the ocean, making this portable title one of the biggest, most expansive Metal Gear outings yet.

Taking place a few years after Portable Ops, Peace Walker sees Big Boss continuing to build his mercenary army - only this time, you'll have a full-on outpost called Mother Base to grow. Big Boss undertakes a wide variety of missions set during the backdrop of the Nicaraguan Revolution of the 1970s, recruiting new soldiers, researching gear upgrades, and even developing a Metal Gear of his own. The sweeping story is still here, but between building out Mother Base and fighting actual monsters from Monster Hunter, there's enough gameplay to fill up a dozen Metal Gear titles. The HD release greatly improves the controls and adds online multiplayer, making it the definitive version of the game. If not for its lackluster boss fights and some unfortunate resource grinding, Peace Walker would be the number one game in the series - it's that good.

The original PlayStation hit Metal Gear Solid is still one of the best, as almost every single one of its sequels and spin-offs ends up living in the shadow of this classic. Its story deals in a heady mix of nuclear proliferation, illegal cloning, double-crosses, and paranormal activity, and it moves at a rapid-fire pace for the duration of its 10-hour campaign. It was a revelation at the time, wearing its Hollywood aspirations on its sleeve while never forgetting that it's still a video game at heart.

Few games can boast the sheer amount of amazing twists in Metal Gear Solid. The mysterious death of the DARPA Chief; finding Meryl's Codec frequency on the back of the game's actual CD case; the fourth wall-breaking battle against Psycho Mantis; Snake's capture and escape from prison; and so many more that I could fill this entire slide and still not have enough space to gush about everything cool that happens. Even with its rudimentary 3D graphics, Metal Gear Solid remains a masterpiece, second only to...

The Metal Gear series' hard left turn into the Cold War era remains its best, taking everything fans love about the series' narrative and gameplay and executing on them to near-perfection. Its story is the tightest and most thrilling of the bunch, using a pastiche of 1960s spy movies to tell the origin of just about every single narrative thread in the series. Plus, the story just feels so much more human than the rest, dropping a convoluted web of nanomachines and artificial intelligence to focus on Naked Snake and his subsequent fall from grace as he discovers the truth behind the betrayal of his mentor and friend, The Boss.

The jungles of Russia change up Metal Gear's stealth gameplay for the better, forcing Snake to utilize a wide variety of camouflage to tip-toe through Snake Eater's various locales without getting spotted. But it's not enough just to sneak - Snake has to survive, foraging for food among the flora and fauna of the untamed wilds and tending to wounds he receives on the battlefield. It's hard to top a classic such as Metal Gear Solid, but Snake Eater manages to surpass its predecessors with dozens of memorable moments of its own and gameplay that has yet to be matched - and if you're new to the series, .