The Story: 
Astro Boy is a cute, super-powerful robot with no memory of his past. Guided by a kindly old scientist, he takes down a theft ring, witnesses the assassination of the first robot president of Antarctica - and then, he's suddenly transported tens of thousands of years into the past to battle for an ancient civilization. Then things get weird. Astro comes back to the "present" five years after the assassination, where a robot-human war has destroyed 80 percent of Earth. He defeats the robot revolutionaries, but just then a giant robot space-skull shows up and blasts Earth to a cinder. Roll credits.

After the credits, Astro is resurrected, given the ability to transcend time and retraces his steps with full knowledge of what's going to happen. Ultimately, he becomes a robotic Christ figure, sacrificing himself to save everyone else before being given a third chance at life.

Why it’s the Best: 
Yeah, we know: licensed games suck, and Astro Boy isn't an original story. But hear us out: Omega Factor is fantastic, and while it's tied to the 2003 Astro Boy cartoon series, it's not actually based on it. Instead, developers Treasure and Hitmaker decided to create a completely new storyline that brought together what seemed like every character ever dreamed up by Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka. Omega Factor was much darker and more involving than anything we'd ever associate with kid-friendly Astro Boy; over the course of the game, Astro witnesses human and robot genocides, a violent assassination and a flaming apocalypse at the hands of a floating skull with creepy theme music. At the same time, the game is filled with moments of sweetness - enemies become allies, Astro reconciles with his seemingly evil "father" and, ultimately, nobody is beyond redemption. Not even Astro's rival Atlas, who shows up repeatedly to try and kill him, or Sharaku, the three-eyed, time-traveling prince whose scheming causes the apocalypse in the first place.

The "transcending time" gimmick also makes the game a lot more interesting, as it enables you to reshape events by revisiting them repeatedly. In one timeline, Rag, the robot president we mentioned earlier, is assassinated; in another he's denied office and becomes the revolutionary leader Blue Knight. It's all about watching the repercussions of your latest set of actions, and then figuring out how much closer you are to setting things right and averting horror.

If nothing else, the game's writers deserve recognition for finding a fun way to essentially force players through the same levels multiple times, thereby padding out the run time. It's so satisfying to watch Astro surprise everyone with his knowledge of their plans and deceptions, you'll barely even notice that you're on your fourth trip through the moonbase level.

The Story:
You wake up in a sterile chamber with nothing more than a toilet and a radio. With the disembodied voice of GLaDOS as your only companion, you traverse your way through a series of chambers, each testing your problem solving skills with spatial puzzles. The whole set-up seems innocuous at first, but soon the tests become wrought with physical danger instead of merely being difficult. A sinister edge takes shape, as GLaDOS slowly reveals layers of her own personality, not all of which have your best interest in mind.

Cracks in the perfect, clinical facade begin to appear, both physically (when you're able to go behind some of the walls and see the work of a troubled graffiti artist), and in GLaDOS's erratic behavior. But your tester has taught you too well, and you're able to escape from the testing area into the facility itself, where you confront GLaDOS's main hub, destroy her (or not - psych!), and explode onto the surface outside.

Why it's the Best:
Portal's mysteries (Who scribbled on the walls? Where are all the people? What purpose to the tests serve?) aren't just mysteries for mystery's sake that leave the player frustrated and  confused. They're delicious enigmas that we actually enjoy pondering, rather than feeling like  the writers copped out and were just too lazy to answer everything sufficiently, like in so many  other irritatingly vague game stories. 

In fact, one of Portal's greatest strengths is that it didn't overstay its welcome by over-explaining or over-extending itself, and was content to simply be the rich tableau that it is. Some complained of its shortness, but there's something to be said for being able to experience a complete story in a single sitting. Sure, 50-hour RPGs and phonebook-sized novels offer richly detailed worlds, but the necessity of breaking that experience up into chunks will, sadly, always dilute our immersion in those worlds to some degree.   

But the real reason Portal makes it onto this list is GLaDOS - one of the strongest personalities ever known in gaming - who redefined "passive-aggressive" for anyone who survived her arsenal of mind games. It's a testament to the power of her character that her presence was felt so strongly throughout the game, even though we never actually see a glimpse of her until the end, and even then not in any remotely humanoid form. But even though she doesn't have a face, we can't help but anthropomorphize her lovably sadistic programming. 

The spirit of GLaDOS, and therefore the spirit of Portal, is best summed up in her triumphant ending theme, which we were delighted to hear for the first time despite all the shit she had just put us through. Talk about manipulative.