10 Best No. 4's In Gaming History

Some of you may be raising an eyebrow at this entry, wondering how Metroid Fusion made it on a "Best Of" list when Super Metroid, its much-vaunted predecessor, didn't.

Simple - Metroid Fusion is the better game,

Apologies for the slightly confrontational tone there, but Samus Aran's fourth adventure is, a successful evolution of the Metroid formula - one that takes everything that made the previous game great, then builds on it. The level design is tighter, the boss battles are more memorable and the plot actually exists.

Samus' inner monologue gave gaming's most famous bounty hunter a welcome dash of personality, and the introduction of the terminator-esque SA-X - essentially a superpowered Samus clone - further humanised the formerly inscrutable protagonist. Watching Samus go from literally cowering in a ball to hide from her nemesis, to being able to fight it on equal footing and eventually overcome it, provided a strong narrative thread that had been missing from previous entries in the series.

Granted, Fusion's follow-up - the disastrous Metroid: Other M - showed what happens when Metroid's designers spend too much time focusing on the plot. But that just makes Metroid Fusion's achievement in perfecting the balance between gameplay and story all the more impressive.