8. Metal Gear Solid
Whilst the series disappeared up its own jacksie in the most enjoyable way possible over the years, Metal Gears first Playstation iteration marks a landmark in the progression of the medium. Whilst Zelda was carving its own notch in the list of beautifully realised visionary worlds, Metal Gear was the first to perfectly match Eastern flourishes of humour and artwork with Western tropes of the lone-wolf gunman-for-hire. Dealing in one-liners and with a penchant for womanising, all wrapped up with a save-the-world bow, Solid Snake instantly became one of the greatest characters our medium would ever deliver. Voiced in timeless fashion by David Hayter, hes the badass to give endless lectures to the upcoming badasses of action gaming, a man who took down a Hind-D attack-helicopter with a rocket launcher and fought his psychotic brother atop a destroyed giant nuclear walking battle-tank, which he also felled beforehand. The level of cinematography present within Metal Gear changed the way we looked at videogames. It solidified (with pun intact) the idea that games could match cinemas level of depicting action and character-interaction, forever setting a new benchmark for memorable set-pieces brought to life by enigmatic voice actors, a benchmark that today still surpasses the vast majority of action games.