4. Twisted Metal
Another of the bad boys of racing, Twisted Metal was my own in-point for destroying opponents in vehicular gaming, and I've never looked back since. Bringing an arsenal of impressive weapons, comparatively huge fight arenas and a raft of colourful and diverse characters, with their own special moves and backstories, Twisted Metal always felt like the most heavy metal of video games. The pleasure of Twisted Metal was in the free-for-all warfare, the player collecting regenerating ammunition on their way around the arenas, including special weaponry, hunting down opponents at the same time as evading their cross-hairs to survive. But beyond the open warfare, TM's strongest selling point was the cast of characters, adding human and sometimes sub-human faces and personalities to the cars, in a way that would later redefine the entire GTA franchise. And the hook of those characters was helped by some excellent character design, which would see figures like Sweet-Tooth become arguably more famous than the game that created them. For some reason, maniacal clowns were big in my life around the time of Twisted Metal Black, which I still count as the finest addition to the series which was recently given a much-needed shot in the arm (and which someone, somewhere will hopefully turn into an MMO game soon), as I frequently chose to use Insane Clown Posse as the usual soundtrack accompaniment to my in-game carnage. It was a marriage I always regretted hadn't been fully adopted into the game in the first place.