And then there was Grand Theft Auto IV.

I have some conflicting opinions about GTA IV: I think everybody should own it, because what Rockstar accomplished with the living, breathing city they built is a feat that transcends gaming and ventures into science fiction territory. It's just too bad they layered an irreparably broken game on top of it. The controls were awful, the missions were lifeless and repetitive, and they generally seemed to lack any kind of creativity or imagination with which to fill their staggering technical achievement. Just a tip, guys: Next time you build a rich and believable environment, remember that we can already jump into a beat up old Bonneville and drive our fat cousins to the bowling alley. That is not the realm of fantasy; that is the realm of New Jersey on a Saturday night.

Source."Welcome to a rich fantasy world, cousin! Now, let's pick up my wife's blood pressure medicine and fall asleep watching soap operas!"

And yet, despite itself, GTA IV possessed what might have been the most fun multiplayer mode of any current generation game. So what was so ingenious about this new and novel mode?

Nothing.

They didn't do a damn thing. They gave the player a Grand Theft Auto city and allowed multiple players in the same space. The end. No objectives, no scores, no penalties -- just you and a dozen of your friends, all with infinite lives, set loose in the most dynamic landscape built in video game history.

That's the definition of fun: Just let us do whatever we want, whatever it is, with no rules, and we'll make up our games along the way. Whether that's just an endless, pointless brawl; hanging out and exploiting one of the many glitches (like launching cars from the infamous swing set); going garbage truck jousting; or my personal favorite, playing Hello Copter, where the entire point of the game is to steal a helicopter, hover just above one of your oblivious co-players and then bail out, shouting "Hello, Copter!" just as your body smashes into the pavement next to them, followed a split second later by an exploding helicopter.

Source."GREETINGS, HELICOPTER! Shit, did I do it wrong?"

But a complete absence of objectives or rules does not normally make for a good gaming experience. Don't believe me? Just go out on any playground and tell the kids you've thought up a new game called "playground" and the object is to "be on the playground they're already on." Then step back and smile at the confused blinking. A good game is a thing you can win; it's a set of rules for you to master and operate within. It's like Rockstar already knew that the objective-based games they included in GTA IV would be too glitchy and awkward to play, so they threw up their hands in frustration and said "You do better!"

And you know what? We God damn did.

But Bushido Blade was the direct opposite of modern fighting games: It was based entirely around one hit, one kill moves -- all of which were possible with the right training, patience, honed skill, or random sneeze/thumb spasm. The game was massively innovative, and featured some entirely new concepts for the fighting genre, like realistic, accumulative body damage (you slashed the tendons in their knee and they couldn't run; a hit to the arm would take away their ability to execute certain attacks). Bushido Blade even featured linked stages, meaning that you could sprint off the right edge of the screen and emerge on the left side of the next stage. In theory, this would make for the most dramatic, realistic sword-fighting game possible. In practice, this made for the longest, most absurd, bloody game of tag in history.

The second anybody started losing (or if they just thought you were funny when you were mad, and didn't really have any place to be that day), they would turn and sprint away, leaving you no choice but to follow. This led to every "deathmatch" being comprised mostly of two dudes in bathrobes jogging equidistantly for 40 minutes straight. Eventually, the fleeing party would get hung up on the corner of a bridge or a pole of bamboo or something, and you chopped them in the back of the head. They died instantly, the next round began, and repeat. It was infuriating.

Source."EXERCISE HIM!"

And that's why it was so much fucking fun: No matter how skilled you got at the game, the playing field was no more than slightly in your favor. The absolute and undisputed master of Bushido could only ever have a marginal advantage over a determined stroke victim or an excitable little girl, which may sound shitty, but it meant that you always had opponents who felt like they had a shot and wanted to play. That shit was invaluable, because 99 percent of fighting game matches end with somebody throwing the controller down and saying "This is stupid, I don't want to play anymore." And without a live opponent on the other end of that controller, sitting in a dark room watching a heavyset Japanese guy power-fist a little British girl until she passes out is somehow nowhere near as fun as it sounds.

Source."I mean, sure, I'll masturbate to it, but I'm not going to like it."

It was an utterly broken, unbalanced, unmanaged mess of a fighting game, but you always had a line waiting to play it, and every single match ended with screaming swears and wild cheers.

Because, while Bushido Blade's marathon foot-chases were mostly boring and aggravating, the end was always worth it, when either you got the vindication of finally mowing down that little bastard with a well-placed swing, or they'd get bored and unexpectedly turn to fight. Either way, it was 40 minutes' worth of boring buildup that always ended with one minute of pure, unbridled, bloody excitement.

And Bushido Blade invented that formula six years before Battlestar Galactica came out.

And so it went, all the way up until the end, when you were both locked into another choice: helicopter/jeep. The jeep was the weakest unit, and the only one capable of capturing the flag, and the helicopter was the only one that could catch the jeep. So the game gave you the illusion of a choice, but it always came down to who ran out of tanks first, and then ended with that guy in a tiny jeep leaving a dappled trail of fear urine as he got mowed down by the trail of rapidly approaching explosions emanating from the helicopter behind him.

It was pure chicanery on the part of the developers. It was precisely the kind of thing we gamers hate. It was artificially inflated difficulty, not true skill, and blah, blah, blah. You already know that it was friggin' brilliant: Every match ended with the ultimate underdog going up against the very flapping embodiment of death. Return Fire knew that the key to a good gaming experience is the same as in stand-up comedy and my sex life: Always go out on a laugh. The game had no basic balancing, no variety, and transparently manipulative rules, but every single time you brought out your jeep, "Flight of the Bumblebee" started playing, and you could guarantee that the next five minutes would be spent laughing, swearing and white-knuckling the controller until your mom came in to see if you were overdosing on whippits again.