Collider put out a ranking of the 10 best PS3 games ever made, and I read it the way I read any list like this: braced for a fight, curious whether they'd get it right. The PS3 era is a weird one to rank. Sony stumbled out of the gate with a $599 price tag and the infamous E3 giant enemy crab, then somehow closed the generation as the house that built The Last of Us. The console's story arc is better than most games on it.

The top of Collider's list goes where most lists go: The Last of Us. Hard to argue. June 2013, the last major exclusive of the generation, and Naughty Dog turned a zombie premise into the most affecting thing the PS3 ever ran. I still remember finishing it around two in the morning and just sitting there. Few games have earned that silence.

Persona 5 makes their list too, which is technically true since it launched on PS3 in Japan in 2016, but it always feels like cheating. The PS3 version was the afterthought; the PS4 got the spotlight and the West basically ignored the last-gen port. Still, JRPGs on PS3 were genuinely strong, and the console kept getting them years after anyone expected. Ask me sometime about importing games for a system everyone in America had written off.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is the one I'll defend to the death in any PS3 conversation. People complained about the cutscene length and they weren't wrong, some of those codecs ran longer than sitcom episodes, but that game was a technical miracle in 2008. Kojima squeezed things out of the Cell processor that developers at the start of the generation swore were impossible. The PS3 was famously brutal to program for. MGS4 is what it looked like when somebody figured the hardware out anyway.

The rest of the usual suspects show up as you'd expect: Uncharted 2, which basically rewrote the template for blockbuster action games, Demon's Souls, the quiet import-to-cult hit that birthed a whole genre and, eventually, a decade of soulslikes, and Red Dead Redemption, which proved Rockstar could do open worlds outside Liberty City. Want to know how well some of these hold up? Better than you'd think. Uncharted 2's pacing is still tighter than most action games shipping today.

My quibbles with any list like this are always the same. Where's Ni no Kuni? Where's Yakuza? And someone always has to fight for Metal Gear Solid 4 versus The Last of Us at number one, an argument I've had in real life at least a dozen times. Have you ever tried ranking a console's entire library out loud with friends? It goes badly fast.

Looking back, the PS3 started as a punchline and ended as a legend. The generation it shared with the Xbox 360 gave us the transition from offline consoles to everything-online, from disc-based certainty to patches and DLC and the business models we live with now. The games on Collider's list are the good version of that story: studios learning new hardware, taking swings, shipping things nobody had seen before.

Go read the full ranking and see where your favorite landed. Then tell me I'm wrong about MGS4. Everyone does.