BioShock 2

Game music has been a passion of ours roughly since, oh, 1985, but in the past 10 years, it’s come to mean something more. Don’t get us wrong, we still love the beepatronic music of the 8- and 16-bit periods (and the wave of chiptune artists it inspired), but the past decade has also seen licensed music become a surprisingly important part of gaming. Sometimes, this just means a selection of familiar hits to accompany our music games, but every so often, a game will use licensed tracks to careful, brilliant effect – and in the process, will expose legions of gamers to music they might never have heard otherwise.

What follows are the games and franchises that have been the most influential in bringing strange and terrifying new musical styles to gamers’ ears – and in the interest of making this our most self-indulgent Top 7 since that other one, we’ve asked a handful of our editors to explain what made each one important to them personally...

Before Mario became the most iconic character in videogame history – not to mention the most famous plumber in, well, plumbing history – he was just a carpenter named Jumpman, starring in a game named Donkey Kong. Our point? Even the best need a little time to blossom.

Such is the case with these 8 characters. Like Mario, they weren’t necessarily bad or below average in their debuts, but they were truly spectacular in their sequels, to the point that we almost forget our first impressions of them. How much they changed, and how much they improved. Here, then, is a reminder…

Mario, Kirby, Samus and Donkey Kong will not appear on these pages. Neither will Ezio, Sam Fisher or Commander Shepard. While we spent plenty of time with these videogame stars in 2010, they're old. Familiar. Expected. Lovable yet predictable.

You certainly can't say that about the following 10 characters, first introduced to us over the past 12 months. They're new. Surprising. Exciting. We'd barely heard of them at the start of the year, but by the end, we couldn't stop talking about them. Or wanting to see more of them...

Looking for categories like Best PSP Driving Game? Greatest Achievement in Control Layout, Artistic? Eastern European Developer Most Worth Watching in 2011? Then our end-of-year awards might not be for you.

GamesRadar's Platinum Chalices are different. We're not interested in checking off a massively tedious list of genres, platforms and technical subdivisions… we'd much rather focus on the stuff that makes this hobby, you know, fun. And reward whichever games delivered the most of that stuff.

So if you're looking for the best fan service, most satisfying gore or greatest achievement in old-school kickassery in 2010, you've definitely come to the right celebration. Let's get it started…

BioShock Infinite may represent the future (and explore the past) of the beloved shooter franchise, but the BioShock 2 adventure isn't complete until you've experienced Minerva's Den, a fascinating new campaign add-on that explores previously unseen areas of Rapture, adds fresh abilities and enemies, and offers an achingly emotional side story...

One of the biggest costuming competitions happens at the Comic-Con Masquerade every year and it always draws some of the most elaborate and jaw-dropping entries. Everything from Sci-Fi to movies to videogames are represented and we have the behind-the-scenes look at the road to the Masquerade with my friend’s and our BioShock 2 group.

The process started a few months before the convention with a ton of sketches, squinting over in-game screen captures, scouring the internet for construction ideas and lots of discussion of what was possible over cups of tea...

Some people love to talk. Jordan Thomas, 2K Marin’s creative director, is one of those people, providing so much information that it simply wouldn’t fit into one article. To deprive you of so much juicy truth nuggets would be doing you a disservice, so a second set of pages were forged in your honor. Trust us when we tell you this vast amount of words (and those in the last feature) was but the tip of the iceberg - thousands more words still reside on our Seld-M-Break hard drives. But enough of that - below Thomas talks about front-loading, internal workings and how young people and women reacted surprisingly well to being asked to play a struggling father...

The best games of 2010 thus far, cheap game deals, and a quiz that should delight all born in the 80’s and 90’s...

2010 is special. Normally, when we choose the best games from the first half of the year, we're taking time to recognize and celebrate stuff that will be forgotten by December. Take a look at 2009's winner, for example, and then check how many Platinum Chalices that title received just a few months later. From number one… to only one mention.

This Top 7, however, could easily serve as a blueprint for our eventual end-of-year awards. Six of the games received "10/10" from GamesRadar, and total countdown combined, almost 150 perfect scores from the industry as a whole. What follows, then, aren't merely the best of 2010 so far. Judging by their quality and by the rest of the release calendar, these might be the best of 2010 – period.

"Things grow inside you.
We’re part of you now, you think you hear them say.
You step away from the med bench. The diagnostics screen presents a revolting before and after. On the left side, the before side, you see yourself. What you were. Human.
And on the right side... what you are. What you’ve become. The only way you’ll survive. The only way you’ll-"

Thus begins the 2002 pitch document for Irrational Games' original vision for BioShock, the first 10 pages of which the company has just released on its blog. How different is it from the BioShock we eventually got? Quite a lot. There's a different protagonist, a different story, a different setting, extra gameplay mechanics, and although the splicing remains, it sounds absolurly bloody horrific. Want to know more about the BioShock you could have played? Read on.