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How noble, the human species! Once a year we selflessly take a break from wrapping products in toxic plastics and burning piles of old tires to appease this stupid, stupid planet we live on. How dare it demand more trees, breathable air and animals that don’t choke to death on our trash?

What is the best Super Nintendo game ever made? Which Xbox 360 title is already the definitive classic? What Atari, Dreamcast and PlayStation experiences are most worth remembering? Growing tired of the internet’s countless, wishy-washy attempts to answer such questions, we decided to make the tough decisions ourselves. You’ll find no Top 5s, Top 7s, Top 15s or Top 100s here - just a single winner and runner up for each platform.

Thanks a bunch, Christopher Nolan. Ever since Batman Begins took the universally-reviled cinematic bastardization of a cool character and redrew it in the drab colors and long shadows of The Dark Knight Returns, the “gritty reboot” has been back in fashion. In Hollywood-speak, the term's a nice way of saying “we've screwed this up, can we have a do-over?” Of course, games being a forward-looking sort of medium, players have been wise to this trick for years now – and we're still suckers for it.

Whether it's a deeper-'n-darker sequel or restarting from scratch, rejigging your series with a darker palette and more distorted guitars is a great way to draw attention to what might otherwise be just more sequel-abuse. But how well does it work? From a player's perspective, a gray coat of paint is hardly going to turn gameplay upside down... but from a “cataloguing the tricks they'll pull to sell a new installment” standpoint, dark reboots are just gravy...

In real life, war is messy. Mistakes get made, civilians get hurt, families are shattered and once-thriving countries are bombed back to the Stone Age, often because of the misguided actions of their politicians. Wars in videogames, by contrast, are a hell of a lot more convenient and clean. Because they’re (usually) fictitious, the justifications are clear, the goals relatively simple and the opposing forces completely, irredeemably evil.

But that’s not always the case. Whether by design or through slapdash writing, some of gaming’s most notable conflicts – when examined objectively – are completely meaningless, stupid exercises in futility for all involved. Here are some of our favorites...

More and more games seem to be plucking our heart strings to great affect and eliciting a genuine sense of woe amongst players. Here we look at five recent videogame deaths that have made us appropriately gloomy for all the right reasons and ponder how they succeeded in stoking the cold blue flames of our sadness.

Like flying piranha or sentient automobiles with a grudge, an apocalypse is something humanity doesn't want gate-crashing the cosmic party. Famine. Pestilence. War. Death. These are just four types of disaster commonly associated with an apocalypse and each one is guaranteed to kill the mood at any social gathering or LAN party. More catastrophically, they can also kill a significant proportion of the World's people population. Especially Death. Make no mistake - apocalypses are no fun. But would gamers be better prepared to survive one type of apocalypse over another? We find out.

Has it really only been 12 months since the last avalanche of “Best Games of 200X” awards? Well, we all love a good list, and you won’t find a better barf bag of random praises than our own Platinum Chalice awards, the place to have someone else’s gaming opinions shoved upon you. How important are these awards? So important. Real important. What do the other guys have, gold trophies? Screw that.

Now that the world hasn't ended after all, let's pretend we got caught in the apocalypse anyway, as we pick our the top wastelands we'd like to inhabit...

Admit it - you’ve thought about choking quite a few videogame characters to death. Whether it’s an annoying sidekick or a particularly tough boss, there’s no denying that the urge to bust somebody in the mush hasn’t seized you. There are a lot of deserving punks we could put into this article - but the most aggravating offenses come from the cutest characters. Those fluffy types just there to make a game more