Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

The best Grand Theft Auto to date? That's what one member of GamesRadar claims and he has the facts to back it up inside.

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...

There’s not long to go now until Rockstar finally unveil their Grand Theft Auto 5 trailer – unless you’re reading this afterwards, in which case disregard that first bit. Let’s be honest, we’re properly excited. Like groin tingling-ly so and by the amount of activity in our Twitter feed we can tell we’re not alone. 

We’re so pumped for the debut of GTAV that we’ve scoured the interwebs in search of the old, initial trailers for previous iterations. We remember GTAIV’s ‘things will be different here’ trailer with the first glimpse of Niko Bellic from yesteryear but how many of you remember how you felt when Vice City and San Andreas were aired?

Click inside to jog your memory and find out what we think these past trailers mean for GTA V's debut.

As we inch closer to the 10-year anniversary of Grand Theft Auto III this Saturday, we’ve done a lot of reflecting about the era of gaming that it ushered in, and how it changed the way developers look at games. But aside from standardizing open worlds and giving us and a decade of morally ambiguous gaming, GTA as a series has told a lot of fascinating stories. And a big reason those stories were so fascinating was their cast of larger-than-life scumbags, psychos and sociopaths, most of which were not only memorable, but surprisingly complicated underneath their cartoonish exteriors.

With that in mind, we roped together a few of our editors and wouldn’t let them leave until they’d told us, in their own words, which ones were their favorites...

Just because a game's a little long in the tooth doesn't mean it's stopped being fun. Come with us as we take a trip through the archives and gather up all the guides, cheats and FAQs from yesteryear for some of gaming’s all-time greats.

Just because a game's a little long in the tooth doesn't mean it's stopped being fun. Come with us as we take a trip through the archives and gather up all the guides, cheats and FAQs from yesteryear for some of gaming’s all-time greats.

There are 50 snapshot locations to be found throughout San Fierro. These collectibles only appear while looking through the lens of a camera – to pick one up, zoom in close to the object and take a picture of it.

Just because a game's a little long in the tooth doesn't mean it's stopped being fun. Come with us as we take a trip through the archives and gather up all the guides, cheats and FAQs from yesteryear for some of gaming’s all-time greats.

Just because a game's a little long in the tooth doesn't mean it's stopped being fun. Come with us as we take a trip through the archives and gather up all the guides, cheats and FAQs from yesteryear for some of gaming’s all-time greats.

Whatever your opinion about sex in videogames, the simple fact is this: games won’t really be taken seriously as an art form until they can get certain things right, and one of those things is sex. It’s an essential component of film, music, books, paintings and even television, and yet gaming lags sadly behind.

Part of this is because games still haven’t quite shaken their kiddie-toys stigma, but mostly it’s because the rare games that try to get sex right almost never do. The results of their endless efforts tend to range from mildly off-putting to outright mortifying, with varying levels of ugliness and hilarity in between. Maybe someday, we’ll see an in-game love scene that doesn’t make us recoil in horror – but in the meantime, here are 13 that did...

Sasquatch. Bigfoot. The Abominable Snowman. There are many names associated with the elusive, (definitely not fake) ape-men... eh, thingies. Contrary to what Harry and the Hendersons would have you believe, though, most would rather chow down on your colon than forge an interspecies friendship. In video games especially, your average mythical ape would like nothing more than introduce you to that big game over screen in the sky. So pack some animal tranquilisers and a hacksaw, as we take you on a tour of some of gaming’s greatest yetis and sasquatch. Oh, and watch out for that bastard who makes the soup.