Mortal Kombat: Armageddon

Much as we love Mortal Kombat, it feels like the series has had a progressively lamer cast of villains with every installment. Shao Kahn? When you get right down to it, he’s just a big, half-naked dude with a hammer and a super-cheap fighting style. Shinnok’s a pale old man in a stupid hat, Onaga’s the kind of villain a 12-year-old would draw on a binder, and Blaze is just another beefy guy made of fire. And don’t even get us started on their henchmen. Drahmin? Moloch? Quan Chi? Motaro? What an ugly bunch of sadsacks.

As far as we’re concerned, Mortal Kombat still hasn’t topped its original villains: the millennia-old shapeshifter Shang Tsung, the four-armed nightmare named Goro, and Shang Tsung’s creepy little helper-ninja, Reptile. And as luck would have it, all three are about to be shoved back into the limelight next week, when the new Mortal Kombat rewinds the series’ clock back to its beginning. Before that happens, however, let’s take a look at the ways those characters have evolved and changed since their first appearances 19 years ago...

Welcome to our third annual Halloweek! For five fearsome days we’ll be celebrating the goriest, creepiest and all around ickiest aspects of video games, beginning today with a look at seven fighting games that perhaps laid it on a bit too thick.

Popularized by Mortal Kombat in 1992, fatalities and in-game blood became nearly ubiquitous over the next couple of years. Not to be outdone, each developer felt it could “out gore” the other guys, leading to a comically gratuitous escalation of violence...

Take two steps into your local Chuck E Cheese funtropolis – which, for the record, would be three steps more than we’d actually recommend you take – and it’s obvious that the days when videogame arcades were a beeping, flashing fountainhead of innovation, style and even culture are long gone.

Not so lucky in love? Dreading Valentine’s Day because it’s yet another reminder of what some vindictive ex did to you, or how everything was once going so well and now all your dating options are miserable? Do you feel like breaking a heart this time around? If so, may we suggest these killer organs who are already seeking to break you.

Perhaps no other entertainment industry contains venomous fans arguing over the content of multiple versions of a solitary product.  And for good reason - games are made to be ported over to multiple consoles in order to recoup staggering losses of cash. Each console has its own strengths and its own failings. That’s why we see a frame rate glitch here or a severely neutered feature there.

Fact: Bruce Lee is better than Chuck Norris. Lee never hawked Bowflexes in his quest for the perfect mixed martial arts form. Lee kicked Norris’ ass in Way of the Dragon. And it was Lee who brought his proprietary blend of Kung Fu kickass-ery to the mainstream with his wild whoops, and a roundhouse kick that packed more power than the millions of stale internet jokes about his co-star. So why all the Lee love on a videogame site?

Just in time for Black History Month, GamesRadar is proud to present a completely unrelated article about fat people. Chubbies are everywhere these days. Your next door neighbor could be a fatty. More than likely, your mom is one, too. Oh, Snap! 

On some level, roughly 95 percent of games have always been about assassination: go to point A and kill prominent entity B, fighting your way through goons C through Z to get there. Most games tend to come up with a morally justifiable pretext for all the violence, but more and more, we're seeing games that drop the act and let you be what you've secretly known yourself to be all along: a remorseless killing machine bent on destroying your targets.