Resident Evil 4

In honor of the New Year, here's a look at the franchises that rose from their own ashes to become something completely different. If they could reinvent themselves, why can't you?

Once a videogame hero has more than one or two adventures under his or her belt, it simply isn’t enough to just have an archenemy anymore. To keep things interesting, they need a foil, a rival, or some other angry opposite number obsessed with matching wits with them. Sometimes, those characters stick around long enough to make themselves an indelible part of the series, even going so far as to make friends with the protagonist – although more often than not, their friendships tend to be shaky at best, and even those involved might never fully admit to them. Relationships like that tend to make for gaming’s most enduring and interesting rivalries, and what follows are some of the most notable...

Everyone knows that it's not how long it is, it's how you made it long. No, that's not right… anyway, it seems that games have to contain at least 15 hours of single-player gameplay these days or everybody feels short-changed. Just look at the argument we had over Vanquish. But there are two ways of making a game longer. One is easy – recycle content. The other is awesome, and that's where this lot come in.

By the time 2005 had rolled around, it looked like the beginning of the end for PS2. Critics started to refer to its once-impressive hardware as “aging,” and the Xbox 360 was gearing up to snatch away its crown and claim dominance over the next console generation. And because previous hardware cycles had lasted about five years, most assumed that the PS2’s days were numbered, and that the machine would be largely discarded once the PS3 finally hit.

Only now do we realize just how wrong we were to count the PS2 out so early. 10 years after its North American launch, it’s still getting games and moving units, if not exactly going strong. With the anniversary of that launch just around the corner, let’s take a look at the best of what we thought, at the time, would be the PS2’s final great year...

Zombies and videogames go together like parasitic viruses and juicy human brains. Especially in recent years, we've had an almost ridiculous glut of zombie games, each one providing its own take on the living dead. While you may at first think of zombies uniformly as mindless flesh-eaters, you'd be surprised at what a wonderfully diverse bunch of characters they can be. Sure, the mindless flesh-eating part still stands, but there's a lot more to your average ghoul than that.

From the axe-wielding maniacs of House of the Dead to the classic rotters found in Resident Evil, there's a surprising amount of variety and depth to the common garden zombie. Read on and celebrate the diversity of animated cannibalistic corpses in all their decomposing finery...

September 9th means different things to different types of gamers. One camp can easily go the 9-9-99 route and spend all day pining over the life and death of Sega’s Dreamcast. It’s an honorable day of mourning for sure, but the other path is a bit peppier and perhaps leads to fonder memories of a machine that lasted for nearly 10 active years. That’d be the original PlayStation, which launched on 9-9-95 to almost immediate success.

Looking back, what were the system’s standout titles? Most of them are obvious inclusions, as they’ve spawned sequels even into present day, but others have since faded into nothingness and deserve a special anniversary shout-out. And if you feel this list is missing your favorite game (say Legend of Dragoon, Persona or Abe’s Odyssey), blame the rest of the GR staff who took vacations/sick days this week and left me to come up with this alone. It’s their fault XXXXX isn’t on here – I love XXXXX just as much as you!

George Romero (director of Dawn of the Dead and the father of zombie movies) says he'd be interested in making a game. This also coincides with the news that Jun Takeuchi (director of Resident Evil 5) won't be returning for the sixth instalment of the survival horror series.

And this got us thinking: how friggin' awesome would it be if Romero and Capcom teamed up to make Resi 6? The answer? Loads. Like loads and loads. And inside you'll find out why we think the zombie Zen master could help give the series just the shot in the undead arm it needs.

While playing a bit of Spirit Tracks I bumped into a tiny old man named Niko, who’s apparently been a part of Link and Zelda’s watery quests since the Wind Waker days. After that revelation shook its way through my bones, I realized, oh hey, his name’s Niko… as in Niko Bellic!

26 more cases of "Oh, that's interesting" inside!

Interactive cutscenes. “Cineractive” sequences. “Press X to not die” moments. Whatever you call them, quick time events are those mostly non-interactive moments peppered throughout videogames, nearly all of which ask you to tap a button on cue – or hammer on a button, or twitch an analog stick, or whatever – in order to enable your character to do something that’s way cooler than anything they can do while you're in direct control

Real-life shopping. Unless you enjoy shambling about like an extra in a Romero flick, it's a mostly soul-destroying activity that ranks somewhere between 'watching The X Factor' and 'tasting vomit' on our list of Things We'd Rather Not Do If We Can Help It. So it's testament to the subversive qualities of games that they can make shopping not suck. How do games do it - what makes shopping in games so much more enjoyable than shopping in