Batman: Arkham Asylum

During this year's D.I.C.E., Rocksteady Games took the stage to talk to a room full of eager developers, all anxious to know how the developer was able to adapt its linear action game into an open-world Game of the Tear contender. What they found out, however, was more than a little surprising... 

If shitty daytime soap operas have taught us anything (other than comas are never permanent and don’t trust evil identical twins with moustaches), it’s that flashbacks rule. The same logic also rings true in games. Some of the best levels we’ve ever played occurred as memories from our playable character’s past. And whether it’s having blocky PS1 nightmares or having a budding bromance in Chernobyl, the following flashbacks totally bested anything from that show with the polar bears and smoke monsters.

Our Thanksgiving 'un-special' is all about geek films, phone calls, and trying to remember words...

If there were a list of Rules for Videogames, the #1 rule would have to be, “Always make cutscenes skippable.” But the number two rule may very well be, “Don't play games based on movies.” It's a truth that's been self-evident rarely without exception ever since ET stunk up the Atari 2600.

But Rule #2's been in for some revision lately, as GoldenEye-shaped aberrations and Butcher Bay-escaping anomalies defy the “movie games are crap” truism. Maybe the way to make a non-terrible adaptation is to hold off until you're sure you have a classic property on your hands. Given movie games’ review history, the simple act of getting them to a stage where people say they’re “well-executed” or “worth the price” is a pretty big step...

The term 'secret room' is more than the sum of its parts. Secrets are always cool, but they work best when they make an otherwise normal-sounding word more intriguing. Secret Santa. Secret squirrel. Victoria's Secret. Videogames understand the worth of this like no other medium and use it to turn regular rooms into something irresistible. Secret rooms. Some are better than others, of course. So here are our Top 7 secret rooms in video games.

Traditional wisdom suggests that fictional superstars never change. Bugs Bunny, Homer Simpson and Superman, for example, have endured for decades with more or less the same appearance. They never age, never look incredibly dated (save for a few misguided revamps that die off) and consistently appeal to a new generation. The same can’t be said for videogame characters, though.

As a technology-based medium, game heroes and villains cannot remain the same. They must constantly evolve, or risk looking “last gen.” That doesn’t mean the new or old designs take precedence, it just means no developer will ever, ever leave its creation alone. Now, with decades of console history to pull from, let’s take a look at the “old” designs and see how they stack up against their modern equivalents...

So that's it, then. After six years the epic Lost comes to an end in pretty disappointing style. If you've yet to see the finale, just take comfort that it doesn't end up all being a dream of the dog. Still, the fairly crushing finale got us thinking about equally epic games that ended on a disappointing whimper. And all the titles inside are either guilty of rubbish, anti climactic endings or deeply underwhelming last levels/ bosses.

Last night I finished Just Cause 2. My lasting memories of the game will be its incredibly beautiful world, the massive array of brilliant vehicles to drive/pilot and the amount of stuff you can mindlessly blow the shit out of. But there'll be a sadness there too. Despite these thrills the boss battles kicked me hard in the balls due to their unbelievably mundane, by-the-numbers exploits. So what is it with game’s frequently missing the target with boss fights?

There are ways to die in a game and there are ways to die. Being horrendously, but heroically squashed under a size 400 foot as we single-handedly fight a giant robot with nuclear weapons. Now that’s a respectable way to embrace gaming death. Having our hero get done in by birds, spiders or a bad case of the cold (like in the following collection of games)? Yeah, not so much. So join us as we doff our gaming hats and monocles to

Let's face it, the public doesn't want originality. The public wants first-person shooters on 360, fitness games on Wii and pirated copies of anything else because the risk of buying something unfathomable is too high. It doesn't want LittleBig Planet (despite Steven Fry), couldn't give a damn about Okami despite all our best efforts, and thinks Rez HD is a sleep disorder you get from those newfangled tellies.

But while some games are