Bayonetta

With the recession, it's not even a given that games characters will keep spending. So we've designed some adverts for them showing off their power-ups in an irresistible light...

Since we enjoyed sharing our personal favorite games of 2010, we thought it was only appropriate to share the games that most let us down last year, the games that most drew our vitriolic ire. These aren't objectively the worst games of 2010 - they are the ones that most rubbed us the wrong way. There are even fantastic games on this list, but if everyone loved the same things, we wouldn't all be unique slowflakes in the great blizzard of life, now would we...

Just a few weeks ago we firmly held each others’ hands and danced jigs of joy for 2010’s biggest and best games. Yes, our Platinum Chalice awards were once again a festival of finery directed at the year’s brightest stars, but now come the dreaded Anti-Awards, which force a spotlight on all the bullshit games, trends and ideas we had to endure throughout the year.

To commemorate their anti-triumph, we’re awarding each “winner” with Bayonetta’s own Stone Award, the statue of a falling fat man that added insult to injury and nearly made us quit playing an otherwise brilliant game. Oh, what a day indeed...

Looking for categories like Best PSP Driving Game? Greatest Achievement in Control Layout, Artistic? Eastern European Developer Most Worth Watching in 2011? Then our end-of-year awards might not be for you.

GamesRadar's Platinum Chalices are different. We're not interested in checking off a massively tedious list of genres, platforms and technical subdivisions… we'd much rather focus on the stuff that makes this hobby, you know, fun. And reward whichever games delivered the most of that stuff.

So if you're looking for the best fan service, most satisfying gore or greatest achievement in old-school kickassery in 2010, you've definitely come to the right celebration. Let's get it started…

Every year the collective hive mind of GamesRadar picks its Game of the Year as the ultimate accolade of the Officially Annual Platinum Chalice Awards. It's very exciting. And while that's still totally happening (the Platinum Chalice Awards will be posted next Friday), this year we thought we'd take a minute to unplug from the Master Brain and give some love to each of our own personal games of the year. Long live individualism.

Sometimes, a game’s plotline can surprise you. Awhile back, we posted a story called the top 7 games with mega plot twists you never saw coming that showcased seven brilliant “gotcha!” moments in gaming history. This is not that story. No, this story is a celebration of the unsubtle and clumsy, a compilation of those games whose plot twists were so thinly veiled, so heavy-handedly, elbow-in-the-ribs foreshadowed, that everyone and their grandmother figured it out ten minutes in. The only people fooled by these swerves were people who called it, but second guessed themselves, thinking, “Nah, it can’t be that stupid and obvious, can it?”

Yes it can, friends. Yes. It can...

Virtual children are undoubtedly worse than the real thing. Diminutive, shrill and noisy, you can’t even send them to the naughty step when they’re misbehavin’. We’re used to solving our videogame problems with violence, but due to standards of ‘good taste’, that approach isn't generally allowed with young-uns. Often voiced by high-pitched women because kids can’t act, they also tend to look…weird – like shrunken adults. Because of this, we’ve put together a list of youngsters in games whose toys we’d love to take away, but can’t.

A bad game port is just like an ageing beauty queen. Sure, you can tell she was kinda hot before the ravages of age crushed her looks and her spirit, but those qualities are pretty hard to see under all the cosmetic surgery and cheap mascara. The words we just done typed also relate to games… eh, just replace the reconstructive surgery with crippling slow down or terrifyingly bad pop-up. Just like the aforementioned imaginary GILF, these games were all once great. Well, until the botched facelift/half-assed ports.

Hello loyal GamesRadar readers. And the other folk who just so happened to stumble over here for our back-catalogue of booth babes. It's the time of week where your ears are treated to the beautiful tones of the TalkRadar UK team as they attempt to fill you in on all manner of things from the gaming universe. "Like what?" we hear you cry. Like this we answer: Gamescom news, your answers to question of the week, and much much much more...

 

Bayonetta’s “Fly Me to the Moon (Climax Mix)” just might be the perfect battle ballad. This is a good thing, because a heroine with shotguns strapped to her shoes and a bad habit of licking lollipops needs a soundtrack that rocks. Whenever Bayonetta’s busy sending angels to hell, the electrifying tune refuses to sit quietly in the background. Like Bayonetta, the song really stands out - and fights for your attention as you try to focus on chaining hair whips and pistol punches together to punish anyone stupid enough to look at you the wrong way.

But how did an American jazz standard from the 1950s evolve into one of the best musical companions to lusciously long combos? Find out as we track the history behind Bayonetta’s powerfully poppy battle song…