There are several ways to gauge how far videogames have come since their bleep-blorp beginnings. You can look at graphics, gameplay complexity, or as we’re about to illustrate, how your character actually dies in the game. As technology improved, so did the deaths suffered by the myriad protagonists, eventually progressing to the point where, today, you live through that death in the first person, forced to watch your hero’s grisly final moments ...

People get pissy when stuff they consider holy is depicted profanely in videogames. Take Manchester Cathedral’s depiction in Resistance or lyrics cribbed from the Quran in LittleBigPlanet. Gamers react with their usual jaded cynicism, belittling others for daring to hold something sacred in this fast-forward age of materialistic gluttony. ...

Seeing as it took almost 40 years for movies to learn how to talk, gaming hasn’t exactly shuffled its feet. It hasn’t even been 40 years since Computer Space became the first commercial game, and what began as little more than dandruff on a black screen is already threatening photo-, audio- and physical realism. ...

As you may have guessed from our glowing review, DiRT 2 is a bit special. But while we've already shown you the incredible detail of the game and the fun you can have with the immaculate driving physics, there's one thing we haven't shown you in detail: Crashes.

So here are 101 vehicles getting into spectacular smash-ups on the Xbox 360 version of the game. Best buckle up - it's gonna get bumpy... ...

At a recent Codemasters press junket for the brilliant Dirt 2 (see the review) we were lucky enough to ride shotgun with X-Games, rally ace, Ken Block. A mega-skilled driver capable of doing this.

Of course, it wasn't going to be a traditional trundle around the UK's Silverstone F1 circuit. Instead we were thrown sideways round a course made up of fairground paraphenalia with a dirty big ...

Every game looks great in screenshots and trailers. Do you really want to wait four months before finding out the game you’ve been lusting after actually sucks and just got its face rocked off by some other game? Of course not. That’s why we’re here. We’ve played everything at E3, and this is what we’re rating each game in its current state, right here and now. Let’s get it on ...

When the hero's mistakes end the world instead of saving it. ...