PSP Features

Videogame media has a long running habit of being misogynistic and sexist, more than willing to demean females and treat them as sex objects to satiate the lustful demands of thirteen-year-old compulsive masturbators, otherwise known as the core gaming audience. We know this is wrong, and that objectifying women in the name of traffic is both immoral and inappropriate. After all, there are plenty of men who need to be objectified as well.

We here at GamesRadar are perfectly secure in our sexuality, which is why we're not afraid to admit that there are more than a few videogame males for whom we'd happily butter the other side of the toast. Having already proven that we're not afraid to go furry, we now provide something for fellas who like fellas. Let's get some balance going...

Is Comic-Con really even about comics anymore? Not so much from where we're standing - and that, for the record, is smack in the middle of the San Diego show floor, surrounded by a dizzying array of movie, toy and videogame propaganda. If you weren't so lucky as to make it down this year, though, don't worry - we've taken plenty of photos, both of general points of interest (read: statues, props and toys) and of the best of the many, many cosplayers and booth babes we've seen, which we'll now share with you...

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...

Videogames have seen many archetypal enemies over the years, from Russian terrorists to rotting zombies. Most of these familiar faces come and go without a problem, but there has always been one type of traditional enemy that never fails to make its presence both known and regretted: Birds.

Big bastard birds, in fact. These feathery fiends have been antagonizing gamers for nigh on twenty years, providing frustration from above in every game they've ever infested. Developers absolutely love using these beaky buggers to harrass gamers, and it's high time they stopped. To stress this point, we've isolated eight of the most bastardly birds in videogame history. Read on as we give these eggy twats the lambasting they deserve...

Those who cannot remember the past, the saying goes, are condemned to repeat it. Or become the games industry. Important clause there that no-one ever quotes, but it's there, we swear.

It must be. Because for all the evolution and prgress, there are certain monumental gaming screw-ups that keep happening. No matter how face-crunching a beating the previous perpetrator took as a result, there's always another company (usually a platform-holder) waiting to prove that a balls-up can strike in the same place twice.

Six absolute howlers are detailed overleaf, so come along and ready your best pointing finger and accusationally-toned laughter. Time flows like a river... and history repeats...*

Pointy-headed intellectual types love to blather on about Joseph Campbell and The Hero’s Journey while restating the obvious but with bigger words.  So the world loves heroes, maybe even needs them. OK, we get it. During our collegiate years, while learning how to restate the obvious but with bigger words, we also read about the idea of duality (something can’t exist without its opposite.) So what about the other side of the Hero coin? We almost never hear about the ones who wussed out and ran the other way. Heroes and cowards are inextricably linked in a cosmic web of interconnectedness through which their phenomenological manifestations are mutually reinforcing and co-dependent. So let’s look under the nearest rock for some of gaming’s most cowardly characters. Prepare to be disgusted by their pathetic weakness...

Maybe we're fools, or maybe we're masochists.

After celebrating the best games of 2010 (so far) last month, we could have stopped. We could have accepted that this was already a surprisingly fantastic year for the industry, and eagerly looked forward to the rest, without ever even knowing about the dark and depressing experiences that waited on the other end of the quality spectrum.

But no. We had to wonder. We had to investigate. We had to find out which games were reviewed the absolute worst in 2010, and then share those sad and dismal results with you, our – up until this point – blissfully unaware readers. We had to go and ruin the whole year for everyone...

The budget-price Platinum range obviously wasn't budgety enough for Sony, who have released a second, even cheaper line of PSP games. You can buy them from the PSP Store at the prices below, or you can now pick up UMD versions from game retailers for about £9.99 each. Sounds good, right? Well, in short, yes. In fact, some of these prices are so good, we've worked out you can get 5 absolute classics from the EU store for just £35.95. Which five? We'll show you here.

 
Above:  Leave a comment for a chance to win a Prinny plushie, a Trinity Universe art book, and a Z.H.P. sticker!

At a recent NIS press event in San Francisco, GamesRadar was fortunate to receive some sweet prizes along with exciting news about two new PSP titles from the Disgaea team and Ar Tonelico 3 for the PS3. While we’d love to treasure these fine collectible items, it would make us much happier to share them with our favorite people in the world: GamesRadar readers.

Entering is easy, so come on in for a chance to win a Prinny plushie, a Trinity Universe art book, and a Z.H.P. sticker!

UPDATE: We are no longer accepting new entries for this contest. Winners will be announced on this week's episode of TalkRadar, which will air on Friday, July 23. Good Luck!

Videogames are frequently described as a young medium, but they’ve been through a nigh-unfathomable number of changes in the 49 or so years since SpaceWar! first lit up MIT’s campus. In that time, a lot of the terms and points of reference we use to describe games have come, gone or mutated into something wholly unlike what they originally meant. The lexicon has gotten so complicated, in fact, that it’s frequently possible to roughly guess a gamer’s age just by the references they use.

Above: Here’s a freebie: “The last game I played was Pac-Man!”

Don’t believe us? Then think about the last time you talked about a…