PSP Features

In less than 48 hours, Microsoft's E3 2010 press conference will kick off four days of non-stop videogame insanity. We'll be there for the duration, reporting on all the latest news and announcements as fast as our withered fingers will allow, but before we fully dive into that madness, let's take a couple of minutes to look back five years at E3 2005.

Why? Because we still have the pictures. And because it's always fun to go "zomg I remember when that game came out."

Mark Hamill unleashes a fiendish cackle that simultaneously sounds like skin ripped from flesh and fingernails dragged across corrugated iron. If the bowels of hell have a soundtrack, this is it.

Amongst the games, press releases and bulging envelopes of cash curiously marked '9/10, yeah?' that we receive from publishers each day we also get clothing. Mainly T-shirts of random ill-fitting sizes. And they fall into three categories: Outdoors, Indoors, and Bin.

Some games simply must have cooperative play. Gears of War, for example, was clearly designed with a co-op experience in mind – there are two main characters on the same mission with the same abilities with a strong personal bond. Blasting through the story with a friend lets you partake in that bond, which is a much more powerful experience than plain ol’ deathmatch or CTF.

There are two types of gamers: the ones who love explosions, and the ones who love explosions in 1080p at 60 fps. Whether you’re a fan of shooters or strategy games, 8-bit or HD, we still all share the common appreciation of a good bang (ha, you WISH!). To show our love of all things that go BOOM, we’ve collected some of videogames' most epic explosions and set them to a bangin’ soundtrack.

Because we enjoy making graphs, looking at graphs, and talking about graphs so darn much, we decided to do a little research experiment. Our goal was to discover which numbered entry in a game series (not the number of games into the series, the actual number in the game’s title) is most often the best. Is it scientific? Not in the least, but it still might surprise you.

Video Games and facial hair have long had a close bond, be it the soul patch on the Prince of Persia, Gordon Freeman’s goatee, or the five o'clock shadow on every single character made with the Unreal 3 Engine. But while most games have people (mostly men) with some bit of hair growing beneath the nose but above the mouth, there are too few with just a mustache adding character to their faces.

Game developers are wrong about 90% of everything 83% of the time. I know, because I’m a super-expert on facts. My dad invented facts. So hold on to your sugary carbonated bevorage, uncross your legs and take your left hand off your face, because I'm about to drop a straight-up 10-megaton truth bomb on this bitch. All the subjective bullshit and “artistic license” that game designers cower behind is polluting the hard facts...