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...

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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...

Mario, Kirby, Samus and Donkey Kong will not appear on these pages. Neither will Ezio, Sam Fisher or Commander Shepard. While we spent plenty of time with these videogame stars in 2010, they're old. Familiar. Expected. Lovable yet predictable.

You certainly can't say that about the following 10 characters, first introduced to us over the past 12 months. They're new. Surprising. Exciting. We'd barely heard of them at the start of the year, but by the end, we couldn't stop talking about them. Or wanting to see more of them...

A good boss battle is like a fine wine. Refined, elegant in its execution and quite likely to kill you fourteen times on the spin. Wait, scratch that last one. Unusually, 2010 has seen a string of games with bosses that not only didn't suck, but actually proved to be some of the biggest highlights of their titles. So if you're keen to go back and reminisce about fighting feral tigers in casinos or popping a deity’s eyeballs like juicy grapes, keep on a reading...

Welcome one and all and very merry Christmas to you. You're probably sick of the sight of turkey by now, not to mention your relatives and the oh-so predictable Christmas TV schedule, right? Well, why not escape the sadness by tucking into a tasty special episode of TalkRadar UK.

This (rather explicit) Christmas themed edition contains a round up of the highs and lows of gaming in 2010. Fuelled by alcohol, the finest mincepies that £2.99 can buy and some pathetic Christmas crackers, the whole GamesRadar UK team are crammed into the studio to discuss their best and worst of the last twelve months.

So what are you waiting for? Come on inside and treat yourself to gaming chatter, tales of sexual innuendo and essentially five grown men becoming increasingly more drunk before your very ears. 

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.

Alfons Capone. Henry Hill. Vito Corleone. When you think of great Mafia men, these are probably some of the first names that spring to a criminal mind. Y’know, who you don’t think of? Such woeful wiseguys as Enzo from Bayonetta, Uncle Paulie from the Darkness or that idiot you whack while dressed as a doctor with Niko in GTA IV. Yup, games have constantly been starved for a decent line-up of gangsters (well, apart from the ones they nicked from the Godfather titles). Ah well, at least most of the moronic Mafioso inside end up with a pair of concrete shoes.

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.