Find a feature

Way back in January, we did what a lot of other tech and gaming websites do, and published a list of predictions for the then-new year. In this case, we predicted the games that we thought – for a variety of reasons – wouldn’t see the light of day until at least 2010, and published it under the somewhat inflammatory headline No Heavy Rain until 2010?

E3 2009 was a monster. A huge, massive, face-eating beerdemon that erased the agonizing memory of 2008’s meager, emaciated E3 from our minds with a flood of great-looking games, earth-shattering announcements, and a few quizzical oddities we never want to speak of again. After this, we mean, because some things are so good, bad, or just bewildering that you just have to tell people about them.

You've read this sort of feature before. Website X points out that Character Y looks a whole lot like Celebrity Z. Readers agree or disagree. Publish and repeat. The articles are always fun, but eventually, the same obvious choices show up again and again.

So what makes mine any different? I didn't decide these matches – an all-knowing, face-recognizing, database-searching, algorithm-crunching computer did!

The results were… unexpected.

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...

For whatever reason, you don’t see a lot of video game characters taking time out from shooting dogs or whatever to watch TV. We’re guessing it has something to do with that thing we just said sounding insanely boring, but even so, games that let us watch the characters watching TV have become gradually more common. Here are our favorites...

How many lives has your favorite hero saved? Chances are, it's probably less than those on this list. See which gaming protagonist is a savior savant after the jump...

The tragic flip-side of increasingly ambitious video game narrative is when for whatever reason (more often than not an MIA sequel) an otherwise brilliant and rewarding story goes unfinished. So we've decided to help. We've decided to get you some closure by working out how nine of these unfortunately in-limbo tales should have ended. We've even done pictures to help you imagine. 

For whatever reason, you don’t see a lot of video game characters taking time out from shooting dogs or whatever to watch TV. We’re guessing it has something to do with that thing we just said sounding insanely boring, but even so, games that let us watch the characters watching TV have become gradually more common. Here are our favorites...