Lost Odyssey

Oftentimes our Top 7 lists tread ground that no one else has covered. After all, how many other articles can you find about inanimate objects and sexy horses? But every so often we come down from our esoteric high and write about something universal, like say long-ass videogame endings.

You know the type: spiky hair, sad eyes, too many belt buckles in his ensemble to count. You might meet one or two of these guys in fighting games, or starring in a Prince of Persia sequel; more often than not, you’ll see them wangsting their hearts out in a sprawling Japanese RPG epic.

Cutscene after cutscene, they exhibit planet-shaking combat abilities and a level of indestructibility which would make God himself jealous. But as soon as you pick up the controller? The Incredible Hulk turns back into Bruce Banner and all of those showboating tricks and superhuman powers disappear into the ether.

Just why do game characters save their best tricks until we've already done all the hard work for them? Here are the worst offenders.

More and more games seem to be plucking our heart strings to great affect and eliciting a genuine sense of woe amongst players. Here we look at five recent videogame deaths that have made us appropriately gloomy for all the right reasons and ponder how they succeeded in stoking the cold blue flames of our sadness.

In 1983 you, like us, would have played a Commodore 64. It was also the year you could have picked up a copy of 2000AD in the UK, to read it for Skizz written by a young Alan Moore. Twenty-five years later, the worlds of comics and games have definitively separated in terms of experience - so why do we see so many of our favorite comic creator names appearing in the credits of certain games? Rebellion bought 2000AD and Judge Dredd Magazine, Top Cow is half-owned by Eidos and Rockstars marketers

If we decided to crown game designers as champions of their respective genres, Hironobu Sakaguchi would undoubtedly be glued to the RPG throne. Credited as the creator of Final Fantasy, which every stat-loving gamer has surely sampled in one form or another, Sakaguchi is now shaping a new series of RPGs under the label of his new non-Square studio, Mistwalker. We recently caught up with the man to discuss the recently-announced English version of his stellar Xbox 360 offering Blue Dragon as