Viva Pinata

The first Viva Piñata was a bit magical. Your bright, cheery piñata garden was a pleasure to gaze upon and tinker with as you saw fit. With a steady trickle of new piñatas to woo into your lush sanctuary, you could set yourself to work building a utopia or simply sit back and enjoy watching nature unfold.

Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise continued the piñata-nurturing, garden-building tradition, but felt more like an expansion than a sequel. If a third Viva Piñata is ever announced for 360 (we're not counting Party Animals), we want to see a proper balance this time between maintaining the core piñata gameplay and adding enough new content to make it feel like a fresh experience...

If there's one thing Big Bird, Elmo and that weird-ass thing that lives in a bin have taught us, it's that you can never judge a book by its cover. Take the following cute-looking game worlds, for instance. If they were pieces of literature they'd have bunnies and sunflowers on the cover... and then the pages of Mein Kampf inside. Yup, these virtual universes may look serene and adorable, but in reality, they'd be hell to live in.

Sometimes, games are so good we say they're 'good enough to eat'. That's usually not strictly true, of course - DVDs, Blu-Ray discs and the human mouth do not mix. But what if games were turned into candy bars? Now there's an idea.

If our Photoshop attempts are anything to go by, there's a huge market of untapped potential just waiting for some entrepreneur to take a lucrative bite. Just try not to dribble on the keyboard,

Have you ever seen Google Street View in action? It's incredible, and already coming up with some amazing images... it's a wonder the world survived without it. But we've spotted some more familiar faces in the passers by.

Can you spot them too?

We collect a lot of gaming merchandise at GamesRadar. While we buy some of it ourselves, one of the perks of working in the industry is that a week rarely goes by without some new item of promotional gaming paraphernalia finding its way to our desks. And generally it's a pretty even mix of awesome and crap

In case you missed TalkRadar 28 (and shame on you if you did), we couldn’t fathom why Giant Bomb awarded MK vs DCU a five star rating (their highest score). That led to forumites on both sites to start a-feudin’ an’ a-fussin’ about integrity and other such nonsense, so we simply called Jeff Gerstmann up and now you can hear the results of said conversation. Hint: we’re bitter enemies now.

Admit it - you’ve thought about choking quite a few videogame characters to death. Whether it’s an annoying sidekick or a particularly tough boss, there’s no denying that the urge to bust somebody in the mush hasn’t seized you. There are a lot of deserving punks we could put into this article - but the most aggravating offenses come from the cutest characters. Those fluffy types just there to make a game more