Over the years we've enjoyed steering some of the animal kingdom's most awesome specimens through some pretty awesome games. Banjo the bear. Donkey Kong the ape. Amaterasu the wolf. We've loved them all. But it's not always nature's most magnificent beasts that game makers deem suitable for the role of hero. Some creatures that have made the jump from wildlife to virtual life are little more than food chain filler. And this is those pathetic ...

Whether you’re looking for electronics, hardware, anime, games, or anything remotely geeky, you’ll find it in Akihabara, a bustling shopping district in Tokyo, Japan. Located just north of Tokyo Station, Akihabara is really three towns in one. It’s a haven for tech hobbyists, a paradise for anime fans and gamers, and a popular tourist destination. ...

To be called a 'fanboy' is one of the worst insults in gaming. It suggests a misguided person characterised by an irrational devotion to a piece of software or soulless mega-corporation. A person incapable of intelligent thought. A person that is a despised twat.

But wait. Let's cut them some slack for a moment and think what purpose fanboys actually serve (beyond being a dumping ground for derision). We fancied a bit of a challenge, ...

All this week our friends at 3D World have been looking at the landmark 3D titles in gaming, starting in the arcades and charting the most cutting-edge advances in 3D technology all the way to the games that we play on home consoles today.

Night Driver (Atari, 1976)

Generally held to be the very first 3D video game, Atari’s Night Driver managed to conjure a 3D experience out of very little computing horsepower by ...

We fear the unknown. Psychologists have proven that nothing troubles the human mind more, in fact, than that which cannot be predicted. Our phobias of death, darkness and strangers all stem from this single, simple truth. Apparently, so does our predictable taste in horror games. ...

Back before you were a gamer, we didn’t have the multi-button, clickable-thumbstick, solar-powered controller gizmos you have today. We used to have to invite friends over and work together to push down the A-button because it was too stiff to move on our own. If we were lucky, we’d get two, maybe three good presses in before it got stuck and Mario just had to hope the rest of the level was flat. ...

Let’s pretend, for a second, that everything bad anyone ever said about videogames was true. Why, we’d all be suicidal pixel-junkies, protected from our desperate self-hatred only by our own slovenliness! The world would be safe from our sociopathic, car-jacking, handgun-happy death wishes merely because we were too busy installing an IV drip to provide us with the powdered-cheese sustenance necessary to gain another level in World of Warcraft! ...

Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch have no tactile buttons at all for gaming. But it doesn't matter. The ‘prod mechanic’ is ideal for a platform sometimes problematic when it comes to precision controls and the simplistic, single finger approach has given us a whole bunch of addictive, immediate, accessible games. Here are 10 of the best.

Buy it from the App Store 

The Flash sensation makes a ...

Anything new and relatively untested will be subject to more misconceptions than facts. Ridiculous and sensational news reports about the seedy underbelly of Animal Crossing and batshit-insane lawyers like Jack Thompson have diluted the truth about gaming. Combine their ignorance with our own misconceptions as gamers, and there’s a lot of nonsense to sort out. We can’t sort it all out, but we can at least hit some of the bigger points of confusion with our hammer of truth and brief internet research ...

One reason we like games is that the stakes are high. The good guys are really good, the bad guys are really bad, and the princesses are really doe-eyed. But sometimes, games manage to work in villains that operate in shades of gray… and other times, they accidentally make a villain out of the most sympathetic guy in the story. ...