Silent Hill 2

There are some undeniable badasses in the world, kicking butt in the baddest and assest of ways. Take Final Fantasy X's Auron, for example: a smooth-talking, shades-wearing, longcoat-rocking snarker who can wield a huge sword with his one good arm. He is a badass, and nobody can deny it. With that perfect storm of cool, he has nothing to worry about. Other characters aren't quite so fortunate. They might not have the stylish clothes, the husky voice or tough, asskicking grit of a badass, lacking even the basic swagger found in an Auron, a Master Chief or even a Kratos. With poor dress sense, bad attitudes and physical imperfections, these characters are doomed to a life without badassery ... or are they?

Perhaps not. There are some characters who struggle through their myriad flaws to become something more, something better. Something truly badass. They don't look like they should be, but they most certainly are...

Whatever your opinion about sex in videogames, the simple fact is this: games won’t really be taken seriously as an art form until they can get certain things right, and one of those things is sex. It’s an essential component of film, music, books, paintings and even television, and yet gaming lags sadly behind.

Part of this is because games still haven’t quite shaken their kiddie-toys stigma, but mostly it’s because the rare games that try to get sex right almost never do. The results of their endless efforts tend to range from mildly off-putting to outright mortifying, with varying levels of ugliness and hilarity in between. Maybe someday, we’ll see an in-game love scene that doesn’t make us recoil in horror – but in the meantime, here are 13 that did...

Before games made the jump to CDs and DVDs, most of our favorites were shelled inside plastic cartridges of varying size and shape. Color, however, was almost universal – all NES, SNES and Nintendo 64 games were in grey carts, while almost everything else (from Sega to Atari) were snuggled up in black. On rare occasion, random games would buck the trend, arriving in a unique color that leapt out of the conformity and grabbed your eyes by the balls.

If you weren’t around for those days, this entire feature probably seems a bit silly. But for those of us who remember seeing a gold Zelda or a red Doom, there was a special, intangible moment of joy in seeing something stick out from all the other games. Collected here are all the specially colored carts I could recall, beginning with the Atari 2600 and ending with today’s DVD case equivalents...

This week's release of Alan Wake has stirred up discussion as to how it stacks up against Silent Hill 2, arguably the best game in that series and one of the strongest survival horror titles of all time. Naturally the arguments teeter back and forth (even in the comments of our review), but there's one thing Alan Wake doesn't have, and that's Akira Yamaoka's consistently moving music.

Legendary song inside, a must-hear!

Pac-Man and Mario owned the 1980s. Sonic, Lara and Snake took over for the 1990s. Their games are considered classics. Their names are timeless and iconic. Their images are burned into the memory of every gamer, even those who were born after the characters themselves.

Now we have another ten years worth of heroes, villains, sidekicks and love interests to occupy our imagination. Which, however, will remain there?

Perhaps better than any other creative medium, videogames have managed to recreate entire ecosystems of imaginary creatures and presented them in an observable context. Books and movies may offer detailed glimpses of anatomy and behavior, but only in videogames does the observer interact with organisms and experience behaviors first hand.

When he started sharing his idea of an orchestra playing music from videogames, people thought the veteran composer Tommy Tallarico was off his rocker. It took him three years to convince publishers and developers that he was sane. “Imagine me making a call to Taito in Japan, asking them for the rights for the score of [1983 arcade hit] Elevator Action. “I’d like to play the theme tune to the game at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Hello... hello?’”

They can be creepy. They can be disturbing. They can obviously be gross, gory and gruesome. Are videogames, however, really that scary? Do they truly, honestly frighten you? We don't think so, and here are 13 reasons why.

This week marks two important milestones for GamesRadar: the start of Halloweek, a weeklong series of horror-centric features, and the two-year anniversary of our weekly Top 7 lists. To celebrate both at once, we’ve dredged up the original Top 7 article - back from before we had our formula down and our shit together – and updated it with fresh art, better layout, a few revisions and videos that actually work.

With Halloween around the corner, a handful of horrifying games are being prepped to leave their pants-wetting-induced mark on your couch this fall. Some of the titles listed don’t yet have US release dates (The Last Guy, Ghostbusters, Fatal Frame), but we’re confident they’ll be hitting our shores sooner rather than later. And like any great horror game, the ones listed below require you to rely on your noggin (and a small