Bayonetta's hardly a realistic woman. Her legs are probably twice the length of her body, she's disproportionately slender and yet possesses a butt that her character modeler confesses to having spent a lot of time getting "perfect."

Nor is she demure; Bayonetta fights enemies with the same magical hair she wears as clothing, which means vigorous combat leaves her naked. She blows kisses to break through magical barriers. She's constantly nursing a small lollipop, suggestively, for little apparent reason. Oh, here we go, video games are exploiting female sexuality again, right? Not so fast.

Game director Hideki Kamiya is known for distinctly stylizing his action games. The Devil May Cry franchise has always been about flair that often goes comically over-the-top, and characters that make players feel powerful just by virtue of how cool the heroes look.

Just when you thought Microsoft wasn't freakishly interested in nabbing timed exclusivity for high-profile game add-ons -- wait, why would you ever think such a thought? -- we find out at CES that the company has made sure Xbox LIVE will receive the initial Modern Warfare 2 DLC packs first.

We'll have to wait until we get closer to the DLC's spring release to find out more details, but for now, we can look back at what's been said by Infinity Ward on the add-on front. Have you guys been clamoring for some additional Spec Ops missions? I hope so, because that'd be something I can get behind.

It seems like a lot of fans also want multiplayer maps (duh), although interestingly enough it sounds like many would opt to pay for their favorite Call of Duty 4 maps in order to relive the fun in Modern Warfare 2. There are two add-ons announced so far, so these guesses might not be too far off base.

It's hard not to start playing BioShock 2 without thinking about it as one of the most unnecessary sequels in gaming. It is easy, however, once playing has begun to recognize it as a very promising game.

Lop the boss battle off of the original BioShock and the 2007 game would seem to be just about perfect. It was a novel dive into a failed Objectivist utopia called Rapture. It was a philosophical exploration of free will played as a first-person shooter designed to accommodate a player's tactical ingenuity. It introduced one of the great and weird new relationships in video games, the life-force/Adam-draining Little Sisters and their monstrously powerful protectors, the Big Daddys.

And aside from that final boss battle, BioShock ended well enough that nothing could improve it, not the addition of a 2 at the end of the title, not the tacking on of multiplayer and certainly not the opening title screen that credits twice as many studios for the sequel (four, none of which are the series' founding studio, 2K Boston).

PC gamers everywhere rejoice! The DirectX 11-powered Games for Windows LIVE edition of DiRT 2 is now available in stores for $39.99, just in time for the holidays. Put this one on your wish list! Codemasters takes advantage of DirectX 11 features to add to the realism of the racing environment. Hardware tessellation further improves the appearance of water and other surfaces as well as crowd animations. The performance of Shader Model 5.0 aids in creating an even richer 3D experience, enhancing key image quality parameters such as depth of field, ambient occlusion and shadows. These DirectX 11 features have produced the most exciting and visceral racing experience yet.

The Engineer combat class makes its return in Mass Effect 2, and BioWare has injected a few new abilities to make things more interesting.

As before, Engineers possess a roguish finesse and approach battle in a more roundabout manner than most. In Mass Effect, these guys were Tech Specialists who focused on supporting the party by disabling weapons, debuffing enemy shields, hacking mechanical enemies, and even healing the party. There's still the tactical focus in the sequel, but they can now take a more direct approach by summoning combat drones, set foes on fire, or freeze and shatter them.

We'll likely be seeing more class highlights will be released before the game comes out January 26, 2010.

Most netbooks aren’t blessed with the same excess horsepower as current desktops and conventional laptops. In order to keep your system running to its full potential, it’s important to select applications that are easy on resources. You don’t want to needlessly overwork that Atom processor, do you?

One place you can save CPU and RAM usage is your antivirus program. I’ve found three options that are perfectly suited to netbooks, providing an excellent level of protection while keeping the impact on your system to a minimum.

While it’s not quite as light on Windows XP, if you’ve got a newer Windows 7 netbook (or one of the few running Windows Vista) MSE is an excellent choice. Like other traditional antivirus programs, MSE needs to download definition files to your PC to identify viruses. Scans are fairly fast, can be scheduled, and it’s been tested to detect about 98.5% of malicious files. The most common knock against MSE is its lack of any kind of heuristics-based protection, but the jury is still out on just how effective that type of defense is anyway.

Cor, big gaming news: EA have announced Medal Of Hono(u)r is to return next year, all up-to-date and modern. What they’ve done here, you see, is they’ve taken a popular WW2 series and updated it to present what I’m going to call “modern warfare”. And frankly, good. Because I liked the Medal of Honour games even if they weren’t quite the most cutting edge, and the splendid Medal of Honour: Airborne was lost in the noise of Call of Duty’s reinvention. You should buy it. Although not at that price — cripes — that’s what it cost new! But to the new game. So, what do we know so far?

The game, named only Medal Of Honor, is planned to arrive some time in the next year, and to be set in the most contemporary of settings, Afghanistan. Set to be jam-packed with war for the foreseeable future, Afghanistan is 2010’s Iraq. It’ll be interesting to see how the game handles this, whether with sensitivity or balls-out realism.

It’s been in development for a while, the secret somewhat blown last month, and EA now explain that “Tier 1 Operators from the US Special Operations Community” have been consulting on the game since it was first conceived. They are, I’m reliably repeating, super-soldiers who work under the National Command Authority. They’re elite types, and so presumably get involved in the more interesting campaigns.

Seriously, how awesome have the past few hours been? Engadget turns the design stakes up to 11, Google finally dishes the dirt on Chrome OS, and now you can even download the forthcoming software to have a fiddle with yourself. It's completely free, though you'll need VMWare running atop a Windows, Linux or OS X installation to make the magic happen. Naturally, we've been considerate enough to provide download links for everything you'll require at the source below, so get those fingers clicking.

...We've had a chance to have a quick and dirty snoop around Chrome OS and our early conclusions are rather predictable. This really is a browser with an OS attached rather than vice versa. You get your tab-based navigation up top, and the focus is of course on the internet, with minimal option buttons on the far right and app launchers at the top left. Unfortunately, in order to access the more interesting apps, one requires a Google.com login which we do not have, so we were stuck gazing at only the Gmail and Calendar applications. They act and function much like their online counterparts, but for the significant lag and choppiness that may be attributed to the still very early stage of development or the fact it's running on a virtual machine.

Yup. You read that right. Modern Warfare 2 PC now has dedicated servers.

Wait, PC gamers! Before you send Bobby Kotick a thank you letter, know that it wasn't they who did it, but rather the gamers who took Infinity Ward and Activition's attempts to lock down the game as a challenge. And bring it those gamers did, managing to hack in the developer console and enable the ability to set up dedicated servers. Keep in mind, the game hasn't even been out a week.

Perhaps some of the boycotters caught playing the game were not being hypocrites, but rather hard at work turning the highest-profile shafting of PC gamers right around, as the video below might demonstrate.

Just as a FYI. (Click for the full thing)

According to "internal Activision estimates", Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 didn't just have a good launch, it had "the biggest launch in history across all forms of entertainment".

This claim is based on sell-through sales, with Activision bean-counters reporting the game managed to pull in $310 million in its first 24 hours on sale. And that's not a worldwide number, that's just in North America and the UK. $310 million. In a single day. In three countries.

Sure, games cost more than a movie ticket, but $310 million in 24 hours is still a mighty impressive number, regardless of the admission price.

Just picked up from Richard Cobbett’s twitter, it appears that Interplay are re-releasing Planescape Torment. Its release date is listed as the 30th October and the price is a — not-much-change-from-the-nature-of-twenty-quid — 17.99 of your Earth pounds. In fact, it appears to be a whole load of Interplay other material too. It’s a surprise to see a decade-old game released at a mid-range price… but it’s also one that I find hard to argue against. A game that’s still placing high in all-time lists, that’s been unavailable for years, that goes for full-price when it turns up on eBay and hasn’t been superseded in any way. If the gaming equivalent of the Beatle’s price never going down and this means that Dan Gril has no excuse but to finally return Alec’s copy to him. Hand it back, you bast.

It's not often that the two most popular operating systems get major updates so close to each other, so we couldn't resist throwing them into a cage match together. Already we can hear some of you screaming that Snow Leopard isn't a major update--we know this one's personal! But is Windows 7 nothing more than "Vista done right"?

This is the operating system that Windows Vista should have been. Windows 7 is gorgeously designed, without sacrificing functionality; it prioritises security, without constantly interfering; it performs well, without demanding hardware; and it does what Microsoft has promised all along - simplifying everyday tasks and working the way you want.

DirectX is the most important interface between the graphics card and a computer game. It is this API that allows game developers to write their code without having to worry too much about the hardware in the gamers’ computers.

More than 60,000 supporters thus far have shown up to petition for dedicated "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" servers following Infinity Ward's confirmation over the weekend that it would use a player-to-player matchmaking system, much like what's used for Xbox Live and PSN play. The program, called IWnet, provoked responses from PC server supporters, eventually resulting in the petition directed toward Infinity Ward.

"Get Infinity Ward to review their decision not to allow fully dedicated servers for their forthcoming game release 'CoD:MW2," the petition, titled "Dedicated Servers for CoD:MW2," reads. "Remember that this 'Call of Duty' was made popular by PC Gamers who have supported the series throughout."

Infinity Ward's community manager Robert Bowling confirmed for the BASH podcast that "Modern Warfare 2" would opt for a more console-like experience during online PC play with their IWnet direction.

A German advocacy group has organized an event designed to get participants to bring their “killer games” to in order to dispose of them in a trash can.

Aktionsbündnis Amoklauf Winnenden, or Action Alliance (loosely translated), has setup the event for this Saturday, October 17 in front of the Stuttgart State Opera. One game tosser will win a signed jersey from the German national soccer team. No word on what will be done with the “donated” games, but presumably they will be smashed or discarded in some way.

Australia's long nation nightmare of maybe not being able to play Left 4 Dead 2 may soon be over, as the government's media ratings board has apparently issued the zombie shooter a rating of MA-15+.

That would essentially mean an end to the "ban" on Valve's PC and Xbox 360 sequel and translate into "good news" for our Survivor friends down under. No word yet on whether Valve's appeal was successful and/or if the company had to submit the edited version of the game for the Australian release.

Now that the cat is out of the bag and Disney Epic Mickey has been revealed to the world, we thought it would be a great time to explore the world of Warren Spector. No, not the dark, shadowy world gamers are used to. The world that Spector has been living in his whole life. From birth, he was destined to work in the Magic Kingdom. From wearing mouse ears at just a year old to owning a second house filled with rare memorabilia, it’s safe to say that Disney is in his blood.

With the formation of Junction Point, Spector has been handed the task of reimaging the most recognized cartoon character of all time. While that’s no easy task, it starts to become clear after watching our video interview why the invaluable property is in good hands.

The Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords Restored Content project has entered open beta after years of development.

Instructions and download locations can be found on the Deadly Stream forum (spotted by EG reader Garthy).

The Restored Content project - as the name suggests - aims to reinstate much of the lost content found on the KOTOR2 disc but not in the game itself. The one year that developer Obsidian had to make a bigger and better sequel simply wasn't enough - that much was apparent at review.

In this mod, over the course of 36 (!) maps, the zombies will dynamically evolve. The players will be able to upgrade their abilities using a lite RPG system. It's got a storyline, complete with new voiceover recordings. There are also survival maps that balance digging in to take a defensive position and running for your life.

Keiji InafuneThis is probably not the message you would want coming out at the end of the giant industry trade show that's supposed to be glorifying your native talents, but at the Tokyo Game Show earlier this week, Capcom's Keiji Inafune (creator of Mega Man and Dead Rising) shared his starkly damning assessment of the Japanese games industry: "it's finished."

The comments were made during an event showing off Dead Rising 2 (via Destructoid), where Inafune asked the attendees for their honest opinions of what they had seen at the show so far. Then, he shared his own: "Personally when I looked around [at] all the different games at the TGS floor, I said, 'Man, Japan is over. We're done. Our game industry is finished.'"

Only Bungie can get away with throwing a random string of letters after their game's name. Halo 3: ODST? Overdose street? Outdoor, sexually transmitted? Oddest? Of course, the Halo faithful know ODST stands for "orbital drop shock trooper" and everyone else eats up all things Halo, no matter how overpriced they are, much less the letters and numerals on the box. ODST is a sure-fire success. It's also a disappointment.

There are no long hallways and there is no torturous narrative. You don't have to escort anyone and you don't have to deal with your warthog gunner not being able to hit anything. There are no pre-placed snipers. There is no time limit. Master Chief himself is nowhere to be seen. You and up to three friends pick one of the eight maps and then hold out as long as you can while randomized waves of aliens assault you, gibbering and growling and hucking grenades and flanking you and dying obligingly to leave an assortment of guns scattered at your feet. It is Halo's Greatest Hits, The Condensed Version.