Easter is the time of year when gamers try to break the world record for Most Peeps Crammed in Your Mouth. Easter is also the time of year when Christians thank Jesus for dying a horrible death to keep them out of Hell. To honor both traditions, we present six video game characters who sacrificed their lives for the greater good. Reflect on their nobility as you stuff your face.

Like the rest of the gaming world, the 2D-X crew can’t wait for the release of Epic Mickey. The upcoming Disney Interactive Studios title reminds us of all the good things Disney games used to represent–straightforward controls, creative platforming elements, quality music, excellent graphics, and most of all fun. To celebrate Disney’s return to quality video gaming, we’re taking a look back at the top 10 2D Disney video games.

Vampires are taking over. They’re dominating TV (True Blood, Vampire Diaries), the box office (Let Me In, Vampires Suck) and taking a serious bite out of pop culture (I refuse to name Stephanie Meyer’s crapfest – even though it did introduce me to Florence and the Machine). Still, the video game industry was ahead of the curve on this blood-sucking trend. Here are the five best vampires in video game history.

If you haven’t heard of The Expendables and you grew up in the 80s, take a gander at the trailer. It’s everything that was awesome about ’80s action movies–overstated muscles, explosions, bad one-liners–crammed into one (hopefully) glorious ass-kicking fest. To celebrate that awesomeness, the movie’s Facebook fan page features an 8-bit game based on the movies, which is as badass as the premise of the movie, right down to the chiptunes soundtrack.

Listen up, ya mugs. Rockstar Games puts L.A. Noire out on Tuesday, see? If you can’t wait till then to take on the mean streets of Los Angeles, check out these six noir pictures. They’re dark, bleak, and believe the world is out to get them. They’re also the best ever made. Don’t agree? Go sleep with the fishes.

The ending’s a doozy.

Episode 8 of Mortal Kombat: Legacy is the second part of the Scorpion / Sub Zero samurai film Kevin Tancharoen threw in his web series. Except now it’s more of a ninja film ‘cause it’s packed with fight scenes shot like 70s kung fu flicks, complete with gonzo edits and crash zooms.

If you’re reading this without watching the episode, please scroll up and watch. I’ll be talking about the ending heavily and I don’t want to spoil it for you. Got it?

Episode 7 is the first of a two-part samurai film. Call it Crouching Tiger Hidden Snowball. It opens on a quiet forest, covered in snow, with bare trees framing a cloudy sky. We meet Hanzo Hasashi (Ian Anthony Dale), ace assassin of the Shirai Ryu who’s so good with the kunai that he’s known by his nickname: Scorpion. He trains with his young son and has dinner with his wife, worried over the impending visit of the shogun and the boy’s desire to be an assassin. He’s summoned to the castle early but is lured into a fight with rival Bi-Han (aka Sub Zero), leaving his family and town defenseless.

THIS is Mortal Kombat.

After teasing fans with a gritty franchise reboot and delivering a web series that was nothing like it, I gave up on Kevin Tancharoen. He seemed content to pay lip service to the fans by dramatizing the origin stories of their favorite characters, and it pissed me off because Rebirth demonstrated that he could do better. Either he got enough support from those fans that he felt encouraged to do this episode, or he enjoys making me pull me hair out.

Episode 6 is all about Raiden. And it’s good.

Mortal Kombat: Legacy is not what I was promised.

I get that it’s a prequel, a filmed adaptation of the origin stories of the franchise’s most popular characters. I understand that the purpose of this series is to setup those characters for a tournament that may or may not happen in a feature film down the road. I know now that it is not a continuation of Rebirth in any way, shape, or form. What makes me sad about this is that I won’t get to see the tournament. I was promised fighting with that teaser trailer back in June. I was promised gory, hard-hitting, well-choreographed fighting violence for a gaming property that could carry a whole movie.

This series is not that. At all.

Yawn.

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Episode 4 is all about Kitana and Mileena’s background – 8 minutes of straight exposition explaining how they grew up, delivered entirely in voiceover, by a narrator that’s never identified. It’s all high fantasy, too, with darkly lit sets and overwritten dialogue played stick straight by actors in heavy costumes. The one saving grace is some Kill Bill-style animation that illustrates the occasional bloody death. Similar to the I Am Legend animated comics, the characters don’t move very much, but the lighting, color saturation, and shot composition of those sequences are lovely. Had the entire episode been done that way, I would have accepted it.