Explosions aren’t always fun. Just nearly always. In no particular order, here is our top ten

Fallout 3
When you witness a nuclear bomb go off in the middle of a harmless, peaceful settlement, you’re supposed to weep tears of sorrow and despair, not tears of overwhelming joy. But that’s what happens when you complete the Power Of The Atom quest in Fallout 3. Probably the best gaming moment of 2008.

The nuke in COD 4 was a shocking moment in a truly excellent game.

Mercenaries 2: World In Flames
Mercenaries 2 is altogether a bit of a ropey game. It looks rough around the edges, the physics are haphazard at best and there are loads of bizarre bugs. However, the explosions are as awesome and as next-gen as you like. Blowing up the oil rig was especially entertaining.

Red Faction: Guerrilla
Sometimes it’s not the explosions themselves you enjoy most, it’s what happens in the immediate aftermath, and the explosions in Red Faction: Guerrilla are a perfect example of this. You fire off a couple of rockets at a building – that’s fun – but the real joy is the pause while you wait for it to
start collapsing.

Final Fantasy VII
There has literally never been a bigger explosion on the PlayStation than Sephiroth’s Super Nova attack. He summons a comet from outside of the galaxy that destroys half the planets in the solar system then makes the sun explode, taking the other half down with it. Officially one of the best things ever.

GTA IV has too many exceptional explosions to choose just one standout.

F.E.A.R.
From a distance, a mushroom cloud is just a mushroom cloud.
That’s it. We’ve all seen that before. But what F.E.A.R. decided to do differently was have you experience a massive, district-flattening explosion at street level. Having a wave of dust and debris rushing towards you is pretty exhilarating.

Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Perhaps inspired by F.E.A.R.’s explosive climax, Infinity Ward took the same idea a stage further and had you crawling around a freshly laid wasteland, having been caught in a nuclear blast. But you’re not a genetically enhanced super soldier, you’re a normal human being. So you die.
Unsettling stuff.

Grand Theft Auto IV
When we think about it, there isn’t really just one explosion that we’d single out for praise in Grand Theft Auto IV. Rockstar’s masterpiece is in this list because it features loads and loads of explosions and they are all absolutely beautiful to behold. Especially when you decide to die in one and everything goes all slow-motion and filtered.

Bomberman
Bomberman’s explosions might not be the biggest, the most realistic or the most spectacular we’ve ever seen in videogames, but in pure gameplay terms they might just be the best. Explosions haven’t been implemented in such a pure, simple and ingenious way in a game since. That’s probably the reason why it keeps getting remade.

Battlefield: Bad Company
It might not have buildings that collapse as realistically as they do in Red Faction: Guerrilla, but the bangs themselves in Battlefield: Bad Company are fantastic. They look awesome, and you always feel really shaken when something blows up nearby, largely thanks to that trademark ringing-ears effect.

Worms
Worms just goes to prove that you don’t need realistic flames and smoke, or Dolby 7.1 sound, or subtle use of controller vibration, or advanced debris physics to produce a satisfying explosion. There’s simply no substitute for sending six cartoon worms to their deaths using just one highly unstable bunch of bananas.