Video games are known for letting us mere mortals wield ludicrous amounts of power. You are the Master Chief, the Free Man, or the Chosen One, destined to save mankind and somesuch. Over the course of your journey, you unlock increasingly spectacular weapons and abilities. A crowbar gets replaced by a rocket launcher, a puny fireball becomes a gigantic meteor. Eventually, however, things get a little out of hand.

Overkill doesn't begin to describe the magnitude of these video game moves. Each one has the power to end all life as we know it - but only deals 9999 damage. They're breathtaking the first time you see them, but after repeat viewings they leave you wondering about the unspoken consequences. Is it really worth calling down a world-ending meteor strike just to knock off a few random monsters? Whatever you decide, here are the seven most destructive moves that casually end all life as we know it.

Nothing elevates a small-arms skirmish into an international incident faster than nuclear arms. Deploying Call of Duty's tactical nuke is a bit like pulling a gun during a knife fight. It announces to everyone that "shit just got real" and this little tussle is officially over. After calling down the thunder, a ten-second timer appears on the screen, accompanied by an air raid siren. A blinding, all-encompassing flash of white soon follows, and, in the immortal words of '90s metal band Drowning Pool, the bodies hit the floor.

Detonating a tactical nuke is an automatic win for both the user and his or her team, no matter the current score. Of course, everyone dies in the process and the area they were fighting over becomes irritated wasteland, but let's not split hairs. Let's also not split hairs about the long-term environmental impact of nuclear detonations of any size or potential loss of human life in and around the impact zone. You won the match, dammit, and that's what counts.

I'm not sure which would be more destructive to the Earth: the detonation of a small, nuclear warhead or the impact of two giant meteors. And in a way, I'm thankful for that. Naruto villain Madara Uchiha possesses one of the most excessive attacks in the entire series. It's play out in three steps, though it really could stop at step one: imprisoning the opponent inside a giant tree. Step two: a giant meteor descends from the heavens and crushes the magic tree (along with the person inside). Considering this would literally kill anything you'd think the attack was over. But no, it keeps going.

Step three: a second, larger meteor suddenly appears and smashes into the first (which has already smashed into the foe) causing a massive explosion (why?) that would likely blast the entire planet back to the ice age. Little piece of advice: if you have to measure your opponent's strength based on the number of world-ending meteors you need to drop on their head, the maybe it's time to put diplomacy back on the table.

The Novalith Cannon is a giant space gun that fires giant space bullets at planets - like an old six-shooter on an intergalactic scale. Like most strategy game superweapons, it's insanely expensive and wildly impractical to use in an actual game. These arguments feel moot, however, when you're on the receiving end of its bombardment, watching your worlds get reduced to space rubble in two shots.

It's interesting to note that, according to the Sins of a Solar Empire Wiki [LINK], the Novalith Cannon used to have a glitch where it would crash your game if you fired it at one of your own planets. This unintentional safety switch has since been fixed, though I'm not sure if that's really a good thing. As with any firearm, never point the Novalith Cannon at something you don't intend to destroy.

Ah yes, Dragon Ball Z, now here's a cast of characters that knows how to blow up a planet. Namek is the obvious example, but it seems every couple of episodes someone starts screaming about how they're going to blow up the Earth or how they can't let an attack hit the Earth. Towards the end of the series, Super Buu even has a move straight-up called Human Extinction Attack that does just what it says. But let's talk about Broly and his Gigantic Meteor, the attack linked above.

That explosion at the end is freaking huge. Just look at the size of it - and that's the view from space. It's like the size of all of North America. Now, I'm no scientist, but one would assume if the planet was racked by a continent-sized blast like that there would be some repercussions. Massive earthquakes would ripple across the surface, and the amount of dust and particulate matter thrown into the atmosphere would surely usher in a new ice age. But hey, at least Broly won the fight.

Planetary Annihilation is a massive strategy game on a celestial scale, with marathon matches that can take hours - or even days - to finish. But when it finally comes time to call it quits, nothing shuts your opponent down faster than the Annihilaser. This game-ending weapons transforms a specific type of planet into your very own Death Star. It takes ages to build and massive amounts of resources, but once finished this super weapon can vaporize an entire system of planets in mere minutes.

Stopping an Annihilaser rampage is difficult to be sure, but not impossible. One option is to strap a bunch of continent-sized rockets to a nearby moon and ram that sucker straight into it. Yes, that's absolutely something you can do in this game, and it's just as glorious as it sounds. Though, you have to wonder what sort of future is in store when entire planets start getting destroyed wholesale.

Now we really start getting into crazy territory. For those unfamiliar, Super Robot Wars is a long-running series of turn-based strategy games in Japan. Most of these games bring together dozens of popular characters and robots from various anime series, but a handful of these games are comprised entirely of original characters. These "original" games also tend to be the most outrageous when it comes to overpowered attacks, as the developers aren't beholden to any sort of source material.

Enter Shu Shirakawa and his giant robot, Neo Granzon. Shu's strongest attack is to have Neo Granzon generate three micro black holes which it then smashes together with its robot hands to form a single, violent energy orb. Shu then softballs the orb at his opponent, and when it detonates the resulting blast can be seen engulfing the entire universe. And then the two just pop right back into the fight and keep going. What? How is this even a fight when one person can literally end entire realities?

Lo and behold. We have arrived at what is possibly the most over-exaggerated attack in the roleplaying genre - nay, in the entirety of gaming. After transforming into some sort of angel-cloud-monster-thing, Safer-Sephiroth, the penultimate boss of Final Fantasy VII, unleashes his ultimate attack: Super Nova. This move summons a comet that tears through the Milky Way galaxy, destroying multiple planets before detonating our sun. The resulting blast consumes both Safer-Sephiroth and the entire party in the hellfire of an exploding star.

And then he does it a second time and a third time. Enough already, the Milky Way can only handle getting completely annihilated so many times. It doesn't help that this attack takes several full minutes to complete, enough time for a quick bathroom break, grab a sandwich, and file your taxes. It's also a testament to how far Cloud and the party have come: one day they're terrorists blowing up power plants, the next they're having someone explode stars in their face.

Okay, forget this entire list, we have the one true winner right here. All others pale in comparison to the Chaos Dunk, a jam so powerful and destructive it led to the Great B-Ball Purge and the B-Ball Removal Department. Famed b-baller Charles Barkley is one of the few to have successfully performed a Chaos Dunk, though the fallout had a damning impact on b-ball and the future of humanity.

For more great GamesRadar+ content be sure to check out .

One of the best ways to tell a game you love it is to play on the hardest difficulty. It's a show of commitment, a sign of willingness to learn the in's-and-out's of a game in exchange for an engrossing challenge that'll blister your thumbs and rattle your brain. And only a select, dedicated few ever attempt such a feat - let alone succeed. Just look at any global achievement or trophy rankings if you don't believe me. Hell, most players don't typically finish the game in question, regardless of difficulty.

Each entrant on this list has accomplished something most players never will. They stand alone, stoic and proud, having faced horrors and surmounted challenges that have destroyed so many others. But where do you fall within these hallowed halls? Nearly every game out there either has some crazy achievement to unlock or is just innately difficult. Which one rises to the top as your crowning gaming achievement?

Ninja Gaiden is like a Shakespearean romance: beautiful, but cruel and unfair and with a really horrible camera system. Maybe that analogy doesn't work. Point is, Ninja Gaiden isn't just hard because of its unrelenting, swarming enemies and overpowered bosses. It's fundamentally broken - and staying with a broken game is diamond-on-diamond hard. Keeping track of Ryu Hayabusa’s jumping, spinning frame as he runs along walls means the slob on the camera gets left behind, clipping and pin-balling against the environment, trying its best to keep up. Learning the camera’s limitations is just as gruelling as mastering the actual game - how and when to block, exploiting enemy patterns, and budgeting my spend in the shops. Coming out of a fight with an inventory full of potions was a symphony of controller, man and game, with each playing its own movement.

Getting all of this right (or at least learning the technical limitations) was beyond satisfying, and there are parts of this game that are forever burned into my cortex. This was complete mastery, a stubborn, defiant 'up yours' to a gremlin - the sodding camera - that threatened to tank one of the greatest action games ever made. I loved you, Ninja Gaiden, but what should I have expected? The course of true love never did run smooth.

The Game Gear version of Sonic 2 is insane. It's identical to the already-tough Master System version, only there's one crucial difference: the zoomed-in viewpoint. This may make Sonic big and detailed, showcasing the 8-bit handheld's power, but it also makes it impossible to react to anything ahead of you. Maybe Sonic Team forgot during the conversion that 8-bit Sonic 2 also features one of the most ludicrous spring sections in any game ever. Single springs, hundreds of feet apart. No way to see them coming. With insta-death in-between. That's probably why you can rack up countless extra lives in Green Hill Zone. You really need them.

So I actually 'learned' Sonic 2. The exact cloud tiles under which lay an invisible spring to reach a Chaos Emerald way up in the sky. How many microseconds I had to release the d-pad in order to scrub enough speed to reach the next platform in Green Hill's boss level. The sequence of pipe direction changes to beat the boss. I did it all, got all of the Chaos Emeralds, finished the secret level and saved Tails. Can I do that today, some 23 years later? NOPE.

"What," I hear you cry, "the game where you play as a small, sticky blob? The charming LittleBigPlanet-alike where you build the soundtrack as you collect little happy notes?" Yup, that’s the one. The one with Death Mode. The practically impossible Death Mode that must be completed in its entirety in order to gain a shiny platinum trophy. And I wanted that trophy. Badly. So badly that I think, somewhere in the darkness, part of my brain is still playing Sound Shapes.

Twenty unique mini levels unlock once you’ve completed the main campaign. The goal is to collect a number of randomly placed notes within a time limit, dodging various deadly hazards: 20 notes in 30 seconds, 19 notes in 37 seconds, you get the idea. There’s no way to cheat, and no tips. It's just you and your thumbs. Facing death over and over again, I reached a zen-like state. I would do levels 50 times in one sitting. And yes, I won in the end. My last level was Aquatica: a hell spawned combination of underwater flight and spinning blades. I don’t think I could even speak when it was over.

While it may not be a full game, BioShock Infinite's Clash in the Clouds DLC is definitely the hardest stand-alone dollop of game I've ever played. While its baseline goal is pretty simple - clear a given stage of all enemies to advance, rinse and repeat - in a fit of unquenchable achievement thirst, I decided to attempt the Blue Ribbon Challenge.

For those who haven't heard about this study in gaming masochism, it works like this: every stage has a Blue Ribbon condition, where you're rewarded with a bit of colorful digital fabric for abiding by a specific handicap. Sometimes it's easy ("Defeat all enemies with the shotgun"), sometimes it's tricky ("Defeat five enemies with a single Devil's Kiss blast"), and sometimes it's so punishing and exact that you'll want to rip your hair out and eat it because you've gone a bit over the edge. We're talking challenges where you have to make specific enemies kill themselves with a specific move while airborne, or spend ten minutes picking off baddies with environment traps and then lose because two guys shot each other at the last second. Oh yeah, and there's SIXTY STAGES! And yet, somehow, I pulled it off after hours of incredible adversity, ripping victory from the putrid pits of failure. I AM THE BEAST OF AMERICA!

Crushing difficulty doesn't add new variables to Uncharted 2's environmental puzzles, and it doesn't make the wall-scaling, cliff-leaping exploration segments any more death-defying. Actually, that second point isn't entirely true, because you are dead if an enemy catches you climbing that lamppost. Crushing difficulty lets baddies absorb more damage, making fast and frequent headshots essential to your survival, and lets any shmuck with a pistol drop you after a few shots, meaning you either find cover or die outright.

One of Uncharted's common criticisms is that it devotes too much time to stop-and-pop gunfights. I totally agree, but I love Uncharted 2 so much that I still felt compelled to bump up the difficulty and start over every time I finished. Thankfully, Crushing isn't too bad once you learn to always stay near cover, but that final battle / hide-and-seek match with Lazarevic was almost too much - almost. I have a Gold Trophy to prove I could do it, which, according to the timestamp, I earned at 4:19 on a Sunday morning. Priorities.

Imagine if Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Rastan had a baby. Now imagine that baby leaping out of its crib, knocking you to the ground, and putting you into a headlock until you blacked out. That aggressive little tyke would be Volgarr the Viking, a hardcore 2D platformer that takes after its brutal forefathers with gameplay that demands your absolute focus. The magnificently bearded protagonist Volgarr takes after Capcom's Sir Arthur in all the best ways, from his weighty, fixed-trajectory double-jumping, to his power-ups (found in hidden chests) that shatter when you take a single hit. If you lose your fire sword and sweet steel shield midway through a level, you may as well jump headlong into the nearest lava pit.

Volgarr's difficulty curve is the best kind: seemingly impossible at first, but full of patterns and predictable enemy movements that you'll pick up on after the first dozen or so deaths. And like a Super Nintendo cartridge with no battery saves or passwords, quitting out means restarting the whole shebang from scratch. Or so I thought, because if memory serves, I finished the game completely oblivious to the fact that you can resume your progress by simply walking to the left at the beginning of each stage. Oh well, still worth it.

This throwback downloadable is one of my all-time favorites, even if it's the most taxing title I've ever completed. The game is agony and ecstasy: the pain of dying dozens, even hundreds of times in the same brutal stage, followed by the joy of finally completing it. Super Meat Boy starts with a modest challenge, then escalates to the point where I'm very close to smashing the controller.

Super Meat Boy's fake-out finale was the moment when I nearly gave up. I spent close to two hours trying to beat what I thought was the last stage, and I was near tears when I beat it. Then SMB goes all Metroid on me, surprising me with an 'escape the exploding stage' challenge. The whiplash of emotions had me cursing the Heavens so loud that I'm surprised my neighbors didn't call the police. It's a credit to the game that I pushed through my rage to ultimately beat the game and about half of the new game +.

"I made it to Shredder in the original TMNT :( But gave up and didn't beat it."

Sophia's story of struggle and loss is a somber tribute to all those who have fallen short of these trying challenges. And, to be fair, we all have more failures than successes in the realm of gaming, but it's those very same failures that make our achievements shine that much brighter. So, what about you? What is the most difficult game (or in-game challenge) you've ever completed? Let us known in the comments below.

For an added challenge on GR+ look up .

One of the best ways to tell a game you love it is to play on the hardest difficulty. It's a show of commitment, a sign of willingness to learn the in's-and-out's of a game in exchange for an engrossing challenge that'll blister your thumbs and rattle your brain. And only a select, dedicated few ever attempt such a feat - let alone succeed. Just look at any global achievement or trophy rankings if you don't believe me. Hell, most players don't typically finish the game in question, regardless of difficulty.

Each entrant on this list has accomplished something most players never will. They stand alone, stoic and proud, having faced horrors and surmounted challenges that have destroyed so many others. But where do you fall within these hallowed halls? Nearly every game out there either has some crazy achievement to unlock or is just innately difficult. Which one rises to the top as your crowning gaming achievement?

Ninja Gaiden is like a Shakespearean romance: beautiful, but cruel and unfair and with a really horrible camera system. Maybe that analogy doesn't work. Point is, Ninja Gaiden isn't just hard because of its unrelenting, swarming enemies and overpowered bosses. It's fundamentally broken - and staying with a broken game is diamond-on-diamond hard. Keeping track of Ryu Hayabusa’s jumping, spinning frame as he runs along walls means the slob on the camera gets left behind, clipping and pin-balling against the environment, trying its best to keep up. Learning the camera’s limitations is just as gruelling as mastering the actual game - how and when to block, exploiting enemy patterns, and budgeting my spend in the shops. Coming out of a fight with an inventory full of potions was a symphony of controller, man and game, with each playing its own movement.

Getting all of this right (or at least learning the technical limitations) was beyond satisfying, and there are parts of this game that are forever burned into my cortex. This was complete mastery, a stubborn, defiant 'up yours' to a gremlin - the sodding camera - that threatened to tank one of the greatest action games ever made. I loved you, Ninja Gaiden, but what should I have expected? The course of true love never did run smooth.

The Game Gear version of Sonic 2 is insane. It's identical to the already-tough Master System version, only there's one crucial difference: the zoomed-in viewpoint. This may make Sonic big and detailed, showcasing the 8-bit handheld's power, but it also makes it impossible to react to anything ahead of you. Maybe Sonic Team forgot during the conversion that 8-bit Sonic 2 also features one of the most ludicrous spring sections in any game ever. Single springs, hundreds of feet apart. No way to see them coming. With insta-death in-between. That's probably why you can rack up countless extra lives in Green Hill Zone. You really need them.

So I actually 'learned' Sonic 2. The exact cloud tiles under which lay an invisible spring to reach a Chaos Emerald way up in the sky. How many microseconds I had to release the d-pad in order to scrub enough speed to reach the next platform in Green Hill's boss level. The sequence of pipe direction changes to beat the boss. I did it all, got all of the Chaos Emeralds, finished the secret level and saved Tails. Can I do that today, some 23 years later? NOPE.

"What," I hear you cry, "the game where you play as a small, sticky blob? The charming LittleBigPlanet-alike where you build the soundtrack as you collect little happy notes?" Yup, that’s the one. The one with Death Mode. The practically impossible Death Mode that must be completed in its entirety in order to gain a shiny platinum trophy. And I wanted that trophy. Badly. So badly that I think, somewhere in the darkness, part of my brain is still playing Sound Shapes.

Twenty unique mini levels unlock once you’ve completed the main campaign. The goal is to collect a number of randomly placed notes within a time limit, dodging various deadly hazards: 20 notes in 30 seconds, 19 notes in 37 seconds, you get the idea. There’s no way to cheat, and no tips. It's just you and your thumbs. Facing death over and over again, I reached a zen-like state. I would do levels 50 times in one sitting. And yes, I won in the end. My last level was Aquatica: a hell spawned combination of underwater flight and spinning blades. I don’t think I could even speak when it was over.

While it may not be a full game, BioShock Infinite's Clash in the Clouds DLC is definitely the hardest stand-alone dollop of game I've ever played. While its baseline goal is pretty simple - clear a given stage of all enemies to advance, rinse and repeat - in a fit of unquenchable achievement thirst, I decided to attempt the Blue Ribbon Challenge.

For those who haven't heard about this study in gaming masochism, it works like this: every stage has a Blue Ribbon condition, where you're rewarded with a bit of colorful digital fabric for abiding by a specific handicap. Sometimes it's easy ("Defeat all enemies with the shotgun"), sometimes it's tricky ("Defeat five enemies with a single Devil's Kiss blast"), and sometimes it's so punishing and exact that you'll want to rip your hair out and eat it because you've gone a bit over the edge. We're talking challenges where you have to make specific enemies kill themselves with a specific move while airborne, or spend ten minutes picking off baddies with environment traps and then lose because two guys shot each other at the last second. Oh yeah, and there's SIXTY STAGES! And yet, somehow, I pulled it off after hours of incredible adversity, ripping victory from the putrid pits of failure. I AM THE BEAST OF AMERICA!

Crushing difficulty doesn't add new variables to Uncharted 2's environmental puzzles, and it doesn't make the wall-scaling, cliff-leaping exploration segments any more death-defying. Actually, that second point isn't entirely true, because you are dead if an enemy catches you climbing that lamppost. Crushing difficulty lets baddies absorb more damage, making fast and frequent headshots essential to your survival, and lets any shmuck with a pistol drop you after a few shots, meaning you either find cover or die outright.

One of Uncharted's common criticisms is that it devotes too much time to stop-and-pop gunfights. I totally agree, but I love Uncharted 2 so much that I still felt compelled to bump up the difficulty and start over every time I finished. Thankfully, Crushing isn't too bad once you learn to always stay near cover, but that final battle / hide-and-seek match with Lazarevic was almost too much - almost. I have a Gold Trophy to prove I could do it, which, according to the timestamp, I earned at 4:19 on a Sunday morning. Priorities.

Imagine if Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Rastan had a baby. Now imagine that baby leaping out of its crib, knocking you to the ground, and putting you into a headlock until you blacked out. That aggressive little tyke would be Volgarr the Viking, a hardcore 2D platformer that takes after its brutal forefathers with gameplay that demands your absolute focus. The magnificently bearded protagonist Volgarr takes after Capcom's Sir Arthur in all the best ways, from his weighty, fixed-trajectory double-jumping, to his power-ups (found in hidden chests) that shatter when you take a single hit. If you lose your fire sword and sweet steel shield midway through a level, you may as well jump headlong into the nearest lava pit.

Volgarr's difficulty curve is the best kind: seemingly impossible at first, but full of patterns and predictable enemy movements that you'll pick up on after the first dozen or so deaths. And like a Super Nintendo cartridge with no battery saves or passwords, quitting out means restarting the whole shebang from scratch. Or so I thought, because if memory serves, I finished the game completely oblivious to the fact that you can resume your progress by simply walking to the left at the beginning of each stage. Oh well, still worth it.

This throwback downloadable is one of my all-time favorites, even if it's the most taxing title I've ever completed. The game is agony and ecstasy: the pain of dying dozens, even hundreds of times in the same brutal stage, followed by the joy of finally completing it. Super Meat Boy starts with a modest challenge, then escalates to the point where I'm very close to smashing the controller.

Super Meat Boy's fake-out finale was the moment when I nearly gave up. I spent close to two hours trying to beat what I thought was the last stage, and I was near tears when I beat it. Then SMB goes all Metroid on me, surprising me with an 'escape the exploding stage' challenge. The whiplash of emotions had me cursing the Heavens so loud that I'm surprised my neighbors didn't call the police. It's a credit to the game that I pushed through my rage to ultimately beat the game and about half of the new game +.

"I made it to Shredder in the original TMNT :( But gave up and didn't beat it."

Sophia's story of struggle and loss is a somber tribute to all those who have fallen short of these trying challenges. And, to be fair, we all have more failures than successes in the realm of gaming, but it's those very same failures that make our achievements shine that much brighter. So, what about you? What is the most difficult game (or in-game challenge) you've ever completed? Let us known in the comments below.

For an added challenge on GR+ look up .