the insert credit cold fifty: videogame icons: compiled by tim rogers -- with a foreword by chris kohler, fulbright scholar

17. Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel

It seems you can't throw a rock in a toy store these days without hitting a game that stars some kind of cartoon squirrel. We at insert credit aren't the biggest fan of Rare's Conker -- star of Conker's Bad Fur Day -- what with his game being injected full of false "maturity" (in the form of much alcoholism, gore, and nudity) when the developers' release date loomed ever closer and their game still didn't have half the personality of Banjo-Kazooie. The sex and drug use was thrown into the game -- and anyone who says otherwise need only be pointed to Rare's Nintendo 64 kart-racer Diddy Kong Racing, full of colorful, kid-safe cartoon characters, including the little squirrel in question. At the time of Diddy Kong Racing's release, Conker was slated to star in a game with an ever-changing title. In the Diddy Kong Racing instruction manual, Conker is described as "Another friend made by Diddy Kong on one of his endless adventures with Donkey Kong," and "an exploration nut who'll jump at any chance to break free of a squirrel's less than exciting daily routine. He's eager to join up with Banjo as the bear passes through." Many months after this game hit, Conker's own game was revealed to have undergone its massive, shameless makeover.

Well! We won't support that kind of thing here, for sure. So, if it's impossible to make this list without including a squirrel, we select Sun Soft's Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel, the flying-squirrel arch-nemesis of the do-gooding bat Aero the Acrobat, star of a circus-themed platform adventure. Zero is a cartoon videogame squirrel who started out evil -- as a bad ninja -- and ended up starring as the hero of his own game, Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel. Yes, that makes him a bad guy who became a good guy -- and the star of his own game. That he can also throw shuriken, and has a glide attack, well that makes him much more than just an original among cartoon gaming squirrels.

16. Irene Lewis

Irene Lewis. Many of you may be wondering just who Irene Lewis is, or why you should care about her. Well -- that's alright. Sit back, noobs, and let yourself be treated to a hardcore education.

Irene Lewis is the first love interest lady of videogames. She's the love interest of ninja Ryu Hayabusa of Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden series. She's a television reporter, a secret agent, and a gun-carrying femme-fatale, all rolled into one.

Ninja Gaiden wowed the kids on the schoolyard back in 1989 for being the first "cinematic" videogame. Tecmo's slick marketing labeled the between-level cut scenes "cinemas," and that's where we got the term from. Irene Lewis is a character we see only in the cinemas, to be sure; we at insert credit could easily give the nod to Ryu for being a badass ninja alone. Instead, for the sake of honoring a game's true driving force, we're going to have to give those same ninja-props to Irene Lewis.

After all, why did we play Ninja Gaiden? The game is so nail-hard, so ice-cold -- some could say they played out of a desire to test their gaming skills. Others are able to see the truth: we played to be able to see the cinemas between levels. Remember the cinema between levels five and six? It was almost a half an hour long! I couldn't believe it the first time I saw it -- it even went so far as to include a long dialogue between the villain and his demonic servant. We watched with bated breath. We wanted to see what would happen. We wanted to see where Ryu and Irene Lewis went next. We wanted him to rescue her. We wanted to see her apologize for shooting him. Didn't we?

Would there even be cinemas without Irene Lewis? Would they be half as interesting?

Would Japanese rock band The Pillows have written their song "My Beautiful Sun (Irene)"?

"I need you / Irene Lou / My Beautiful Sun."

Oh, and we do need her. Let's hope Tecmo recognizes our need for Irene with their upcoming Ninja Gaiden for Xbox. And maybe gives her some awesome 3D boobs, like one of those girls in Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball.

15. Bomberman

Hello Kitty. We all know the name. We all think of something when we hear the words.

"Hello Kitty." It calls to mind either the image of a small child meeting a stray cat in a neighborhood alleyway, or a cute, clean, white cartoon cat with a bow in its head and a dress on its body.

Hello Kitty is clean Japanese character design sensibility at its purest. Hello Kitty was designed neither as a comic book character, nor an anime heroine, nor a videogame icon. She was designed as a character image for stationery, cosmetics, and clothing.

In very much the same way, Hudson's Bomberman could have been a character image. Classic, with smooth, rounded body segments, Bomberman is a hardworking little guy who navigates mazes, using his bombs to clear breakaway blocks and baddies, and move on to another stage. Add the fierceness of multiplayer combat to this addicting puzzle gameplay, and you come up with a character who could have been anything else, and ended up being so much more.

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