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

26. Raiden (Metal Gear Solid 2)

It will forever go down in the history of videogames as "The Spoiler": the moment of Metal Gear Solid 2 in which the player realizes he's no longer playing as mulleted tough-guy Solid Snake. When this new guy that the Colonel is calling "Snake" finally removes his gas mask, we see that he's skinny, and young, and blond. Soon, we learn that he's also whiny, to boot. He is, in essence, the perfect videogame hero of the twenty-first century. When we learn that his ex-girlfriend Rose is working mission control, things get weird. When we start to get acquainted with legendary superhero Solid Snake, things get weirder. It's all like a bad dream, yeah -- and Raiden's weak puniness represents the weak puniness of us all. The presence of one other super-spy, the one in whose footsteps we constantly tread, represents the fact that, in our lives, there is always someone better at what we do. Still, in the end, as a hero, Raiden doesn't make the top of the list because, quite frankly, he represents something of a weak, latent homosexual, and games clearly don't need any more of that.

25. Sam Fisher (Splinter Cell)

There's just no substitute for experience. Any American can tell you that. Any manager of an American Starbucks will tell you that when they tell you I don't have enough experience to work there. I'm not bitter, though. That's not to say that Sam Fisher isn't bitter, either. Sam Fisher is an older, wiser, more experienced videogame spy than we're all used to. He has salt-and-pepper gray hair, a far more experienced head-ornamentation configuration than upstart Solid Snake's boyish little mullet. Metal Gear Solid 2's Raiden sports feathery, hip blond hair -- yet that's not good enough to make him any better than videogamedom's second-greatest super spy. Sam Fisher, for one thing, stars in Splinter Cell which, in addition to being available on all major platforms, also happens to be written by Tom Clancy. Tom Clancy is an actual American with actual US Military experience. What does Hideo Kojima have? Actual experience reading Tom Clancy. By all rights, that alone makes Sam Fisher the ultimate gaming super-spy. That little wall-kick-splits move he does in a close space? That seals the can on this one.

24. TG Cid Orlandu (Final Fantasy Tactics)

Most RPGs make you work for superpowers. In Final Fantasy VII, you have to endure countless hours of Chocobo breeding and racing before you win the mighty Gold Chocobo, with which you can travel to the island in the corner of the world and win the Knights of the Round summon spell. With this spell, you can kill the final boss in a single round of combat. It's a reward for hard work, and we appreciate it. Even if all that hard work mostly bores us to tears.

Enter Final Fantasy Tactics, a strategy RPG in the vein of Tactics Ogre, with plenty of Final Fantasy thrown in for good measure. The battles are large and varied, the story as deep as that of a nineteenth-century French war novel, and the characters as human as your next-door neighbor. Final Fantasy Tactics' gameplay is so deep and varied that you might end up sidetracked, or else lost forever in fighting random battles to gain levels. You will, at some point, take to hitting your own characters during battle, to raise experience points. That is, until TG Cid Orlandu joins your party.

Each Final Fantasy installment since 1987 has included a Cid character. Sometimes Cid is a weak old man. Sometimes he's a wacky airship-builder. Sometimes he's a king who's been turned into a frog. Sometimes he's the headmaster of a school. In Final Fantasy Tactics, we see the best Cid ever: TG Cid Orlandu is a legendary knight. His son, in fact, is the one narrating our story. Cid's packaged-in sword, the Excalibur, gives him an auto-haste effect, making him able to attack three times before everyone else can attack once. He has sword attacks that can kill any enemy in the game in one hit, and even one that heals him completely while killing any enemy, and this attack never fails. What's even better is that there's no tiring, boring sidequesting in the closing hours required: Cid joins your party through a normal, unavoidable story event about three-quarters of the way through the game, just as the battles are getting ridiculously challenging. We need the pick-me-up. We need the Cid.

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