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

44. Satan (Devil's Crush)

Every videogame needs a villain. Every videogame with a villain needs a final boss. This is a facet of game design that there's just no working around. Even pinball games need final bosses, and the geniuses at NEC who crafted Devil's Crush understood this rule to the letter. It's how they implemented their understanding that blew minds and left streaks on all of our underpants: you are inside the villain. Not only that, you are a pinball inside the villain. Never before has something like this been attempted in a game, or otherwise so well-implemented. It's presumable that no game-maker has ever had the heart to try to compete with Devil's Crush's "Pinball Your Way Out!" gameplay. Perhaps no game-maker has ever thought of a better thing to call a pinball plunger than the "Spring of Justice." Perhaps they see that, once you've got Satan as a final boss already laid out and coded, there's just no competing. And what a fearsome face you find within Satan's belly -- bash the innocent, demure, female head over and over again with your silver ball, and the serpentine visage beneath is revealed. Throw in heavy-metal tunage and addictive gameplay (unlimited balls, anyone?), and you've got one uber-villain body you don't mind being trapped within.

43. Shion Uzuki (Xenosaga)

Japanese animation and comic books have been, traditionally, for the last thirty years or so, primarily about two things: lesbians, and giant robots. Never were these two things combined until Namco's groundbreaking, controversial 2002 RPG Xenosaga.

Xenosaga stars troubled, far-away-from-home scientist Shion Uzuki. She wears glasses. She's something of a bookworm. She dresses in the same clothes every day. One of her coworkers in a laboratory on board a starship has a crush on her, and is always pondering asking her out on a date. In a little twist seldom seen in videogames, Shion isn't interested, and not just because the guy's not her type -- because she's something of a lesbian. Her lesbian status is smoothly and calmly hinted at throughout the game's running time. It is a true, sensitive account of a conflicted female mind, as she falls into an uncomfortable, life-altering love -- whilst saving the universe.

In a twist seldom seen in Japanese lesbian literature, Shion Uzuki's love interest is the cold, mechanical, unfeeling KOS-MOS -- yes, a robot. And a female robot, at that. The story has its share of love scenes, to be sure. None of them are as shameless as some younger gamers are probably hoping, and that's more than okay with this author: the game is cultured, and smooth, and deftly avoids shamelessness. Movies like A.I can ask the question "Can a robot love?" Xenosaga, one of our first true examples of videogame literature, merely takes it one step further, and asks, "Can a robot love sexually?"

If you want the answer -- play the game. You're not going to find any spoilers here. Children read this site, you know. It is, after all, about videogames.

42. Protoman

In the early days of the Super Nintendo, many critics complained about the stagnation of the Megaman series. Each new Megaman game before then had introduced a whole new list of bosses to battle; it wasn't until Megaman X that the lackadaisical attitude Capcom had toward inventing these bosses was revealed in full: as if putting "~Man" on the end of the name of each boss wasn't enough, now Megaman's creators were making robotic villains out of animals. We had to face mammoths and tigers and penguins now, instead of "~Men." Well, this all changed when Protoman was introduced in Megaman X2 (called "Rockman X2" in Japan), winning back the hearts and minds of MegaFans everywhere. Chris Kohler writes in his upcoming book, that "Protoman exemplified a videogame archvillian in many ways: for one thing, he looks a lot like Megaman, except he happens to be red, and not blue. Add shades, and you get something that is immediately recognizable in the deepest cognitive centers of our brains, where information regarding cinematic memories is housed, as a true enemy from the future." Kohler forgets to mention Protoman's laser sword, long scarf, and flowing blond hair, and that's alright -- the code that lets us play as Protoman in Megaman X3 still causes us to quake from fits of badass-witnessing today, a whole decade later.

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