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

47. Chef (Burger Time)

People who know Japanese culture will tell you, in very few words, why Japanese cartoons and comics are better than American ones: because Japanese comics can be about anything. American comics always feature superheroes dressed in spandex, with names that always end in "~man." Japanese comics aren't always about superheroes -- in fact, they're almost never about superheroes. There are Japanese comics about fishing, golf, tennis, go (a Chinese board game), and card-battling. In this same way, the Japanese minds at Data East created the ultimate pacifistic alternative to swashbuckling heroes like Pitfall Harry and violence-braving Frogger -- the Chef from Burger Time exists simply to make hamburgers, in what one might call the first and greatest action puzzle game ever. Sure, sometimes he has to avoid some nasty condiments -- and what chef doesn't? Aside from some brusque encounters, this plump little mustachioed chef is an unlikely hero, and certainly an endearing memory to anyone who's ever set foot in an arcade.

46. Pit (Kid Icarus)

In recent years, it can't be denied, games have been jumping into the realm of mythology. Look at Microsoft's Otogi, based on obscure Japanese myth of the Heian era. Broderbund's Battle of Olympus for the Nintendo Entertainment System let us cavort with the Roman and Greek gods on a major scale.

These exercises all took their heritage from Shigeru Miyamoto's Kid Icarus. In this game, you play as the plucky young Pit, a demigod boy who must traverse multiple scrolling levels in search of artifacts that will restore your wings. What is perhaps most charming about this game is its deviation from the myth on which it is based. Icarus was a young boy whose father, Daedalus, made wings out of feathers and stuck them on with wax, so as to escape from a dungeon. Icarus was warned not to fly too close to the sun; fly too close he did, and he perished.

Well, aside from the title of the game, Pit has no connection to the dead Icarus. If anything, he's a combination of Icarus and Theseus, the hero who killed Medusa. Yes, the final boss of Kid Icarus is Medusa, and you defeat her in a hardcore horizontal-scrolling shooting segment. Before that, you'll battle many foes -- like the dreaded Eggplant Wizard -- with nothing to do with Greek mythology outside the pillars that frame the games fourteen luscious stages.

Now seventeen years after the original game's release, some fans, many of whom who have never played the original Kid Icarus, will whine about its deserving a sequel. For a game character to leave that kind of impression on a person who never played the game -- well, that resembles my relationship with Konstantin in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Videogames, becoming literature, you say? I'd say so.

45. Irene Louis

Irene Louis. Many of you may be wondering just who Irene Louis 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 Louis is the first lovely 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 Louis 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 Louis.

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 news report scene.

Now, the final question: would there even be cinemas without Irene Louis? 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.

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