The Top Five Sexiest Female Sidekicks

It's difficult to find a true "sidekick" in a video-game and far more difficult to find one that's female. For the purposes of this list, a sidekick is defined as an NPC who participates in the experience but isn't an avatar for the player. This definition helps weed out almost all traditional RPGs whose party members you control at one point or another (mostly during turn-based battles). While soldier games (particularly the most recent spate of them) are chock-full of sidekicks, this is a list of the sexiest females so those strapping soldiers will have to wait for the all-male review. Fighting games are also out for the same reason as typical RPGs. Finally, princesses in need of rescue aren't really participating in your adventure and therefore don't make the cut. This begs the question: how many games even feature a female sidekick at all? Well there's Mass Effects 1 & 2 which feature a bevy of attractive ladies (both human and alien) enough to populate this list. But we're taking one candidate per franchise so that leaves four slots open. Read on to find the results.


5: April O'Neil (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)
April O'Neil has filled various roles across the two decades since she first graced consoles back in 1989. More often than not, she has been the damsel in distress, motivating the Turtles to leave their pizza parties and wallop some Foot. She was also a playable character in the Smash Brother's rip-off of 2009. But it is her performance in TMNT: Turtles in Time that puts her in at the number five spot on the list.


April has certainly changed a lot over the years. Originally a sassy computer programmer, she seems to have grown younger and younger as the years have gone by. They heyday of her sex appeal came with the Turtles animated TV show (and attendant Turtles in Time videogame) where she was sporting a yellow jumpsuit. While the modern-day April might not race any motors with her baggy jeans and thug-appeal, her early-90's look combined with her sidekick status in Turtles in Time nets her the fifth position on this list.


4: Ashley Graham (Resident Evil 4)
Ashley was both the damsel in distress as well as your companion through your harrowing escape from Los Illuminados in RE:4. While not the offensive tour-de-force Leon needed, Ashley still assisted with opening gates and occasionally kicking ass. Granted she also was forever getting tossed over one bad guy's shoulder or another and getting antsy if you were beneath her on a ladder and aiming skyward. But she was a trooper till the end and managed to stay sexy-prep through the entire ordeal.


3: Cortana (Halo series)
Halo's AI program Cortana emerged a sex-icon with the original Combat Evolved. Granted, her rapid ascension to this status was fueled in-part by Halo's popularity but there's no denying her place among the sexy female side-kicks. Part damsel-in-distress, part voice-in-your-head, and all sass, Cortana won our hearts early. Looking back on it now, it seems like Bungie didn't realize the sex-appeal of their Jane (Orson Scott Card reference anyone?). It wasn't until the fanboys had spoken that Cortana was self-consciously portrayed as an object of desire in Halo 2. But her place on this list was assured, in part, by the character that was developed in Combat Evolved. Cortana is the quintessential best friend tomboy that we fall for, the girl-next-door archetype downloaded onto a data chip that we were happy to jack into the back of our helmets.


2: Rachel (Ninja Gaiden)
Unlike the preceding entries on this list whose roles skirted the line between sidekick and damsel in distress, Rachel was all kick-ass. (Notwithstanding a brief slip-up which landed her elevated spread-eagle, waiting to be rescued by Ryu.) And, more than any other sidekick on this list, Rachel was self-consciously sexified. Battling demons in an indescribable S&M-inspired leather one-piece? Check. Winding up covered in demon-drool that might as well be swimsuit shoot oil? Check. Rachel didn't tantalize us like April's exposed collar-bone or Ashley's chaste pantie-protection. And Rachel didn't win us over with her mind like Cortana's witty nagging. But she wasn't about pretense. She was a sex-kitten and a sidekick, earning her place at number two on our list.


1: Samara (Mass Effect 2)
As mentioned in this list's introduction, the Mass Effect series boasts an impressive number of sexy sidekicks. So why Samara? Why not Miranda or Liara? (Typing this highlights the prevalence of open-vowel monikers for the vixens of the ME universe. Was Bioware consciously appealing to the momma's boys in their fan base? Or is applying linguistic philosophy here a touch too heavy for the top five sexiest female sidekicks list?) Samara beats out the rest of the ME NPCs due precisely to her untouchablility. The forbidden fruit is the sweetest and Samara embodies the woman who is totally out of our league. She's older, she exhibits complete poise, and she could probably throw our skeletons right out of our bodies if we got on her bad side. It is precisely for this fact that she takes the number 1 spot on this list. She is the vanguard of the next generation of females in the constantly evolving videogame universe: one who will never need rescuing but will instead rescue us.

The Top Five Hyped Games of the Last Decade

The years spanning 2000 - 2010 have been some exciting ones for gamers. There have been a boatload of great titles in the decade that saw 3D gaming start to hit its stride. There have also been some serious flops, some half-flops, a whoopie cushion, and probably the odd bell clanging.

But this top five list isn't concerned with either the successes or the failures. This is a list dedicated to the top five most exciting game hypes of the decade. Whether these games made good on their promises to deliver revolutionary experiences or fell short of the mark is of little concern to this list. This list is designed to take you back to the moments of pure anticipation when you were ready to sign away your left testicle / pap (depending on your gender) just to get your mitts on the object of your excitement.

Given that two generations of consoles spanned this decade, and given that a new console is usually the vanguard of just this sort of testicle-shedding infatuation, this list comes with one caveat: no console-launch related games are in the running. This helps weed out the Killzone 2's (technically not a launch title but certainly testicle-shedding for a few weeks due to launch-related reasons) and Gears of Wars, the Rogue Squadrons and Dead or Alive 3s.

So, without further preamble...the list! (In descending order of testicular-sheddation.)


5: The Twilight Princess Reveal

The E3 2004 trailer for the first 'realistic' adventure since Ocarina was a drool-inducing phenomenon. (The employment of the term 'realism' in this context is explicable only by the fantastic but drool-quenchingly cartoony Wind Waker.) The audience exploded into applause. Fans cried. Multiple articles were written about the trailer itself (nevermind the game it portrayed). How it was edited. Who wrote the music. Granted Nintendo tripped over its own feet in the ensuing months with distracting news about the Wii and confusing news about multiple versions of the game. But for a few precious months, Zelda ruled our hearts and minds.

4: The Starcraft II Announcement

Deciding where to place this on the list is tricky due to the focused geographic nature of the mania this announcement induced. If you were anywhere outside of South Korea when Blizzard showed the first footage of the sequel to the best strategy game of all time, your excitement probably ran somewhere from "well it's about goddamned time!" to "aw sweet! that's a must buy!" However, if you were anywhere in that darling country with the B-Boys and the cute girls, you couldn't escape this mania.

I was in Seoul when Blizzard held their event in 2007 to announce Starcraft II. I wasn't aware that the event was happening (this was during my fear and loathing days when the only pulse I had my finger on was my own) and was quite surprised to be hugged on three separate occasions by crying fanboys. I wasn't anywhere near the location of the event, showed no signs of outward interest in Starcraft or Blizzard, and am not the friendliest looking fellow. It speaks to how intense the fervor was surrounding this announcement.

3: The Project Ego Experience

Unlike the preceding two entries on this list, the game that would eventually be released as Fable did not create a splash of interest all at once. With Project Ego, Master Chef Molyneux brought the cauldron slowly to a boil and then continued to stoke the flames. While Starcraft and Zelda are notable for the excitement generated with their announcement, Project Ego maintained this excitement over the course of 2 years. The concept and hype that accompanied Project Ego's introduction to the gaming media was enough to sustain it's lengthy development process and allow Fable multi-million unit sales. Indeed, some would argue that this very hype not only paved the way for the success of the original Fable but also for two sequels. It is on the strength of that original dream, drug-induced though it may have been, that the gaming media and masses continue to overrate and over-consume the ensuing products.

2: The Halo 2 Juggernaut

Halo 2 wasn't a surprise. (If we're being honest with ourselves, neither were Twilight Princess nor Starcraft II but they still managed to shock us.) A sequel to the muscle behind Microsoft's Xbox was a foregone conclusion before the frenzy over Combat Evolved even died down. But the trickle of screenshots, the sweeping score, the teasers, the trailers, the magazine exclusives all fomented a level of anticipation that brought out Episode I-esque lines for the midnight release. Every single piece of this hype was precisely calibrated to keep the anticipation for Halo 2's release roaring at full blast. Bungie and Microsoft spent millions in marketing to assure the gaming public that Halo 2 was the end of videogame history and we ate it up.

1: The Black and White Fantasy

The inclusion of Black and White on this list might bend the definition of 'the last decade' as the flames of anticipation were first sparked in late 1999. But more so than any other game on this list, the hype surrounding Black and White in the years leading up to its release was cacophonous. And not the finely tuned hype of Halo 2 which was a top-down trickle of information into the hungry maw of the gaming public. Nor was the hype a giddy explosion of excitement like the glee of the Zelda and Starcraft II reveals. Unsurprisingly, Black and White's nearest relative on this list is Project Ego which also thrived on the hearsay of its rabid community (and also featured one Peter Molyneux as the snake oil salesman manipulating the crowd). Black and White was an idea frenzy in which everyone participated in imagining an impossible game.

The years between the announcement and the game's final release saw a vicious cycle of ideas and interpretations build off each other within the rabid fan base. Again, it was Peter Molyneux playing the impish knave, fomenting these assumptions and relishing the ideas they generated. No matter that most of the ideas were impractical or impossible to implement! It was an idea orgy in which Mr. M turned his fan base into a brainstorming machine. In an environment where nothing was discounted, Black and White took on epic proportions of hype and anticipation as it was no longer really a game but rather everyone's dream rolled into one.