Puberty is a bitch. Your voice squeaks. You're always hungry. And since your understanding of sex is to simply insert and remove repeatedly, you're perfectly content with having sex with a fruit pie. If that wasn't enough, during my adolescence, video games matured past nondescript red blocks to accurately flaunt hot-body pixel mistresses, meaning that I had to suddenly master the art of simultaneously stomping a goomba while rearranging my legs so my mother wouldn't notice my erection.

I had issues growing up. According to the last line, I found myself turned on by Mario.

7.) Joe and Mac

Platform: Arcade, Super Nintendo, Mega Drive/Genesis, Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, Amiga and DOS. Publisher: Elite Systems, Ltd. (Europe), Data East (America & Japan). Developer: Data East Corporation, New World Computing, Inc., Elite Systems, Ltd.

There's been much debate over the sexist imagery in video games, and how the submissive, inferior, always-in-peril female victims help form the perspective of younger gamers. This should probably lead to me adding a counter argument, but the above picture not only helps the argument, but it comes to this conclusion: breasts are worth fighting dinosaurs over.

If you're wondering where all the flat-chested girls are in the game, there are two ways of looking at it: either video-game artists abide by the philosophy of "If I'm going to bother drawing a woman, why would draw one with small breasts?" or that when the Tyrannosaurs Rex tied the stick-thin babes up to a tree, Joe and Mac just didn't give a shit.

6.) Lightning Legend

Platform: PlayStation. Publisher: Konami.

The Japanese-only release, Lightning Legend, combines elements of an RPG with adorably deformed rabbits fighting one-on-one and school girls who fling snowmen. Everyone has some special attribute. For example, Naughty floats and derives energy from his hat. For another example, Misa has breasts.

If excessive breasts does make a super power, then no one has a super power more powerful than porn-star Wendy Whoppers.

According to The X Factory: Inside the American Hardcore Film Industry, Whoppers weighed 93 pounds before breast enlargement surgery. After the surgery? 107 pounds.

5.) Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams

Platform: Arcade, TurboGrafx-16, Sharp X68000, PlayStation, Neo Geo Pocket Color. Publisher: Electronic Arts (TurboGrafx-16), (X68000), Sega (Arcade). Developer: Success.

Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams is a shooter with a witch, Cotton, riding a broom while combating cartoon fish who pop out of the water to fire bubbles. Then, just for giggles, accompanying Cotton is a handheld fairy with knee-high go-go boots and a skimpy bikini. I don't blame the developers. If I could design video games, everything I'd make would be Mariah Carey making out with Kelly Clarkson, and if you're wondering how that would work within the confines of a 2-D, shoot-'em-up platformer, it wouldn't. But I'd sure as hell would like to attempt it.

One would imagine that if the developers were bent on attracting men who'd be drawn towards this sort of thing, that teverything in the game would be a scantly-clad free-for-all. I guess they wanted the sexism to be subtle so it'd fit well into the game's environment. Which is why bikini-clad fairy is inserted into this game, so you know, she wouldn't look out of place among the talking trees and bright, child-attracting, day-care-room-like colors.

4.) Athena

Platform:Arcade, NES, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum. Publisher/Developer: SNK

Breasts are like the youngest child in your family. Despite what your parents claim, they had every opportunity to put their pants back on and simply avert it. There is a process to it. Sex doesn't just happen. Neither does drawing breasts. For a picture to resemble something other than mismatched shapes, an artist needs to plan, decorate, and shade. And for an artist to draw Athena, he apparently had to plan, decorate, and shade in C-cup breasts.

3.) Battletoads

The game wasn't the only thing that was hard.

Platforms: Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom, Amiga, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, Sega Game Gear, Game Boy, Amiga CD32 Publisher: Tradewest Developer: Rare.

I was able to resist the Dark Queen's advances on Nintendo, but her smoothed-out, 16-bit curves provided a hurdle too large to hump. It's difficult to fathom which five-year-old child the developers thought that the Dark Queen's cleavege would appeal to, considering that the main villain in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a talking brain and that worked out well for them. It was also difficult for my mother to fathom why I routinely kept the cut screens up and hardly ever played the game.

2.) Menace Beach

Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System. Publisher/Developer: Color Dreams.

Color Dreams lived up their name when they developed Menace Beach. They wanted players to live out their dreams. And kids dreamt about nothing more than skateboards. All my friends had one. They would beg their parents to buy one. And their parents would buy them one. Then the kids would loose a finger. Then they didn't have them anymore. Color Dreams recognized this and developed a game in which a kid could live out that dream of actually riding a skateboard without having a stub for a thumb.

The skateboarding child in Menace Beach is out on a quest to save his girlfriend, which, unbeknownst to him, is handcuffed to a wall with her clothes slowly deteriorating between rounds. Implying nudity to a nine-year-old player is pretty offensive. But it's the implying of nudity and the not delivering of it that is even more offensive, Menace Beach.

1.) Chubby Cherub

Platforms: Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom Publisher: Bandai Developer: TOSE.

The inappropriateness evident in this example is different than in the other examples. Whereas the previous parts were inappropriate because of the corruption of its player, Chubby Cherub's inappropriateness is because of its corruption of the model. Nonetheless, if there ever was anything that was inappropriate it was a naked baby.

Differing opinions may contend that Chubby Cherub is actually an artist's rendering of an angel, but calling it an angel doesn't add clothes to a baby. Calling it a pancake won't make it a pancake. Calling it a spider won't make it an spider. And calling your mother "mommy" doesn't make her a woman, even after the sex change.

I'm betting that this cherub is chubby in more ways than just his weight.

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