Video game characters are infamous for their outlandish designs and physics defying architecture (ahem).  But any programmer worth his or her salt knows that if you really want to set your virtual creation apart from the poseurs you need one important thing: a killer ‘do.

Dave: Neo Zeed.  Or is it just Zeed?  I’m not sure, but if you played the heck out of Revenge of Shinobi for the Genesis like I did then you came to know and loathe this mightily-coiffured jackass as much as me.

He’s the final boss in the legendary side-scrolling ninja simulator and the weapon he used on you was his shuriken-proof, spinning hairpiece of death.  If you got smacked with this wig, it would do some serious damage, so you would have to get into the pattern-predicting groove.  Zeed was vulnerable when he tossed out his hair to kill you; the safest way to dispatch him was with shuriken to his stupid, bare face.  To add to the tension, your girlfriend is trapped in a room that is slowly contracting,  Death Star garbage dump-style.

Prell, my friend. Prell

Thing is, you really had only one shot.  Before you face off with him, there’s a hidden POW icon that will soup up your attacks.  Using your Roid Ninja Stars actually made short work of Zeed (once you mastered the hair dodge), but if you got hit, then it was back to the economy-grade shuriken and you were suddenly looking at a 90 percent chance that you wouldn’t be able to kill Zeed before your girlfriend got crushed to death.

The fight was exactly as lame as it sounds, surprising since Revenge of Shinobi is renowned for its awesome boss battles.  This is the game, mind you, where you fight the Terminator, Batman, Spider-man and Godzilla in a glorious display of copyright infringement.

But very few final bosses managed such a stunning combination of body and shine.

Erich: Battletoads for the NES was one of the best games of its generation. Devilish difficulty aside, it was fun, inventive, and looked great. It was also filled with all creatures slimy and gross—including toads, rats, pigs, and some sort of weird bird thing. They had quease-inducing names like “Pimple” and “Zitz,” and those were the good guys. The grossest of the gross, though, was the boss of the “Surf City” stage, Big Blag. This sweaty obsese rat tried to kill you by crushing you with its ample gut and awful hairdo. Well, the hair didn’t actually attack you, but it was certainly distracting. Luckily, there was an easy way to beat Big Blag. As long as you’d grabbed the leg off the walker robot you fought just before reaching him, all you had to do was get Blag in the corner of the screen and repeatedly hit him with it. Mashing on the attack button may have been cheap, but check out the radical ’90s coiffure in the Nintendo Power scan below and tell me he didn’t deserve it:

Steve: I submit: Albert Wesker, as he appeared in Resident Evil on the Playstation. Sure, his slick do remains pretty slick to this day, but in RE1, that mousse-job was nothing short of phenomenal.

Jon: I wore my hair like Wesker for two years after RE1, the razor sharp nature of my hair earned me the nickname “Jonic the Hedgehog”…Christ I hated high school.

There were several choices apparent to me when it came to awesome video game hair.  Solid Snake, with his Kurt Russell Ultimullet®, Heihachi from Tekken’s double mohawk, Dr. Wily, Millia Rage from Guilty Gear, who beats people up with her hair.  But in trying to find a decent (read: not pornographic) picture of Millia on the good old internet, I remembered this beauty.

What would possess a person to tie their hair in a ring?  Surely only Jam Kurodoberi, the only person in Guilty Gear so awesome that she doesn’t use a weapon knows for sure.

Adam: You guys are all so off, it’s hilarious. There can only be one winner for this contest, and here he is:

HOW is this even possible?

That’s right. Birdie from Street Fighter Alpha. Why? Because he has a mohawk with a hole in it.

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