Food is great. It's tasty, satisfying and it stops us from dying. But the life-preserving talents of the world's scoffables aren't limited to simple nutrition. Oh no. Since the dawn of (videogame) time, food has been fighting, racing, rescuing and defending its way through quest upon quest, saving days and rescuing damsels all over the place without a single thought for its own use-by date.

And you thought it just sat there in the cupboard, idly waiting for its demise by your eager mouth? Then let us fill you in on the most notable sweet and savoury saviours of gaming.

After more than two decades of increasingly-curmudgeonly jadedness, we're still frequently boggled by the kind of nonsensical branding that publishers tend to think comprises a sure-fire gold license.

Batman makes sense. He's hard as granite-tipped diamond, cooler than a nitrogen cucumber, and has more awesome toys than Hamleys. M&M's on the other hand, are small pieces of chocolate. Not only is their single jaw-dropping super-power the ability to melt in your mouth, not in your hand, they can't do so much as even move, except from bag to mouth. Via your hand. Unsurprisingly, their games are a big fresh slice of poop pie, and none moreso than Kart Racing on the Wii and DS, a racer so sluggish that it seems designed almost entirely around that latter property of its protagonists.

It's more than he deserves. Seriously.

While Mario and Sonic were ruling the console-based 2D realm in the '90's, the neighbouring province of European home computer gaming bowed to the unquestioned leadership of Dizzy the egg. The thick-shelled platform adventurer romped triumphantly through countless games from Codemasters' (yes, they of GRID fame) old-school factory of digital joy, securing himself a permanent legendary status amongst misty-eyed C64 nerds.

He even achieved the semi-believable feat of managing  to pull off sampled speech on the humble Spectrum a couple of times. It sounded rubbish of course, but at the time it melted our minds.

Fried platform game heroes are the core of a nutritious breakfast. Go to work on a Dizzy.