Oh Ninjabread Man. How did your brilliantly puntastic concept go so horribly wrong? Ninjas. Sugary treats. An incongruously awesome-looking hero who could have been a cult star with funny enough scripting. You had it all. Literally everything we needed to love you.

Unfortunately, you squandered your potential by way of crappy controls, horrible platforming and origami graphics. Thus, we still await the perfect realisation of the holy grail of the sugary videogame ninjitsu. Zool came close, but we thought you had it nailed. You made us sad, Ninjabread Man. Very sad.

Though to be fair, that child should be nibbling him from the other end, to prolong the pain and avenge our disappointment more efficiently.

Vastly under-rated little chap, is Alfred Chicken. Fun, inventive and more than a little nutso, his single 1993 outing caused only a short-lived frenzy of poultry-bouncing excitement before being swamped by the platforming big guns of the era (an attempted PS1 reboot in 2002 notwithstanding).

Stunted franchise aside though, Alfred will always have a carved-in-concrete claim to fame in that he was one of the first (only?) game characters to stand in a political election. As a promotional stunt, Product Manager Karl Fitzhugh entered the 1993 Christchurch by-election as a representative of the Alfred Chicken Party, and rather gloriously didn't even come last.

Even if Alfred dies all the way to Game Over, you still win. You might be out of lives, but you will have a succulent, tasty dinner time treat to make up for it.

While originally created as a simple model with which to test Resi 2's collision detection, Capcom eventually rightly recognised the crack military hardness of bean curd and gave Tofu his own unlockable bonus game. But fear not for our squishy hero's safety amongst the flesh-crazed zombie hordes. Unlike mere humans, he possesses no meat content whatsoever, let alone delicious brraaaaiins, and so theoretically should be the perfect untouchable weapon to use against the hungry living dead.

Tofu is by far the healthiest of all Resident Evil heroes from a dietary perspective. Chris Redfield's biceps alone would turn this light summer salad into an instant protein overdose.