It's time to dedicate some time to the most amazing playable videogame characters of all time. These men and women, but mostly men, took you though hell and back, and sometimes even let you feel like some of their badass moves and attitude were somehow dependent on your puny human input.

Some of these characters took you to the heights of achievement with their stringent control requests, others showed you the ultimate coolness of their attitude, and others yet improved your lives by providing unforgettable set pieces that stay with you more than the final scene of Gone with the Wind.

There is, of course, much room for debate on which characters should make this list. There have been so many games, so many stories worth telling, and battles worth fighting, that it's almost impossible to come up with a definitive list that would satisfy all parameters. Therefore, we are going to go for three main gauges in our listing:  personality, epic stories and media attention.

We'll judge the characters by their coolness, the stories they're in, and the amount of relevance to today's gamers' short attention span... let's start with an easy one.