Discussion: who's your favorite videogame villain?

In most games, you play as the hero, and the hero prevails. But of course, a good hero’s tale would be nowhere without a good villain. Who is your favorite gaming nemesis?

Mary-Anne: N from Pokemon Black & White. N is the most complex villain I’ve ever encountered in the Pokemon video games. He’s not evil. He just has a dream, although he is passionate enough that he doesn’t care who is hurt in the process of fulfilling that dream. Even though you end up battling him near the end of the game, it never once feels like he is truly evil and deserves to be stopped, unlike how Team Rocket was portrayed in the first couple of games. To top it off, N is pretty damn dashing, and no Pokemon trainer is going to say no to a one-on-one date in a ferris wheel with him where he goes on a very serious soliloquy about his dream.

Chris: Yeti (from Ski-free): What makes a good villain? Some are 100% evil, some have gripping back stories, some even have personalities we can relate to, but they all have something in common. They all fail. At some point, no matter how awesome the villain, the hero ends up thwarting whatever plans he or she may have had. Not my favorite villain though. The Yeti from Ski-free has everything it takes to be the perfect villain. He is evil, has no purpose in life but to ruin your ski trip, and to top it all off he doesn’t fail. He always catches, and then promptly devours the hero. I can’t think of a better villain than one that never fails.

Xairylle: Magus (from Chrono Trigger): Say what you will, but I was young when I played Chrono Trigger with my cousins and Magus was the villain we were scared of because we had no idea how to deal with him at first. It didn’t help that we were playing a Japanese copy and none of us knew how to read Japanese. In that sense, Magus felt more like a rival to me than an actual villain. His character background and development is also interesting. He has a dark personality, and is so ambitious that he will betray those who have taken him in to achieve them. Despite this, he is, in fact, very concerned for his sister and would have been an adorable little brother minus the dark and gloomy attitude.

Iain: Andrew Ryan (from Bioshock). Andrew Ryan has got to be one of the most complicated villains ever. He has crazy free-market politics that make Ayn Rand look Maoist, and he is almost completely amoral in his methods. Anything can be bought and anything can be sold in Ryan’s land, people are judged on their financial achievements and those without are blamed for their lack of work-ethic. Ryan’s voice echoes through the damp, corpse filled corridors of Rapture, declaring those without jobs to be parasites and those on the surface to be the slaves of the parasite. In one particularly memorable passage he talks about how the American government one tried to take a forest from his land, to make it available to all, so he burnt it to the ground. Ryan is an extremist, a demagogue, and a murderer, but his charm and charisma make him a suave and worthy adversary.