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Feeling sick? Nintendo has the cure for what ails you... whether it's a runny nose, aching joints, or monstrous death robots. Good, bad, and just plain weird, here's an essential list of the twelve best and brightest men to carry a Ph.D. in Nintendo-land. These are men of SCIENCE!, their coats well-starched, their jaws square, and their theories insane.

12. Dr. Wily

"Sorry about all the trouble. I'll go quietly..."

It's one thing for a video game villain to get outright beaten by the hero, but it was hard to shake the feeling that Capcom's mad scientist Dr. Wily kept losing, essentially, to himself.

Dr. Wily appeared in well over a dozen of the classic Mega Man games on a variety of Nintendo hardware, always trying to use his Robot Masters to destroy Mega Man and conquer the world. Too bad it never occurred to him to fix the main design flaw in the Robot Masters. Their weapons, you see, were modular, and Mega Man could easily run off with them once a certain Robot Master was defeated. No matter how many times Mega Man did this, it never occurred to Dr. Wily to start designing his Robot Masters differently. Even worse, Dr. Wily kept giving his Robot Masters weapons that exploited vulnerabilities in other Robot Masters. See the problem here?

It's more unforgivable because Wily clearly knew how to make robots that left Mega Man at a severe disadvantage (and didn't drop weapons for him). Inexplicably, Wily would only manufacture a handful of these designs and use them for guarding his Skull Fortress or orbiting space fortress or wherever else he was sitting on his ass, waiting for the world to conquer itself. We won't bring up the issue of their clearly-labeled weak points.

Thanks to the Robot Masters, though, Mega Man always showed up at Wily's pad with enough firepower to level a dozen Skull Fortresses. While Wily's high-end designs could cornhole a basic Mega Man with ease, a souped-up Mega Man loaded down with special weapons and energy tanks was another matter entirely. Wily refused to change his strategies, so it wasn't long before you could set your watch to Wily's humiliating defeats. Oh, Wily tried to shake things up a bit, now and again. He stole other people's robots, he forced other scientists to make robots for him, and he even stole more of Dr. Light's robots. In the end, he'd still end up groveling at Mega Man's feet.

Now, if this was just too-old, hipper-than-thou gamer grousing, it'd be one thing. Fact is, the Mega Man games themselves eventually acknowledged what a loser Dr. Wily was. In time Dr. Wily built his own, evil copy of Mega Man with an evil robo-animal sidekick. This gave the world Bass and Treble, relatively uninteresting robots that Capcom nevertheless marketed relentlessly. In one of the endings of the Mega Man: The Power Fighters 2, Bass actively calls out his creator for being such an idiot. "If you created a powerful robot like myself, it must have been an accident!" is Bass's exact line. Dr. Wily pretty much agrees with that. Wily admits Bass was the result of an awesome new power source named Bassnium, and not much more.

As if to underscore what a loser he was, Dr. Wily states this while working on what would be his final creation: Zero, the antagonist of the Mega Man X series. In concept Zero is a pretty humiliating idea for Wily to have supposedly come up with, essentially a copy of Bass modified with lovely hair and giant 16-bit spiky armor. In practice, of course, Zero became so outrageously popular in the Mega Man X games that he eventually shouldered X out of the protagonist spot completely. The X games imply that Zero did some very nasty things while under Dr. Wily's control... but we don't know what.

Mostly, we know that Zero is very angsty about it, as befits the Drizzt Do'Urden of the Reploid scene. We're left with the image of a Dr. Wily who had feet of clay and no grasp of strategy, and that's why he ranks so low on the list. Dr. Wily was his own worst enemy, and the classic example of a once-great video game villain undone by writing that just wouldn't let him break out of the repetitive mold he was stuck in. By the time Capcom noticed that there was a problem, they also noticed that it was pretty easy to make good Mega Man games without including Dr. Wily at all.

11. Dr. Fred

"Within minutes, it'll all be over! You'll be hooked up to my machine, getting your pretty brains removed!"

Now, if you want mad science par excellance, you turn to Maniac Mansion's Dr. Fred. This is the only game he appeared in, but Maniac Mansion is easily one of the most important games ever made, and has by far one of the greatest casts of characters. Even though Maniac Mansion only appeared on the NES as a port of the PC original, the port was quite popular with NES owners at the time. Nintendo Power pushed it pretty hard, and there legitimately wasn't anything else like it on the system. Granted, Maniac Mansion ended up on the NES in castrated form, but it was still one of the few humor games a kid could play that was genuinely funny.

The plot of Maniac Mansion is as follows: Dr. Fred is building an evil machine that sucks the brains out of teenagers, and kidnaps pretty Sandy Pantz to use as his first victim. You play boring loser Dave Miller, who gets to enter Dr. Fred's creepy mansion along with two friends of your choice to try and save Sandy and stop Fred.

Maniac Mansion was the pioneering adventure game, though, so you didn't just run into the mansion and start punching Dr. Fred in the skull. You had to stop him by solving puzzles, which usually involved navigating your way around Fred's insane and dangerous family by doing insane and dangerous things. Most of them involved fixing broken machines, finding hidden secrets by moving the cursor everywhere, and staying out of the way of Fred's crazy family.

Now, just how mad was Dr. Fred? So mad that his malevolence was quite literally not his fault. In one of the cooler plot "twists" of the game, we eventually find out that Fred wasn't really evil until a purple alien meteorite crash-landed in his yard. Sure, he was crazy, what did you expect from a mad doctor?

The Purple Meteor convinced Fred to build a machine that let the meteor take over his mind, and that was that. By the time we catch up with him in Maniac Mansion, Fred's been under the meteor's control for twenty years, and hasn't slept or eaten for the past five. Instead of trying to defeat Dr. Fred, a player who makes it far enough in the game to discover this ends up helping him out, by trying to free him from the control of the Purple Meteor. Doing so leads to one of the game's happier endings, out of an amazingly high number of possibilities.

In the long run, the Purple Meteor makes Dr. Fred seem like a little bit of a chump, and to some degree he was. I mean, in the PC sequel to Maniac Mansion, he showed up helping out the good guys. His former role as villain totally is usurped by his former dim-witted hench-creature, the Purple Tentacle. That and the fact that Maniac Mansion was at its crappiest on the NES keeps him farther down the list than he might be otherwise.

Still, there's an undeniable cool factor about Dr. Fred even as the Purple Meteor's patsy. He was so perfectly the image of the mad scientist that it was great fun to watch him stumble around playing video games and having totally insane conversations with his relatives while you try to break into his inner sanctum.

While he was mind-controlled, Dr. Fred was devoted to the Purple Meteor's brain-sucking agenda with an admirable passion. Charts, experiments, memorabilia-- Dr. Fred was really into the untapped potential of brain-sucking. The Purple Meteor might have controlled his mind, but he didn't control Dr. Fred's heart. That was a man who was completely devoted to destroying the teenage mind, and with far more style than usual culprits like drug abuse and Aeropostale manage.

10. Dr. Wright

"You'd better build some police stations fast"

Much like Maniac Mansion, the SNES's SimCity was arguably just a crippled port of a PC classic. Unlike Maniac Mansion, Nintendo published the SimCity port itself and put a lot of care and effort into making sure SimCity showed off the power of the SNES as well as possible. Since it was a first-party affair, the production values were great. Graphics were bright and cheerful (and better than many PC iterations), the interface made clever use of the SNES controller, and there were even some exclusive bonuses. You could have Bowser appear to destroy cities as a disaster... and you got a special advisor.

SimCity was a game that could be neither won nor lost (except in scenario mode, where games were still amazingly long). This was a concept that was overwhelming to a lot of players, and some sort of thick fat manual that explained all the rules in detail would've been just as overwhelming. The decision was wisely made to include a sort of running tutorial in the form of an advisor, who would let players know how their city was doing, explain the rules of the game, and make suggestions about how to improve the city. Nintendo's designers came up with a truly cheerful-looking little green-haired man and named him Dr. Wright, in homage to SimCity's creator and game design auteur, Will Wright.

Early on in the game, Dr. Wright is an invaluable resource. He makes clear some of the game's more unusual rules, like the utter superiority of railroads to highways. He also explains basic mechanics like how to mix various types of building zones and how to attract citizens to your new city. He even lets you know when you've unlocked something special, like a mayor's house or a stadium. Dr. Wright is also the game's main emergency alarm when your city is about to develop, or has developed, some kind of serious problem you need to deal with. Even the surprisingly sophisticated sets of graphs and charts that detail your city's progress are pretty straightforward as explained by Dr. Wright.

He usually suggests basic solutions to problems your city might be having at the moment, like excessive crime or pollution. While you wait for the solutions to take effect, he... keeps making suggestions. Really, this is the problem with Dr. Wright, and why he's so far down the list: the little bastard just won't shut up. Sometimes it feels like you could build a hundred police stations in a given part of your city, and Dr. Wright would still be whining to you every five minutes about the horrendous crime rate in your city and how you need to build more police stations. Once you graduate beyond your status as a novice player, you usually find yourself ignoring Dr. Wright completely. Even if your city was going well, his constant nit-picking left you feeling like a jerk.

Even that sense of quiet resentment turns into a positive, though. How many of us sicced Bowser on our malfunctioning cities, simply because we wanted to see Dr. Wright screaming about something more concrete than bored citizens? Oh, how satisfying that could be. Usually this ended in simply wiping out your city and starting over instead of trying to rebuild, of course. Rebuilding was hard, and if you trashed your city, you were probably convinced it was a total failure anyway. Chances are you'd start over again, try something different, and probably have a lot more fun with the game than you would have otherwise.

Would any of that been possible if Dr. Wright hadn't been such a whiner? No, it wouldn't have. Without Dr. Wright, SNES SimCity wouldn't have been half as fun or fondly remembered as it is now. Dr. Wright's even merited status as an assist trophy in the upcoming Super Smash Bros. Brawl, where he apparently chucks buildings around to fluster your opponents. He probably complains at you over how you're taxing your citizens after you win, too.

9. Dr. Lobe

"Now this may seem sudden, but I'd like to see how big your brain is!"

Dr. Lobe is the headmaster of Nintendo's Big Brain Academy games, but he has a brain-oriented agenda that would make Dr. Fred's wrinkled face twist upwards into a wretched grin. As you might expect, Dr. Lobe likes brains. Specifically, Dr. Lobe likes big brains, and he can not lie. When he sees a great big brain stuffed into an itty-bitty head, he gets... happy! So he will test you in a variety of activities to determine your intelligence. High scores = more smarter = more better = MORE BRAIN MASS. Dr. Lobe also appears in the game's multi-player modes, dishing out praise and scorn depending on how you perform, but it's really in the single-player game where his insanity shines.

Dr. Lobe's tests zero in on five different areas of brain function: Identify, Memorize, Analyze, Compute, and Visualize. How quickly (and correctly) you answer determines your score. The tests are simple pattern-matching, adding, whack-a-mole, and other things you might've done before in the student guidance counselor's office. At the end of your brain marathon, Dr. Lobe somehow manages to use your score to compute your brain mass. Study at the Academy for even a week and he claims he can make your brain weigh a whopping 1,400 grams... up from the human average of 750 grams. His main qualification for being headmaster? His pulsating 1,977g brain!

That's right: Dr. Lobe sincerely believes that the better you perform on an aptitude test, the larger and denser your brain will become. While in an evolutionary sense larger brains gave humans the ability to develop sentience and all of our badass tool-using abilities, usually factors besides mere brain size are considered more important to determining overall intelligence. You've got to admire him for being able to convince so many people to believe in his goofy brain-growing theories, though... and for all we know, something about his tests do somehow make your brain denser. I mean, when's the last time you thought to weigh your own head? Exactly. As long as Dr. Lobe doesn't offend the crowd struggling with megalencephaly and macrocephaly, his Big Brain Academy should thrive.

Still, isn't there something sort of... odd about Dr. Lobe's passion for brain matter? Why is he so interested in cultivating bigger brains? For that matter, what the hell is he? If you play the games, it's obvious he's not human... just a sort of blobby thing with a roughly humanoid shape and traditionally professorial look. While his words appear in English onscreen, his voice is a bizarre, unsettling alien babble. The game may tell you he's explaining the Academy, but for all you know, he's declaring unlawful carnal knowledge of certain relatives.

Is Dr. Lobe some sort of monster or alien? Maybe some sort of brain-man of a brain-species, trying to produce enormous wild brains for reproductive purposes? Are big brains better eating for his kind? We don't know. That lack of knowledge is what makes Dr. Lobe so chilling. He's not experimenting on other game characters like Dr. Fred, he's experimenting on you, your families, your loved ones... anyone who picks up a copy of Big Brain Academy. We think we're just settling in for a round of innocent, productive fun with the cousins and grandma. In reality, who knows what Dr. Lobe is doing to us?

Whatever his scheme is, it's far too late to stop it, and he exists beyond the power of any corporeal authority. There is no one who can save you from Dr. Lobe.

8. Dr. Andonuts

"Well, I was only offering... I'd also like a donut right now."

To be honest, Dr. Andonuts could make this list based on the strength of his name alone, and the fact that it signifies his utter lack of donuts. The fact that he's also a supporting character in the king of all cult-fave Nintendo games, Earthbound, just makes him more awesome. We also hear he's got a significant supporting role in Earthbound's import-only, GBA-only sequel, Mother 3. You can't play that game in English yet, though, so we'll just focus on how great Dr. Andonuts is in Earthbound (which is pretty great).

Before we can talk about that, though, you need to understand one thing about Earthbound: it is one of the weirdest damned games you will ever play. Maniac Mansion is pretty weird, sure, but in a B-movie, Misfits kind of way. Earthbound is what would happen if Devo wrote a video game. Parts of the game are funny, but not really laugh-out-loud funny. Instead the whole experience is faintly unsettling, the music full of the most eerie and distorted noises ever to emerge from the SNES, and dialogue as strange and artificial as... well, a Devo video.

Dr. Andonuts is an integral part of this strange journey, and that's the main thing that makes him memorable. You don't encounter him right away, the way you see Dr. Fred pretty early on in Maniac Mansion. Instead, you run into him when you recruit your third player character, Jeff. His talent is fixing and using items, a reflection of how his father is a world-famous scientific genius. The way Earthbound builds up your meeting with Dr. Andonuts makes it pretty exciting when you finally reach him. He founded the Ultra Science Club! A genius, greater than Einstein or Heisenberg! Destined to combined his skills with Brickroad the dungeon developer to create the awe-inspiring Dungeon Man, the human dungeon! With all that on his plate, it's not surprising that he has nearly no idea who his son is, and hasn't seen him in ten years.

Despite its superficial weirdness, Earthbound sticks to the basic beats of the Japanese 8-bit RPG quite well. Dr. Andonuts is cast in the role of the benevolent (if unsettling) NPC who gives you things. The stuff he gives you is strange and humorous, but absolutely essential to continuing with Earthbound until its bizarre end. This isn't a unique role in Earthbound, but the items Dr. Andonuts gives you are especially memorable (as is his surreal dialogue). Early on he gives Jeff the Sky Runner ship that lets you cruise the world freely, and later he's responsible for making the Phase Distorter item you need to finish the game.

We've seen mad science and dubious science on this list so far, but Dr. Andonuts is the first (and really only) representative we have of unabashedly weird Nintendo science. Much of this is because he's just one more denizen of Earthbound's weird little world, but part of being a memorable NPC is feeling like a natural part of the game's world. Most RPGs (even today) strive for epic narrative or ground-breaking visuals, but Earthbound was one of the first Nintendo games to really push the idea of unconventional tone and style. Back in the 90's this emphasis on experimental writing didn't really grab the main SNES audience, but now Earthbound is one of the most fiercely beloved first-party Nintendo games.

7. Dr. Lugae

"The dwarves will be annihilated with my cannons! Victory is mine!"

If you got your main diet of RPGs from Nintendo systems, then you could count on villains to be malevolent in an abstract sort of way. NPCs might tell you about problems they had because of the Big Evil Thing you'd eventually go stab, but the threat frequently didn't seem real or immediate. Final Fantasy IV, on the other hand, gave evil a chillingly plausible face and personality.

(When I played it, we called this game Final Fantasy II and it had an amazingly crappy translation. Square-Enix since went back, reinstated the original series numbering, and republished this game for the GBA with a mostly-better translation. Since, I'm mostly talking about how this game came off to SNES newbs when it dropped in 1991, I'm going to use the old terms. If you never played this version of the game yourself, think of it as a reminder of just how bad game translations used to be.)

You spend most of the game struggling against Golbez, the evil leader of Baron's military airship forces, the Red Wings. Golbez has replaced the king with a monster and proceeds to use Baron's strength for his own shadowy purposes. You're playing as Cecil, a former Black Knight in Golbez's service who's realized that something is rotten in the state of Baron.

From the outset, there's a distinctly personal dimension to Cecil's struggle against Golbez that previous RPGs lacked. After all, the 8-bit era was mostly about picking your classes and naming your own guys... which afforded the player a lot of freedom, sure, but ruled out the possibility of a character-driven story. FFIV was really all about the characters, with Golbez constantly raining misery on the lives of Cecil and your other player characters. Every time you turn around he's kidnapping Cecil's girlfriend, mind-controlling his best friend, or burning down one of your other party members' hometowns. The sheer body count felt tremendous at the time, and the race to try and save the Crystals from Golbez was very engrossing as a result.

Dr. Lugae shows up as part of the epic Tower of Bab-il dungeon, where you recruit your final player character. After Golbez tore through Edge's home nation of Eblan with the help of Rubicant, the Fiend of Fire, Dr. Lugae settled in and started practicing mad science of the same nasty and merciless variety that later made FFVII's Hojo so popular. You don't realize this when you first fight him, of course; then he just seems like a whacko with a robot buddy. The actual battle with him Dr. Lugae is pretty easy, but plays out quite dramatically. First he sics his monster Balnab on you. If you defeat Lugae first, the monster explodes and heaps damage on your party. If you don't, Lugae mounts a cockpit in his creation and fights you again as the pilot of Balnab-Z. Finally, Lugae turns into a sort of mutant cyborg-thing before going down for the count.

The full scope of Lugae's evil becomes more obvious later in Bab-il dungeon, after you've hooked up with Edge and you're trying to shut down the tower's Super Cannons to save your dwarven allies. Two monsters are waiting there, guarding the Cannon... the former King and Queen of Eblan, Edge's parents, mutated beyond all recognition by Dr. Lugae's hideous experiments. This battle is not especially difficult, but the way it plays out is pitifully sad, and totally unlike previous video game villainy. This was a lot uglier than running off with princesses or deploying vaguely menacing robots. This amounted to completely ruining a guy's life for the hell of it. Once the fight with King and Queen was over, chances were the player was as spoiling for a battle with Lugae's master Rubicant as Edge was.

This drama is all the more impressive because it unfolds in the course of a single dungeon crawl, unrelieved by any trips to the outside world. While the battles with Lugae and even Rubicant weren't among FFIV's nastier boss fights, Bab-il itself felt like a Bataan death march through an infinite gauntlet of tremendously draining random encounters. It was pretty intense, since it felt like any significant misstep could screw you completely. This was before RPGs gave players the luxury of a lot of save slots, so chances were pretty good that if you screwed up in the Tower you couldn't go back to an earlier save. Dr. Lugae ends up memorable because he works so well as part of FFIV's larger agenda of ruining its chracters' lives, and that made for some pretty compelling gaming back in the day.

6. Dr. J

"Tell Mike to dip my letter in water."

StarTropics is an amazingly wonderful and underrated game, a bit like playing the original Legend of Zelda. Just imagine that game with a more developed sense of humor and a killer yo-yo. Given that the original Zelda was already aging when StarTropics hit and the landmark Zelda III was still a few years away, it was really the only chance to play a top-down action-adventure game that Nintendo fans had. You'd think StarTropics star would've faded now that top-down Zelda games and clones are more plentiful, but this is not the case. StarTropics still distinguishes itself with its quirky writing and some really fun puzzles to solve, and its fanbase is alive and well thanks to emulation.

The protagonist of StarTropics is Mike Jones, a pretty average kid who comes to the Tropicola islands to visit his uncle, Dr. Steve Jones (a.k.a. Dr. J). After Mike arrives, he finds Dr. J has inexplicably gone missing. Determined to find out what happened to him, Mike arms himself with a yo-yo and goes out to battle monsters. Completing dungeons in StarTropics awarded you with more clues regarding what happened to Dr. J in addition to the usual power-ups, and made you feel like you were a little bit closer to solving the mystery.

Likewise, what's cool about Dr. J (other than being the uncle you wished you had) was how pro-active he managed to be, even though he spends most of the game held captive by aliens. Dr. J leaves two major clues behind for Mike to use to find him: the initial letter inviting Mike to the islands, and a note in a bottle. The former was a physical object that came packaged with the game, and was an easy way to attract the envy of your friends at school. As the quote above hints, Nintendo expected you to literally dip this real-letter in real-life water to get a certain clue you needed to advance. Nobody did this, either because they lost the letter or didn't want to risk damaging their copy. If you play the game now, you'll pretty much have to go to an online FAQ to get that particular clue.

Among the other things Dr. J leaves behind for Mike is his Sub-C submarine that lets Mike travel from island to island and his assistant Baboo, who helps Mike out of more than a few jams. Once Mike is using the Sub-C and has its Nav-Com computer up and running, he's able to home in on a distress signal Dr. J is broadcasting. Apparently, instead of sitting on his butt in a room waiting for the protagonist to show up (like everyone else who gets kidnapped in a video game), Dr. J decided to bust himself out and escape to a safe place to rendezvous with Mike. This initiative alone makes him very unusual in the video game world. When Mike does catch up with Dr. J after a long series of slightly bizarre adventures, the two are able to team-up to try and take down the aliens' boss, the hideous Zoda.

The way StarTropics's plot constantly evolved, complete with Dr. J showing up far earlier in the story than expected, was a very rare thing among NES titles. The letter stunt was irritating, sure, but back then it was cool just to see a game try something like that. It also showcased StarTropics's gently bizarre sense of humor. It's a game where you do a lot of really weird things, including a sequence where the protagonist cross-dresses to earn power-ups and a level that takes place entirely in the belly of a whale. You did all of this crazy stuff to find Dr. J, and when you did, chances are you felt pretty good about it.

5. Dr. Eggman (a.k.a. Dr. Robotnik)

"Now all I have to do is to place the Chaos Emerald in this console!"

Yeah, you may be thinking, "Wait, isn't this guy more of a Sega doctor?" With Sega out of the hardware race for good, most of Eggman's recent appearances have been on Nintendo hardware, either exclusives or multi-platform. Heck, almost all of the classic Sonic games are even available on the Virtual Console right now. Until such time as Sega up and announces the Dreamcast 360, Dr. Eggman is as much Nintendo as Dr. Wily. He's also what Dr. Wily would be like if he was remotely competent at the mad-scientist-turned-world-dictator thing.

(By the way, yeah, Sega used to call him Dr. Robotnik back in the Genesis glory days. More recently, they usually call him Eggman, so for simplicity's sake we're going to stick with that.)

What made Dr. Eggman so cool was his unusual screen presence as a video game bad guy. Guys like Dr. Wily were content to hang around their fortresses at the end of the game, waiting for the hero to eventually show up. In the meantime, you fought hordes of lesser villains... and if you sucked at a particular game, you might fail to even see the main bad guy before you moved on to playing something you didn't suck at. Not so with Sonic games, where Dr. Eggman showed up in person at the end of every world to try his hand at crushing Sonic once and for all. This meant that just about everyone who sat down to play would probably get to fight Eggman at least once.

His machines started puny and got more formidable as Sonic progressed, and you never got the feeling that Eggman was holding anything back. It really felt like every machine he threw at Sonic was the best thing he could come up with at the time, and he always seemed genuinely surprised and outraged with every defeat. The machines rarely relied on the old gaming cliche of "weak points", either. Sonic usually damaged them with his spinning jump, so you really felt like you were just tearing Eggman's boss vehicles apart the same way you buzzsawed through his goons. As the machines grew more deadly and elaborate in later levels, you really got a sense of how the danger was escalating. Eggman felt like a real threat in a way few platformer villains did.

Likewise, Dr. Eggman's methods as a world dictator were formidable and, well, sensible. Before he tried seriously trying to collect the Chaos Emeralds so he could rule the world, he always turned all the area's denizens into evil robot servants and littered the entire territory with puzzles and traps designed to slow Sonic down. This made sense, and of course it made for fun levels where Sonic bounced off of baddies like a great spiky pinball, moving at speeds previously thought unattainable by video game objects. Eggman even managed to create goons that felt legitimately dangerous, especially in the loosely-controlling 3D games.

Eggman has more or less managed go exactly as far as Sonic and become nearly as popular. He's had his own spin-off game, a Puyo Pop clone for the Genesis called Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. He showed up to perform villain duties for wacky spin-offs like Sonic Spinball. He's appeared in every single Sonic animated series and tie-in comic, which is by itself over a decade of material. He's featured prominently in Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, perhaps the ultimate symbol of his status as a video game villain. He's second only to Bowser, really, and might have eclipsed him if not for a series of bad hardware and software decisions on Sega's behalf. Compare this to Dr. Wily, who was eventually deemed a loser by his own games and completely replaced. Yet no matter how far from its roots the Sonic games have strayed, it seems like no one's ever even thought about trying to replace Dr. Eggman.

4. Dr. Light

"GET EQUIPPED WITH ITEM-2!"

This list has beat up on Dr. Wily a lot, but only because he's a total loser. He probably looks worse by virtue of having locked horns so many times with the estimable Dr. Light. Just as Dr. Wily was loosely modeled on Albert Einstein, Dr. Light took his visual and personality cues from the inventor Thomas Edison. He was affable, reliable, and always helping out if not willing to put himself in harm's way. In modern games players take the archetype of the doctor, professor, or other science-type who hands out power-ups for granted, but Dr. Light was probably one of the earliest examples of this now time-worn trope.

Unlike Dr. Wily, pretty much everything Dr. Light makes works at least as well as intended, or just needs a little upgrading to get there. This has lead to his world-wide fame as a roboticist and his in-game status as one of the holders of the Nobel Prize. His main credits are the creation of the classic Mega Man, his dust-busting sister Roll, and their robot dog Rush. Mega Man tore single-handedly through hundreds of Wily's robots, able to use their weapons as his own in addition to whatever helpful items or Rush upgrades Dr. Light sent along the way. The Items were particularly useful in the brutally hard, early Mega Man games, letting players make much needed moving platforms of various types to help them through the twisting, turning levels. The plot of Mega Man 5 actually relied on the sense of panic a Mega Man player might feel at having to take on Dr. Wily without the good doctor's helpful support. Dr. Light spends that game in captivity, with Mega Man relying on Mega Man 4's Dr. Cossack for power-ups.

Of course, Mega Man and Roll were still limited to being robots in the Asimov sense of the term, bound by the three laws and unable to harm humans. The first thinking, feeling robot was to be Dr. Light's final creation, Mega Man X. With full artificial consciousness, X would be free of the three laws and able to make his own decisions based entirely on his own feelings... which meant he could choose to turn against humans. Dr. Light ultimately kept X packed away in a diagnostic capsule, intended to be closed for 30 years while Light tried to figure out whether X would be good or evil. In fact, it wasn't opened until long after Dr. Light's death, and even then X's emergence into the world may not have been for the better.

X lead to the proliferation of other robots called Reploids, who could become deadly Mavericks if they chose to turn against their human masters in a way that, once, would've called for sinister programming like Dr. Wily's. Mavericks lead to the rise of Maverick Hunters, and all of the wonderful angst and drama of the Mega Man X series and its many spinoffs. Okay, maybe X being unearthed wasn't such a bad thing after all... for us gamers, anyway. Despite having been dead for over a hundred years before the series even stars, Dr. Light still managed to put in regular appearances in the Mega Man X games as X's usual source of power-ups and advice about how to cope with his raging emotions. Of course, Dr. Wily showed up before too long, as well, suggesting that the developers of the X series were running ever-lower on ideas.

Dr. Light is ultimately a man of little style and much substance. He's an unobtrusive if always welcome character, and you can count on one of his appearances to result in something useful for you. Although he's largely disappeared from modern Mega Man games the way Wily has, that's because most of them are working far in the future of even the Mega Man X timeline. Dr. Light still lingers as a valued grandfather figure, and in the dozens of doctors who followed in his footsteps in various Nintendo games by doling out much-needed power-ups and key items.

3. Dr. Derek Stiles

"Don't die on me!"

What's this? An actual medical doctor in this countdown?

And not just any doctor, either. When the Nintendo DS first hit stores in late 2004, a lot of people really didn't think this oddball new machine was going to make it. The launch lineup was weak and the first dozen or so games to follow were pretty uniformly terrible. It wasn't until about a year later when more innovative titles started hitting the system that the DS got hot. One of the titles that saved the DS was Atlus's Trauma Center: Under the Knife, where you play as super-surgeon Derek Stiles and try to successfully operate on patients with super-illnesses by using the DS's stylus as your medical tools. It was just the right blend of sim and pure fantasy to hit it off with gamers, and the gameplay style was simple enough to give it some casual appeal, too.

What distinguishes Dr. Stiles from all the other guys on this list is that he's the sole protagonist. Sure, Eggman's playable in a few Sonic games, but even then there's no doubt that he's just a bad guy. Even most of the benevolent doctors on this list are stuck in the Dr. Light mold, handing out power-ups and or providing background color while the hero handles the real action. Dr. Stiles, on the other hand, is the real hero. Even the Wii remake of Under the Knife, Second Opinion, presented Derek as the Real Hero and new doctor Nozomi Weaver as a mere unlockable who might later team up with him. While Derek Stiles isn't in the upcoming Trauma Center: New Blood, the new male protagonist Markus Vaughn is more than a bit similar.

Playing Under the Knife as Derek let gamers imagine a taste of what it might be like to put on a doctor's scrubs themselves. Of course, playing Under the Knife was quite a bit better than being an actual doctor: the nurses were prettier, the patients' insides far less stinky, and the hours a lot better. Granted, you had to deal with ridiculous medical problems like shards of glass exploding from within a patient's heart, but them's the breaks.

Dr. Stiles is believed to be a direct descendant of the Greek god of healing, Asclepius, and so gets access to a "Healing Touch" ability you could use to stabilize a patient in trouble. In the game's story, this makes it possible for Dr. Stiles to pull off operations that are literally impossible otherwise. Dr. Stiles couldn't rely on the Healing Touch, of course, because it drained his energy (and because unlimited use would make the game too easy). Fortunately, you had a wide variety of medical instruments, both futuristic and mundane, to play with instead.

The only real drawback to Under the Knife is that it was excruciatingly hard. Second Opinion made things a bit easier on you, especially since the Wii Remote was more precise than the stylus, but it still required some heroic reflexes and problem-solving ability to live up to Dr. Stiles's reputation as a super-surgeon. For one, Dr. Stiles's much-vaunted Healing Touch was actually something players weren't supposed to ever use, and you ate ranking penalties if you relied on it. Secondly, the GUILT super-organisms that the good doctor battles ramp up in difficulty more quickly than most players could handle. In later levels keeping your patient alive while killing the GUILT you're after can seem impossible.

Trauma Center, and its use of the DS stylus and Wii Remote, results in gameplay that feels totally unique. The storyline's blend of medical drama and dramatic technobabble is unusual among video games, and a welcome burst of innovation in an era of gaming that sometimes seems wholly dependant on a limited array of near-ancient gameplay formulas. Even Dr. Stiles himself is a nearly unique character in the world of gaming (although an obvious descendant of Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack), and the melodramatic storyline of Trauma Center always felt like a refreshing reward for completing a grueling operation. New Blood may be replacing Derek with new doctors to go along with the new story and operations, but when we sit down to play it, Dr. Stiles is the guy we'll be thinking about.

2. Dr. Kawashima

"See how larger portions of these brains are being put to work?"

What's Dr. Kawashima got that nobody else on this list has? Well, for one thing, he's a real person, if one who's been crudely digitized into a game. The real-life Ryuta Kawashima wrote a book called Train Your Brain: 60 Days to a Better Brain that proved wildly popular in Japan. The basic thesis of the book was that by doing a few minutes of mental exercises like math problems and stroop tests every day, people could preserve the mental "sharpness" associated with being young. By keeping our brains sharp, we can fend off debilitating mental illnesses like Alzheimer's and ensure ourselves a healthy, lucid old age.

As the story goes, someone at a Nintendo board meeting mentioned the book to President Satoru Iwata when he was trying to get execs to brainstorm up a game that could break out of the traditional gamer demographics and sell to people who ordinarily would never buy a game. After some trial and error, Iwata and Dr. Kawashima met and within three hours had come up with the basic idea for the games that would in time be called Brain Age. Although Nintendo claims the Brain Age games are purely for entertaining, they're still fundamentally based on Dr. Kawashima's "Brain Training" theories. You're meant to spend a little time with the game every day, taking some tests to determine your current "brain age" and then practicing the game's various exercises until Dr. Kawashima awards you a medal. Amassing medals unlocks more test activities, more challenging difficulty levels, and bonus games like "Germ Buster" (a simplified Dr. Mario).

Brain Age, much like Nintendogs, is an idea that nobody thought would work. Regardless of the popularity of Dr. Kawashima's theories, it seemed impossible to lure in players fromm outside the gaming mainstream... let alone with a title that had the definite stench of "education" all about it. Remarkably, Brain Age worked, in a way that few attempts to lure in adults with "serious" gaming software have. Even Nintendo's largest mainstream hit, Tetris, was at least promoted as nothing more than a game. Brain Age had people running out and buying their parents and grandparents DSes so they could do math problems on them.

Brain Age went on to sell nearly 10 million copies worldwide, and did a lot to popularize Dr. Kawashima's theories in the US (and possibly around the world). It also popularized the DS with professionals and casual gamers looking for an affordable, faintly productive distraction easily slipped into a purse or briefcase. A sequel recently streeted, cleverly featuring entirely new brain training tests so owners of the original have reason to pick it up. Brain Age 2 has sold around 8 million copies as of this writing, and hasn't shown any signs of slowing significantly. The original Brain Age lead to a flurry of edutainment software in a similar vein and for a similar audience, including the Big Brain Academy games mentioned above. More to the point, it gave the public the image of a revitalized, reinvented Nintendo that was ready to create innovative new software that could be sold at a very affordable price point ($19.99, in the case of both Brain Age games).

Of course, just being in a cool game-- even one as tremendously important and fun as Brain Age-- doesn't alone justify Dr. Kawashima's place on this list. I mean, if that's all it took to be a great Nintendo doctor, Dr. Wily wouldn't be this countdown's official piñata. No, a big part of what makes Dr. Kawashima so cool is how he appears in the game. He's a floating, digitized, faintly 3D head that speaks in word balloons and gives the impression of a sane, benevolent Max Headroom. He seems genuinely delighted to tell you how well or poorly you're doing, and his friendly smile can do a lot to brighten up a crappy day. He even shows up in the commercials, talking, and there's something oddly appealing about him. It's probably best not to think about it too much.

1. Dr. Mario

There are a lot of people who think Dr. Mario is overrated. "He overprescribes," they say. "No matter what's wrong with you, he just throws megavitamins at it!" Yeah, maybe that's because Dr. Mario's megavitamins always kill the damned virus. It's sad how people jump all over the reputation of a successful professional, just because he used to be a plumber and is possibly not an actual Ph.D. holder. If he's not, that makes discovering the miracle of megavitamins all the more impressive.

As a game, Dr. Mario was a first in so many ways. It was one of the first falling-block puzzlers to successfully capitalize on the popularity of Tetris, and the first such puzzler to have a truly entertaining competitive mode. It was built around matching colors, much like Columns, but the gameplay had a clearer goal than just staying alive. Each level was a "bottle" littered with viruses of varying colors, and your duty as player was to correctly arrange megavitamins so colors lined up in groups of four. This would eliminate any viruses, and blocks, that were part of the combination. Eliminate all of the viruses on a level, and you could move on to the next one. If you played Tetris in 2P mode, you'd just play until you both died. In Dr. Mario, players could more actively compete against each other. Chaining together double, triple, or quadruple megavitamin combinations would rain crippling random blocks onto your opponent. Later puzzlers would elaborate on both of these features tremendously, especially the Puyo Puyo series, but Dr. Mario introduced the basic ideas.

For Nintendo's eternal mascot and corporate symbol Mario, it marked his first starring role in non-platformer spinoff and the first time he changed his costume and profession for the sake of playing a different game. A Mario-like character did appear as the referee in Punch-Out!, but you'll notice that game was never called Mario's Punch-Out! or anything. The same goes for Mario's uncredited appearance in Wrecking Crew. Dr. Mario kept his name solidly in the marquee, and proved that Mario's appeal went beyond the quality of his platforming titles. Nintendo quickly realized that prominently adding his mug to a game could move copies even if the gameplay had nothing in particular to do with him.

More important for our purposes, though, Dr. Mario was a really fun game. It was the only one of Nintendo's attempts to duplicate the success of Tetris that caught on to any significant degree, and more impressive by virtue of being developed in-house when Tetris wasn't. While future attempts to duplicate the Dr. Mario formula with puzzlers like Yoshi's Cookie and Tetris Attack (a.k.a. Panel de Pon) weren't nearly as successful, Dr. Mario kept NES consoles running way after they otherwise would've been retired to the closet. This was not only the game your mom would play with you, but the one where she might end up being able to kick the crap out of you. Virtually every falling-block puzzler that followed Dr. Mario owed some obvious features to this landmark title.

As far as pure character appeal goes, Dr. Mario was really kind of a genius invention. Mario was always drawn with appealing 2D art in the NES era, but a lot of those stock images were repeated until most of their charm was gone. Dr. Mario, however, was an entirely new look, both weird and cute in his outdated doctor's get-up. Mario's career change made a certain amount of dream-logic sense, too. Doctors solve health problems, and Mario as both plumber and hoppin' superhero basically excelled at solving problems. It didn't seem so weird that he'd want our help to "solve" the problem of whimsical cartoon disease, and solving it with falling pills was no more arbitrary than solving problems by hurling fireballs or chucking turnips. Dr. Mario is perhaps the best possible example of the benefits of superficially-illogical Nintendo logic in action, and that is what it takes to top the list of the twelve best Nintendo doctors.

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