TEC and Peach's Dance - Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

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Dancing With Myself

Peach was a very good sport while teaching TEC about the birds and the bees.

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The torrid love affair between the X-Nauts' TEC-XX supercomputer and Mario's sweetheart, Princess Peach, is downright heartwarming...in a strange sort of way. TEC first lays his fiber-optic eye on Peach when she disrobes to take a shower, thereby displaying the pride of the mushroom kingdom. TEC's circuitry promptly overloads, supplanting his dreams of world domination with a need to know just what's causing that funny feeling in his PCI bus. To further confuse matters, Peach is TEC's prisoner, and he is her warden. So she is his puppet, and he is her puppet master. What's that you say? This is an E-rated game? Right-o!

A bizarre courtship ensues in which TEC provides Peach with Internet access, so long as she humors him by providing information about love, a concept absent from his otherwise all-encompassing data banks. TEC's requests grow more and more outlandish, finally fulminating with, "It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again."

It's not quite Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but it works.

Actually, that's untrue. TEC does, however, ask Peach to dance with him, a tough feat for a computer mainframe. TEC corporeally represents himself as a carbon copy of Princess Peach, and the pair of, um, Peaches waltz like pros. This hardly seems like a healthy move in the relationship, but then again, Freud never composed a theory on the psychosexual development of megalomaniacal supercomputers. Besides, it's totally cute within the context of the game. Peach even seems to get into it a bit and starts two-stepping in earnest.

Guys, pop the question this Valentine's Day: "Baby, were I an evil electronic brain, would you still love me?"

-Avery Score

ICO

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Take My Hand

A boy with horns and a wispy waif of a girl--a match made in heaven, obviously!

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ICO is not a game about navigating a mysterious castle and surmounting obstacles while on your way to defeat an evil spirit witch queen to then escape to greener pastures. Well, OK. It is about that. But it's also about the special bond between a sacrificial horned boy and his confused, wispy companion, who apparently couldn't find her way out of a paper bag if the need arose. The boy's care for Yorda is borne of the frustration that results from having to lead her around by the hand, as well as tell her what to do for the entire damn game. She's just so helpless. How can you not want to give her a hand? And if you haven't yet played this classic, giving her a hand is exactly what you'll do.

You can apply a lot of labels to ICO: sleeper, critics' darling, pretentious bore. (That last one is false.) The game has a touching, subtle beauty in its architecture, lighting, and animations. Yes, it's sublimely rendered in a unique visual style. But what really makes it worthy of inclusion here is the hand-holding. They made an entire game about hand-holding. Even better, it's good. Really good!

An entire game about hand-holding? Maybe the designers were listening to The Beatles a little too much.

This isn't your typical action game. ICO was like a Prince of Persia in 3D before Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time made it cool to do Prince of Persia in 3D. But that puzzle-solving is only half the point; the other half is that you're completely responsible for the safety of this girl, whom you can't even speak to. You pull Yorda along by the hand in an adorably clumsy fashion; you pull her onto ledges; and you courageously fight off creepy shadow monsters, which, for some reason, want to deliver her to the evil queen. Keeping her safe is as important as keeping yourself safe, and throughout the game, you can't help but feel a little bit of the same affection for the pair that they must feel for each other.

The rest of the games on this list feature specific, brief moments that tug a little at the heartstrings. ICO's sappy moment, on the other hand, happens to last a good eight hours (that's the length of the whole game, if you're keeping score).

-Brad Shoemaker