9. Tails - Sonic Series
For one glorious game, Sonic was the coolest thing on two legs to hit consoles - he was a bad-ass, blue hedgehog with sneaks and a hair style you'd get sent home from school for sporting. Then in the excellent sequel, he brought a friend. A friend who boasted almost all of Sonic's skills, plus the eye-catching ability to fly, using his hideously mutated double-tail, but who unfortunately never lived up to the initial hype. Sadly for Tails, he was the archetypal dorky side-kick - Millhouse to Sonic's Bart - and would always be cast in the hedgehog's shadow, despite his advanced skill-set, which should have made him an even better character than Sonic. And his annoyance factor wasn't merely to do with his meekness, or the fact that he had ginger hair (as some have suggested), it was more to do with the fact that he was mostly useless. Never quite able to catch up with Sonic, when Tails was controlled by the second player, it all got even more annoying, as Sonic was forced to
wait for his foxy friend, despite having built a reputation on his ability to speed through levels in the blink of an eye in the first game. Not cool.