best/worst video game sidekicks

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been playing RE4 quite a bit and Alias is all about Fatal Frame 2 right now, and we were discussing which ones we liked and hated.

Best: Ashley from Resident Evil 4: She does a good job of staying out of the way and not getting killed. I can only think of one time that she died that wasn’t my fault.

Worst: Mayu from Fatal Frame 2: She’s slow. She’s whiny. Her only real purpose is as ghost bait. If I were Mio, I’d have left her in the village.

Baby Mario from Yoshi’s Island:HELP! HELP! HELP! HELP! HELP! HELP! It was hard to help him. After all the ear piercing whining, I stopped caring.

Goofy and Donald from Kingdom Hearts: Useless in fights and seemingly overjoyed to push me off ledges or block me from getting to items/doors/anything. Those two have made me swear at a video game enough that Alias still gives me stick about it. It’s because of that game that Goofy is now referred to as a “retarted man-child.”

2

Best: the mercs from Diablo 2. Sure, they’re dumber than hell, but they do the required job of drawing fire (most of the time) and killing things (most of the time) and they’re relatively cheap to bring back.

Worst: wingmen from Tie Fighter. I once lost several men because they refused to break formation as I was swinging around a space station. I suppose their kamikaze run would’ve been more impressive if it had made a dent on the station’s armor or it was one of the rebels’ stations, but…

3

Best- That chick from Prince of Pershia Sands of Time . She was always running off on her own to open doors and pull levers for you.

Worst- That annoying fish girl that ran away from her father and hid in Jabu’s belly in Ocarina of Time. You pretty much had to carry her everywhere.

4

I agree with the Baby Mario and Princess Jabu or whatever her name was being the worst.

Best: Genis from Tales of Symphonia.

5

What, nobody here has played Daikatana?

[sub]I can’t leave without my buddy Superfly![/sub]

6

Best: Boo from Baldur’s Gate “Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the eyes!”

7

Darn right!

Minsc is so quotable. “Evil 'round every corner. Careful not to step in any.”

Let us not forget the ever-reshapable Blob of “A Boy and His…” fame.

8

Worst:It’s pretty hard. There are a lot of examples of horrible AI. I’ll just rattle off a few.

-Your fellow soldiers in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Particulary the tank crew in snipertown.

“Yes, please go running out in the middle of the street so a sniper can tag your ass instead of waiting for me to clear the way! It’s not like my entire mission depends on protecting you by finding these snipers and killing them.”

or

“I’m going to plant some explosives here, but please don’t bother to move. When the bomb goes off, you’ll just be blown up because you were too stupid to walk 5 paces in the opposite direction”

Darwin in action.

-Your teammates in Rainbow 6. Despite being “elite” troops, they’ll run around like cats on speed if you go around a corner too fast. If you get killed going by a doorway, instead of trying to flush out the enemy and kill him, they’ll keep going and get killed too. It’s not like they could see me die, right in front of them.

-Ian from Fallout. Give him an automatic weapon, and he’ll pick the most heated part of a fight to walk up behind you and fire a burst straight into your back.

-Actually, in most video games, your sidekicks/teammates are little more then redshirts with bigger guns.

-Cedric the Owl from Kings Quest 5.

If not best, better: -The Soldiers from Call of Duty. Most of them have a pretty high survival rate and are fairly good shots too.

-Max, from sam and max. Cute, funny and psychotic. What else could you want in a sidekick?

There’s a couple more that I’m forgetting, and I’m sure I’ll remember the moment somebody else mentions them.

9

Captain Goddamn Keyes in Halo.
You rescue that moron from Covenant jail, and his speech might as well go like this:
“OK, men. The mission is to get me and my valuable chip implants off this ship alive and in one piece. You are all expendable. Everyone is expendable except me. It is imperative that I survive so that the war may continue. Are we ready? Good. Give me that unloaded needler and I’ll take point.”
:smack:

10

Been playing Half-Life 2 again, with the effects maxed out to test a new video card. Reminded me how much I liked playing with the “Ant-Lions” and hated dealing with the rebels who were supposedly teammates. Luring the Combine soldiers into a creature ambush was great fun, it was like you could see the soldier react with panic while three lions punced on him. I found the rebel fighters far more hassle than they were worth, particularly since the “stop following” command did not work effectively. Damn frustrating to have a grenade tossed at you, only to find your point of retreat blocked by three nitwits observing you with blank stares.

I also liked the two partners in Armed and Dangerous, a good action game with a lot of humorous moments. Too bad it seems almost no one played it.

11

I generally hate escort games, but Ashley is pretty good. The only annoying thing is occasionally she starts in with the “Help me Leon, helllllllp!” and that got old real quick.

Have to disagree with you here. It’s been a long time since I played that game, but I recall Goofy & Donald being very helpful, once I powered them up. I could always count on Donald’s magic, and Goofy from what I remember, was pretty strong.

Among the worst: Resident Evil Outbreak. You have to control what, three sidekicks at a time? They’re all worthless and made the game too annoying to play.

Silent Hill: The Room. The first half of the game was fun, the second half was simply unplayable escorting that girl around.

Best: I’d say the sidekicks in Kingdom Hearts. Once they’re powered up, you hardly have to do any fighting yourself. Just stand back and watch your buddies kick butt.

12

Ooh, I hated that bit. Having to stand in the dumbarse’s way to protect him bodily while about six invisible Hunters bore down on me with their beating sticks: I think the designers were just being sadists, given that that mission was called “Get behind me…Sir.” On the upside, Cortana is pretty useful at telling you what to do, and the Foehammer taxi service can almost always be relied on. Almost…

13

Natalia from Goldeneye in the Russian prison is rather useless, but in the levels after she receives the crash shooting courses she’s all sorts of badass.

The fairies in the Zelda games for N64 were helpful, but Navi could get rather irratating after a few hours of hearing “Hey!” everytime she saw something.

Slippy should have just stayed grounded in Starfox.

14

The Black Mesa scientists in Half-Life were an annoying lot: “E”. “I refuse to go another step”. “E”. “Anything to oblige a fellow scientist.” Look, grandad, all I want is your eyes in the scanner to open that door, and I’m quite happy to get 'em the hard way. I’m gonna cap you anyway as soon as the door’s open, just for getting me into this shit.

The Barneys, though, could be quite useful on occasion: “E”. “Let’s run like hell!” Good man. Now, I’m just going to hide in this alcove, while you take on a room full of Special Ops commandos with a single 9mm. You might get a couple of them before they gun you down like a dog, but every little helps. And leading the trusting buggers into that chamber with the big clawed tentacly thing just to watch them being horribly dismembered was just fun.

15

HK-47 from Knights of the Old Republic. Best in attitude, but loses some points for ability. (No melee abilities? A humanoid wisecracking misanthropic assassin droid who can’t use a knife?)

16

Your henchvampires in *Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption * are mostly pretty cool, although a few of them talk like people rejected from porn for lack of acting skills. Pink the punk’s speech summing up the last 650 years of Western history in three or for sentences in a way that a refugess from the middle ages could understand – well, that was priceless.

As for the second worst, I’ll second Cedric from King’s Quest. He does nothing but nag and get caught. Although if *Final Fantasy * secondary characters are considered henchmen, I might have to revise my answer – many of them betray you, after all, which has to be worse than useless.

17

Worst: Maniac, in the Wing Commander games. Your other wingmen were average/useless, but at least they stayed out of your way for the most part. Maniac, on the other hand, was deliberately programmed to be a screw-up.

It was actually easier to shoot him down yourself and continue that arc of missions without a wingman, than to try to complete them with him on your wing.

Best (or at least really good): Floyd, from the Infocom game Planetfall. He also makes life difficult for you early on, but he truly redeems himself later in the game.

18

Tails from Sonic 2 for the Sega Genesis. I was so goddamned happy when I found out how to make him go the hell away.

19

Aw, give Eileen a break. Her leg was messed up, her eye was patched, her arm was in a sling, AND she was battling demonic posession. Cut her some slack. :wink:

20

Eh, I should’ve noted that he was the worst. Best? I got nuthin.