We’re supposed to hate the villain in video games but have you ever played a game where you hate\despise\loathe someone who’s on your side?
I’m working my way through Dead Rising on the Xbox 360. It’s a decent game for the most part except for Otis. Throughout the game your cell phone rings. It’s always Otis. Otis calls to tell you about the people barricaded in the music store. Otis tells you about the guy running from zombies on the second floor. Otis tells you about the blenders in the food court. Otis encourages you to loot clothing from the empty stores and any number of other things that rattle through his tiny mind.
This would be fine except that due to game mechanics, you can’t talk to Otis and defend yourself at the same time. Oh yeah, and you’re in a mall along with thousands of zombies. So, say you’re fighting a pack of 50+ zombies and the phone rings. “I’ll ignore it,” you think, “Got other things to do.” Otis keeps calling back until you answer.
Eventually the beeping gets to you and you finish what you’re doing and run to what you think is a safe spot and answer. Otis (and everyone else) speaks in this tiny text that you have to strain to read. And Agnosticus forbid that you get attacked in the middle of a conversation. This ends the call and pisses off Otis. He immediately starts calling back. When you answer, he bitches you out for hanging up on him and starts the conversation over from the beginning.
I want Otis to die horribly. I want it to be slow and painful but I haven’t figured out how to kill orture\maim him yet. For now, I’ll just have to settle for giving him the #1 spot on my Most Despised Allies list. He took the dubious honor away from that damned mutt in Duck Hunt who’s held it for almost twenty years.
Borcha. That’s not a name that’ll mean anything to anyone who hasn’t played Mount&Blade, but . . . Borcha, you motherfucker. That’s the last fucking time you get a ranged weapon from me!
You’re supposed to be on my side, damnit! I’m sick and tired of wiping the floor with the last Vaegian War Party and seeing my avatar crunch up and whine, clawing the crossbow bolt between his shoulderblades. WIPE THAT GOOFY SMILE OFF YOUR FACE!
Other than that, any and all the friendly NPCs in Might & Magic: Dark Messiah. You moronic lot designed my swordplay to be 99% broad strokes, but lets one killed friendly guard who dives headfirst into a wrestling match with a ghoul turn all the others against me?! ARGH!
In System Shock 2 Shodan is technically on your side for the vast majority of the game yet spends most of her time mocking you or ranting in general. Though I never despised her and very much looked forward to her next ‘bag of meat’ comment she’d throw my way.
Not quite what you’re talking about but in Starcraft (which I just played through recently) I was always struck by how much I despised both the humans and the Protoss in the between mission briefings yet liked the Zerg Overmind which always seemed to be very supportive and generally nice…other then that whole destroy all other life part.
I understand that the sidekicks in Daikana were particularly bad not only was the AI stupid but they were insulting stereotypes that everyone hated.
I detested Henpecked Hou in Jade Empire I didn’t find his rants about his abusive wife all that funny and it grated on me every time I had to speak to him. I never took him on a single mission the whole game during multiple playthroughs.
Recently I tried to play through Chrono Cross and had to stop because I hated every single cutesy sidekick I got (most had an ultra annoying way to talk we’re talking Princess Precious style talking and really bad fake accents. One character just had ‘cha’ randomly throw into his sentences) I was starting to wonder how I could just get them all killed and let the badguy win. In the begining of the game you have a dream where you stab a girl in the back. After awhile I totally understood why. I’d knife her too though I would have taken out the pink dog thing first before I put the smack down on the rest.
Every single one of the computer characters who jabbers at you over the radio in Midnight Club 2 deserves to be staked out spread-eagled on the freeway and run over repeatedly. (Except Haley. She’s kind of funny.) Most of them are supposed to be enemies, but a few of them, after you beat them in a race, become admirers, and tag along through part or all of the rest of the game, offering encouragement. This does not make them any less annoying. Gina, the one who’s supposed to be your “girlfriend,” is supremely irritating; I want to rip that Band-Aid off her face and jam it down her windpipe.
Also, the host guy with the omnipresent voiceover in Burnout 3 needs to be thrown into a large meat grinder.
Anybody, in any game, ever, that you have to escort safely to some sort of finish line somewhere. It’d be faster to flip a lead tractor tire to my destination, and the tire wouldn’t purposely try to get itself killed along the way. Nor would it get stuck behind some tiny outcropping and be unable to figure out how to get past it until I go back and guide the hammerheaded thing out.
X-Play on G4 used to have a “No Escort Missions” logo that I really liked: it had the upper halves of two figures, the kind on a men’s room door, with one holding an umbrella over the other’s head, and a big red circle-slash over it. Wish I could find an image online of that, it says so much…
What, no love for Greco the Roman Wrestler? Or how about that worthless-ass skeleton Skelly**?
:: cringe ::
This thread wouldn’t be complete without a mention of “Barney from Black Mesa”. He is, after all, the most ineffectual security guard ever to tread the hallways of a highly-advanced scientific facility where inept researchers inevitably cause the near-destruction of the earth. Some neat things about Barney:
His path finding algorithm needed a few million more nodes. The guy couldn’t walk out of a room with one wall. He’d get stuck behind potted plants. God help you if you ever needed him to go down stairs with a landing. He’d frequently go Dirty Harry on you and start firing wildly at creatures that you were really just, ya know, trying to avoid. What’s more, during his little fits of bravado, he’d often shoot you in the back while you tried to duck for cover in the interest of avoiding the wrath he’d brought down upon you. And don’t forget the canned dialogue.
…basically, the best thing to do with Barney was shoot him and take his ammunition for yourself. To Valve’s credit, he did get a lot better about most of this in HL2, but still.
** Skelly is not worth the effort. Some assembly is required.
Another one is Edward from SNES Final Fantasy II. He’s a wimp (and a spoony bard) and hides every time his life is low. While he’s hiding, obviously he won’t fight but you can’t heal him and get him back into the action either.
Then there’s Ormus from Diablo II. Ormus refers to himself in the third person and annoys the hell out of Pithy Moniker.
The BOBs in Marathon were horrifically frustrating. There were levels where you basically had to make sure a certain percentage of them survived, but they’d often follow you through narrow hallways and decide to get stuck, such that the only way for you to proceed was to kill them.
The pistol and fusion BOBs in later games weren’t that much better, though they did have better lines.
In her own defense, Selphie was horribly raped in translation. In the orignal language, she was an average Japanese schoolgirl who had a few very bizarre mannerisms, most notably her unusual way of speaking. Later on in the game, when you got access to her blog, you would find out that she thought in the kansai dialect of Japanese, spoken in western Honshu. People from the kansai region are assumed to be both skillful at comedy and extremely eccentric, so most of her quirks are explained through that…
The rest is just her being a Japanese schoolgirl, which tends to equate to her being on ten times as much sugar as anybody else.
I am one of the few people who hated Floyd. The best part of Stationfall was when you finally got to shoot him.
As for annoying phone calls, how can anyone who has played it forget your inappropriate and annoying girlfriend in Metal Gear Solid 2. The game’s storyline is incoherent enough without her demanding to work out meaningless relationship problems in the middle of a mission.
In Wing Commander when you go on your first mission with Maniac the commander says “If he gets out a line, shoot him.” I always took it as an invitation.
My pick for most annoying FF character (a very dense field) I have to go with Yuna from FFX. She’s even more of an inert lump than Aeris in VII and she is both supposed to be in charge and the main character’s “love interest”. She’s a bland blank slate that they try to hang the story on.
I think that Wakka has to get my vote in the english version, though; I don’t know what it is about him, but he always struck me as being annoying as hell.
Close seconds on my list: Tidus, Yuna, and Squall.
Squall’s only marginally on it, however. I didn’t LIKE the character, but I still found his paint chip-induced “…” soliloquies surprisingly amusing; it brought me back to Chrono Trigger and the good 'ol days before the main character needed dialogue.
