Image via Complex Original
You're in Vegas. You’re walking down the hotel hallway. You check behind you, only to find that your friend isn’t following you anymore. You backtrack for the 13th time, only to find him stuck behind a goddamn serving cart. Which wouldn’t be so bad normally, but this is also the 13th time he’s gotten caught behind an inanimate object. And you can’t touch him because he’s covered in vomit. You're fed up, so you leave him there. Unfortunately, when you get back to your hotel room your girlfriend yells at you for leaving her brother passed out in the hallway, and you don’t get any that night. Mission failed.
Escort missions, in real life or in a game, are pure pain. For every well-executed escort mission (Half Life 2, Resident Evil 4, Ico), you get 349 crappily implemented ones—many of which are in games like WoW (sorry, we couldn’t find video of that stupid mission in the Barrens where you escort the Elf). You really don’t have any control over the character you’re escorting, and they love to make you restart the mission by diving headfirst into enemy fire. We understand that game devs are trying to make us form a bond with the NPC, but when it comes to these 8 insufferable escort missions, there's no line at all between love and hate.
By Ryan Woo
8. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004)
Actually, this mission was sort of fun—save for one thing: Eva's stamina drained faster than a Ferrari’s gas tank. You had to keep shoving frogs and squirrels and crocodiles and whatever into her mouth the entire time to keep her stamina up. You’d be knocking out soldiers, getting into the flow of navigating the jungle, when suddenly you'd notice Eva’s stamina was almost zero and you'd have to throw a rabbit at her face. And then you’d have to do it again like 30 seconds later.
7. God Of War II (2007)
Really, Kratos? It's hard for us to believe you need a translator, seeing as how you're an illiterate attention whore. You could have taken the book down to the translator instead of bringing him back all the way through those annoying waves of enemies, but since you evidently can’t read, we couldn’t have expected you to make that deduction.
6. Dead Rising (2006)
Damn near half this game was an escort mission. You have to run around dragging fully grown adults through the mall, except the idiots always get caught in zombie crowds or bump into each other trying to go up ladders. Using the goal command sometimes makes things better, but not by much. Our theory: so much console processing power was used for the Zombie AI that there wasn’t anything left for the survivors to rub their brain cells together.
5. GoldenEye 007 (1997)
Natalya is the Eve of modern dumb video game AI. Not only did she eat the Apple of Stupid in the Garden of Eden, but she ate the whole core and the little “Imported from Mexico” sticker on the apple skin—and she did it all before the serpent even had a chance to tell her to do it. Because she’s DUMB.
4. Grand Theft Auto IV (2008)
GTA IV has a lice infection of escort missions, but “Catch The Wave” is one of the meanest bloodsuckers in the game. Bell tries to take on your pursuers all at once, and usually gets himself killed. Want to throw a controller? Drive for like an hour through traffic to get to the docks in the first place, and then navigate the entire Atlantic Ocean, only to get a MISSION FAILED because the idiot is dumber than paint.
3. Crysis (2007)
Your job here is to escort Prophet. One major problem was that he sometimes seemed to RUN AWAY from the very fires that were giving him life and heat. But what really stamped our one-way ticket to Crazy Town was the fact that the %@% game would glitch out: The aliens trying to hentai-rape you with their tentacles sometimes wouldn’t die “properly” after you killed them, so the scripted events wouldn’t trigger and you’d be stuck.
Restarting didn’t seem to help either. The whole stupid “will it run Crysis” meme was rendered irrelevant because not even God’s own PC—yes, He owns a PC, not a Mac—would be able to get past this. Bugs don’t care about your 5 million-GB graphics card.
2. Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner (2003)
ZOE2 was one of the great PS2 games. But this escort section? It’s not that frustrating. It’s not that difficult. It’s just a cardboard sandwich slathered with “meh." And while ZOE2 certainly isn’t winning any voiceover awards, Taper was one of those NPCs that we wanted to permanently mute. The Ken/Ardjet escort mission, conversely, was a thing of beauty. Half-kudos to you, Konami!
1. Fable: The Lost Chapters (2005)
This rescue mission in Hobbe Cave has the usual annoying escort trappings: the kid’s AI has the self-preservation instincts of an emo goth on Prozac, and he’s easily killed by the goblins. But the truly horriple part is the kid’s screeching voice that you have to endure as it pierces walls, outer space, and your eardrums. During this mission, our neighbor knocked on our door and told us that if we “didn’t stop waterboarding those rabid chipmunks” he’d call the cops on us, so we had to lock him in our closet until we finished the stupid mission. Luckily for him, it only took two rage-filled days.
