The Top 7… Irritating female characters
Whiny! Obstructive! Always dying! Meet the women who set videogame feminism back 50 years
It's no secret to us that GamesRadar is frequently seen as taking an objectifying stance toward women in videogames. However, the truth of the matter is that we greatly love and admire our digital heroines, no matter how sensibly dressed they might be. Tough, capable women in strong roles are something games definitely need more of, and we applaud when those characters are done right.
These, unfortunately, are not those characters. These are the women whose very presence, for a variety of reasons, annoyed the shit out of us. Maybe they were a useless kidnap-bait albatross around our necks, or maybe they just made a point of getting on our case until their voices sounded like panes of glass being shattered against a chalkboard. Whatever their problems, we'd sort of prefer to never have to hang out with these ladies ever again.
Annoyed us in: Mass Effect (360/PC, 2007)
When you first meet Ashley Williams, the horrific slaughter she's just survived will instantly win her your sympathy. That sympathy, however, will slowly erode over the next few hours, as she proves herself to be irritable, suspicious and embarrassingly xenophobic around all your cool new alien buddies. It's sort of like having Michelle Rodriguez's character from Lost following you around all the damn time, what with the getting in people's faces and angrily jumping to conclusions.
Some of the annoyance is offset by the fact that you can carry on a (tacked-on, plot-irrelevant) romance with her, and that you don't even have to keep her in your party for it to play out. But even assuming you want your character to have PG-13 space-intercourse with this irksome henchwoman, the fact remains that it's not easy to like someone who's dedicated herself to the idea that - with all these awesome new aliens to make friends with - humans should only hang out with other humans. That's just boring.
Above: Keep doing what you do best, Ashley: standing around looking annoyed
Oh, and as others have previously observed, she has the same name as the hero from the Evil Dead movies. Yeah, think about that while you carry on your imaginary dialogue-tree romance.
Annoyed us in: Mickey Mousecapade (NES, 1988)
If you've ever gotten mad at a useless sidekick you were supposed to be protecting, now you know who to blame. Twenty years ago, Minnie Mouse set the template for all the irritating hangers-on to come by following Mickey everywhere, being mostly useless (until you found the power-up that enabled her to toss throwing stars, anyway) and easily confounded by ladders, with a tendency to fall off and get stuck until you directed her back up. She'd also have to be taken into account when making a jump over one of the game's many bottomless pits. If Mickey made it and she didn't, both mice would die.
Above: Get ready to see this all the time. Thanks, Minnie
Apart from doggedly following Mickey and mimicking his every movement, Minnie had one other talent: getting kidnapped. Every so often, you'd find a hidden "bonus" that resulted in Minnie getting carried off by some flying thing. When that happened, you'd have to find a secret panel (by throwing ninja stars until they clinked against something) that led to a room full of golden statues. Touch the right one, and you'd get Minnie back. Touch the wrong one, and you'd have to hunt for another secret panel. Not that we were in any hurry to get her back; losing her immediately made the game feel less constricting. In an age of gaming when there were few female protagonists, Minnie stands out as one of the few who was actually better off as a damsel in distress. How sad is that?
Annoyed us in: Resident Evil 4 (GC/PS2/PC/Wii, 2005)
Rescuing the president's daughter is the only reason that Leon S. Kennedy has braved the instant-death nightmare that is Resident Evil 4 - but once he meets her, you might decide it was a wasted effort. Weak and defenseless, Ashley isn't totally useless - unlike some of the other sidekicks on this list, she'll follow orders and stay out of your way - but she's mostly useless, and mostly useless isn't much fun to defend when creepy kidnappers show up and try to carry it away every few seconds.
Above: Ashley in a rare moment of semi-helpfulness
All this might be excusable if Ashley was at least resourceful, but no - she cowers when she should run, she runs when she should stay behind Leon and she all too often falls victim to her former kidnappers' attempts to murder her. Even the not-brief-enough sequence in which you play as her is spent mostly barging around with a flashlight and bumping into things. Trying to keep her safe when she herself makes it so difficult builds up a lot of ill will, so it's no real surprise that things like this exist:
Annoyed us in: Daikatana (PC/N64, 2000)
Mikiko has the misfortune of starring in one of the most thoroughly thrashed and widely hated PC games of all time, but that's really the least of her problems. She's also faintly hideous, she chatters in a generically accented dragon-lady voice and tends to get stuck when trying to navigate tight spaces. Oh, and she also gets infected with a plague virus, forcing her stereotypical compatriot Superfly Johnson to carry her limp form through a hefty chunk of the game, and she eventually turns out to be Daikatana's final boss. (SPOILER ALERT: If you're one of the five people who actually still intend to play Daikatana to completion, we apologize for ruining your appreciation of its horrible plot just now.)
Above: We couldn't have said it better ourselves, HURR HURR HURRRRR
Worst of all, she has the self-preservation instinct of roughly half a gnat. On more than one occasion, we fired a proximity mine in the general direction of our enemies, only to watch helplessly as Mikiko inexplicably ran over to it, stood on top of it while it beeped at her and got herself blown up. And then we'd have to start that section of the level over again, because our heroes just couldn't bring themselves to go on without Mikiko's chatterbox observations that something smelled funny.
Annoyed us in: Grand Theft Auto III (PS2/Xbox/PC, 2001),
GTA: San Andreas (PS2/Xbox/PC, 2004)
For all its cutting-edge awesomeness, the Grand Theft Auto series has produced some remarkably annoying women over the years. GTA III gave us shrill, manipulative Maria, for example, while GTA IV introduced the twin whirlwinds of clingy desperation and soulless vanity that were Kiki Jenkins and Carmen Ortiz. But out of the series' entire cast of gangsters, lowlifes and sociopaths, none have been quite as persistently horrible as Catalina.
We were first introduced to Catalina at the beginning of GTA III, when she betrayed then-boyfriend Claude and left him for dead before going on to become the game's final boss. But her real moment came years later, in San Andreas. Here, we got the full brunt of Catalina's awful, abusive personality, learning firsthand that spending five minutes with her was about as pleasant as eating hot sand. To make matters worse, she had to go and decide that protagonist Carl "CJ" Johnson was her new boyfriend, which was really just an excuse to constantly screech at him for imagined infidelities.
Above: It says something that one of GTA's most enduring and successful villains is a woman. We're not sure what it says, exactly, but it's something
It doesn't matter that Catalina was written to be irritating - what matters is that it worked. By the time we were done with her missions, it was enough to make us want to boot up GTA III and blast her back to hell all over again.
Annoyed us in: Assassin's Creed (360/PS3/PC, 2007)
Have you played Assassin's Creed for any amount of time? Then you've probably been unlucky enough to attract the attention of one of these aggressive panhandlers. One moment, you'll be plodding slowly through the streets of Jerusalem or Acre, trying to keep a low profile, and the next, she'll be running around in front of you, determinedly getting right in your way and insisting you give her free money.
We don't know what makes this woman think that Altair, a man with a hidden face and a visible arsenal of blades, even has any money. But she's apparently convinced he has a lot of it, because she won't shut up, get out of the way or take "I'm running away from you now" for an answer. Worse, her persistent squawking tends to attract attention from guards, which in turn can blow Altair's cover.
She's a menace, a nuisance and a gargantuan pain in the ass. But if you shove her, punch her or silently knife her to death, suddenly everybody hates you. Really? We didn't see them stepping up to help her out, the callous bastards.
Annoyed us in: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64/GC/Wii, 1998)
Right off the bat, we HEY! knew we weren't going to get along LISTEN! well with Navi. In the opening minutes of Ocarina of Time, hero Link - then just a boy - is peacefully HEY! sleeping in his forest home, when LISTEN! all of a LISTEN! sudden Navi barges in and violently shakes HEY! him awake. But we grudgingly put up with her presence, because she HEY! taught us how to get around in the LISTEN! world and helpfully floated above whatever objects or LISTEN! monsters we locked our HEY! aim onto.
Above: CAN YOU PLEASE JUST SHUT THE HELL UP FOR LIKE FIVE CONSECUTIVE MINUTES
Before long, however, it became HEY! clear that she intended to be with LISTEN! us throughout the remainder of the game. And that might not have been so bad, except for her constant HEY! yammering. She also had a bad habit of interrupting our LISTEN! exploration by repeating the HEY! same all-text suggestions over and HEY! over, or floating above some HEY! object of interest that we either were LISTEN! already done with, or weren't ready to be interested LISTEN! in yet. But her unsolicited advice, interruptions and demands for attention would all have been tolerable if she hadn't insisted on driving us insane by repeatedly yelping the same two LISTEN! HEY! HEY! HEY! LISTEN! HEY! LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! HEY! HEY! HEY! LISTEN! HEY! LISTEN! LISTEN! HEY! LISTEN! HEY! HEY! HEY! LISTEN! HEY! LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! HEY! LISTEN! HEY! LISTEN! LISTEN! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! LISTEN! HEY! HEY! LISTEN! HEY! LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! HEY! LISTEN! HEY! LISTEN! words. WHAT!?
...
WHAT!?
HI!
To see more GamesRadar Top 7s, head here and read about diverse topics including Damsels you don't want to save, Consoles that never were, Games so bad they had to add breasts and the Worst jobs in the games industry.
Hear more about this article in this Friday's TalkRadar.
Jul 28, 2008
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