5 Video Game Enemies From Non-Horror Games That Give Me The Willies

It's 2015, and while we've just got the tip in and its not complaining, let's start as we mean to go on and talk about fear. Because there're twelve gruesome months stretching out ahead of us with nothing good in them but The Witcher 3, possible entry into D'n'D and drugs. And if that isn't scary, I'm not every kind of screwed up and also Pope Beneficent I.

Horror-flavoured video games don't tend to make much sense. Here's why; I play games for, among other things, a sense of empowerment. The kind of control you don't get in life, unless you're a practicing psychopath. So when the barista at Cafe Nero is curt with me, I don't sneak into the back room and lift the day's take from a strongbox with my mad lockpicking skills, slit the guy up from taint to throat and warm my penis in the wound. I go home and play a game where I can do that.

But horror games should be about making you feel helpless and confused in the face of a nebulous, insidious force you don't fully understand, because that's what fear is made of. 

People like Capcom and the makers of films and video games too numerous to mention do not understand this. Because when you introduce zombies as a unhealthy thing to be around, putting a shotgun in the players' hands is only going to undermine that sense of threat. And restricting the amount of ammo you're going to find for it just makes ordinance accountancy the more significant worry. 

Massive, slack-jawed lad holding a tree, right in front of you: The new face of fear.

When your bullet savings account is more concerning than a crazed, chainsaw-wielding murderer with a prolapse for a face, I would say that's a failure at horror.

So I'm not the kind of person thats plays horror games. But it's not like I'm the kind of person that plays games where everything is sunshine and jewels and cartoon pigs and some kind of clash of multiple clans, because that wouldn't make me a person, but an infinitesimal fraction of a dollar sign in the eye of a publisher while he's masturbating to demographic figures.  

Anyway, these are antagonists in games that don't identify as horror, but make me experience fear in a life where I get enough of that at the thought of leaving the house for coffee. 

As seen in Far Cry 3 and 4:

The Far Cry series never really got into its stride until number 3. And then number 4 was just exactly the same game but in the Himalayas. So also good, I guess? It's around this time that the franchise became more about stealthy jungle-Rambo massacres and less GI dog-mutant or Red Cross with guns. And the right kind of stealth too. The kind where if you play your cards right, you are the scariest thing on the island.

When I'm playing this game and you see this man, you are half a second from a lung-full of jungle knife. 

It was the pirates or mercenaries lying awake at night dreading the entitled SoCal douchebag at the other end of the machete rather than the other way around. And these games give you plenty of opportunities to give some South Pacific meth addict a good reason to regret at least one decision he made recently, but is only really half of what the games are about.

The Far Cry worlds are lousy with enemy outposts, drug farms and fortresses but no matter how crammed with ornery dudes and assault rifles, these bits are civilisation compared to the thousands of lethal acres the developers built around them. These are games where you can get your shit wrecked crossing the road. Amongst many, many other things:

And that's one of the main things that makes them so awesome. Because the minute you leave the road and delve into the jungle, the tables turn. You may be the predator in a military base full of heavily armed guards, but out in the wild, you're nothing but six feet of Asian-American meat feast and it never feels fair.

In an autumn forest full of very well-rendered trees, spotting a clouded leopard before it spots you is like trying to find your keys in another pair of jeans in another room in the dark and your keys have teeth. And if you're more than ten strokes out in open water, there is never not a shark behind you.

Tigers are by far the worst though, my (entirely rational) real-life terror of sharks notwithstanding. You can avoid water. But you can't avoid something that may well have been tracking you the second you left your quadbike and is easily more dangerous than a soldier with three foot of body armour in every direction and a flamethrower and is also basically fucking invisible.

Make no mistake: Far Cry is Darwinism in action. Try disagreeing while you're being pooped out the back of a tiger. Doesn't work.

As seen in several Final Fantasy: 

The Japanese don't experience irony like the rest of us, so when we hear of a monster called a 'malboro' they don't understand how we can be surprised that it's not just a cloud of smoke spraying out of a footballer's wife. Oh, wait it's Marlboro? Sorry, I take it back, Japan. I can see how you missed that.

Besides looking like a Sarlacc-squid hybrid, malboros feature all over the Final Fantasy spectrum of games as shitty enemies whose halitosis causes a noxious spray of status effects. To those of you who don't play RPGs because you're too busy having sex and finding closure from life's challenges, a status effect is much like an STI. And getting caught short by a Great Malboro means you're getting blasted with basically every STI known to science at once. So at this point, everyone knows what to do: Scream for a doctor and hope your last fevered words aren't too stupid.

Damn. And it really doesn't look any better post-3D graphics engines. 

As seen in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim:

Skyrim was a masterclass in open-world design. It was also buggy as all hell: riddled with bad writing and acting, technical faults, pointlessly obtuse difficulty spikes and spiders. But, again, totally awesome. It is possibly the ultimate flawed gem. Because for every shopkeeper that floated into the air and got stuck halfway through a wall without shutting up about her goddamn wares, there were hours of organic adventuring fun stretching out as far as the mediocre draw distance could cope with. 

Much like Far Cry, the land of Skyrim was also stuffed with assholes that wanted nothing but your precious Khajiit coat or gold or just didn't like your face or whatever. So you got killed pretty often. Some of the things that killed you were probably just folk trying to feed the families; pretty much everything else that did was ripped off from Tolkien and understandably upset about it. But did they really have to take it out on your sensitive elf skin?

Eh?

So there are trolls and giants and orcs and goblin-flavoured, subterranean terrors and all the rest of it. But there are also monsters copied from other works of fiction! Like spriggans. And dragons obviously. Which for supposedly extinct creatures are worryingly pest-like. 

Hagravens are one of the most dangerous denizens of Skyrim and actually not from Tolkien or Medieval mythology. Because they're Greek. The treacherous sirens are half-woman, half-bird creatures and while they're fairly sexy, mostly, hagravens will have much the same effect on your turgid, fantasy erection as your character: withering magic death and avian ticks. These things are seriously unsexy. Perhaps dangerously so. 

And speaking of dangerous, this is a world where 'dragon' is basically a form of weather. Wait hang on, that might be the best idea I've ever had. Can you imagine the weatherman coming on and saying that? Well you don't need to. And also it's Prince Charles doing it.  

As seen in Mass Effect 3:

If you don't play games, you may be beginning to notice that the creators of some of these beloved products haven't gotten over Tolkien. And you'd be right. Because no-one has. This is why.

The twisted face of evil in the Lord of the Rings is probably the generic orc, because Sauron doesn't have a face. He's a floating eye made of fire. Tolkien knew, that to make something truly awful, you should make it good first. The orcs were elves once, as we all well know if we spent the noughties obsessing over culture instead of socialising. Tortured and mutilated yada yada. Elves are your perfect lifeform: wise, long-lived and suspiciously fey but if you submit them to suffering, become the absolute worst.

This idea, that even the best of us can become savages so easily, is one of the fundamental horror themes. It's why we used to fear zombies. Because they showed us the beast within and how close we are to savagery. Obviously they're not now, because they're everywhere. Today, zombies're just an easy representation of how much we hate each other as humans in an easy, lumbering, mindless package we don't have to feel bad about slaughtering with cricket bats.

The Mass Effect series spent two games building up to one final, desperate struggle against an ancient machine race with a hard-on for the extermination of all sentient life in the galaxy. And the seemingly insurmountable 'Reapers' pull a total Sauron on everyone and mutilate the various alien species into horrible, piping-covered techno monsters. And in equally Tolkienian form, the most intelligent and advanced race become the most awful enemies in the game. And the fact that that race is made up entirely of sexy ladies with a penchant for space stripping is somehow just bacon bits on the terror salad.

Did I mention that they're also magic and bi and a few other things that nerds long for?

As seen in every platform game since 1981 & change:

Bottomless and spiked pits have claimed more gamers' lives than diabetes. If every loss to the diabolical pits was given a funeral, it would take more material than there is in the universe just to make the ink to write GAME OVER on all the gravestones. So many virginities were sacrificed to Super Mario that Nintendo video game landfill sites are haunted and you can't even access them unless you're twice-certified as a necromancer.

My point is, these fucking holes have caused me more problems than, well, regular holes. And if that isn't scary, then I don't know what is. Apart from the obvious:

Tales of Rad: 6 Video Game Characters I Still Have A Crush On

Welcome, sexually confused creatures, to Tales of Rad. Tales of Rad is the internet column series that got your mother pregnant. But with what? 

If you grew up as part of the Playstation generation, then congratulations, you had so much more masturbation-worthy material than Nintendo fanboys it's almost unfair. Almost. 

Of course it isn't remotely unfair because all those lactating pussies who didn't dare ask someone to buy a PS2 and copy of God of War for them were too busy rubbing themselves off over Princess Peach and Krystal to develop real personalities, so you're safe here, real gamers.

All the same, the objectification of women isn't restricted to any console. Occasionally, even the most coy of squeaky-clean Nintendo characters would show some skin. Or release a gruesome sex tape. 

The point is, depictions of women in video games are possibly worse than any other minority. The only thing it's potentially worse to be in a game is German. Or maybe Russian, Hispanic or Zombie, these days. But women are generally portrayed as hyper-sexualised, neurotic and totally dependent on a central male character (usually you) to fix all their problems. Probably with your penis if it's a Bioware game. 

On that note, here are five imaginary things I wish I could have put my cock in were it possible. 

***

Name: Miranda Lawson
Game: Mass Effect 2 & 3
Shame: Not too bad, actually. You'll see.

Miranda is a character from a Bioware game, in case you didn't see that coming. And by god, does she have problems. Problems that can only be solved by Shepherd-penis. The only kind of penis that counts in a Mass Effect game, be sure of that. Unless you play as a female Shepherd. And let's be honest, the only reason anyone would do that in ME2 before the possibility of making Shepherd gay was slipped into design for the closer, is so they could see what sex with a ceramic-faced bird alien is like.

This is kind of a fucked up franchise. 

Miranda was presumably introduced to distract people from the fact that an interstellar starship commander sexing his way across a universe of blue women had sort of been done before.

She was genetically bred to be perfect by her father (Daddy issues: check) and enlisted as an officer by pro-human group, Cerberus (Military training/kinkiness: checkity check) and at a brief glance you wouldn't be the first to say: 'Meh. Decent job done, but perfection is only attained by- OH MY GOD. I RESCIND EVERYTHING I JUST SAID BECAUSE SHE JUST TURNED AROUND'.

I don't know what Mr. Lawson thought he was paying for at iDesigner Baby, but what he got was more bübblebutt than Übermensch.

Miranda had 'Dat Ass' before that was even a thing. Just... just look at it. Not for too long, mind. A man could lose himself for many years between the twin peaks of Mt. Joydome. Of course, whenever the sheer graphical magnificence of a particularly pert breast or butt cheek cuts through the general fog of tedium that covers a gamer's brain, mid-game, there's a downer of a thought:

Some schlepp, some probably underpaid and certainly undersexed programmer probably spent weeks, maybe years, diligently writing all the code that makes Miranda's ass cast exactly the right amount of shadow and experience the most believable amount of jiggle according to environmental stress.

That's a bit of a turn off. Now the thought of that same guy going home to his homely wife and their under-furnished home, uninspired life and sexless marriage and hearing her ask him what he did that day, that lights my candle.

And speaking of danger wanks, Bioware added an enemy in Mass Effect 3 called a Phantom. They're just so lithe, so juicily athletic. It marked an important point in gaming when thousands of players simultaneously had the same thought: 'I bet they're into some kinky shit.' And when your contortionist beau has a plasma cannon embedded in their palm, that adds a whole new layer of risk into the daily handjob.

You, uhh, you look really nice tonight. Umm, is the sword really necessary? I mean... well, we're only going for tapas.

Name: Rikku [Foreign sound]

Game: Final Fantasy X
Shame: Shocking.

Rikku is the most believably down to earth female Square Enix has ever created. Which also makes her the cheesiest fake woman I've ever wanted to have sex with. If you wanted to weaponise 'bubbliness', you'd ask Motomu Toriyama for Rikku's original concept pitch.

To put her insufferable chipperness into perspective for all you normals reading this, (I know you're there, Mother) Rikku exists in a world that can and has been destroyed, multiple times, at any moment by a gigantic mushroom creature. Also, it's her job to deal with that. By sacrificing her cousin to kill it. Briefly. It's a shit life as a guardian in the world of Final Fantasy X, is what I'm saying.

And the only goddamn time this maniac shows a single sign of stress is when your party is forced to cross a field in which it never stops thundering. Because she's afraid of thunder. In the world of Japanese video game writing, they call this 'character-building.'

Rikku is so energised you could hook her nipples up to a car battery and reverse engineer a hadron collider. Engineers! Don't bother pointing out how little sense that makes. Perverts! Now you know exactly how you're going to die.

Name: Triss Merigold (Definitely NSFW)

Game: The Witcher, The Witcher 2: Assassin's of Kings and 3: The Wild Hunt, apparently.
Shame: Ambivalent.

'Say that again. I ploughing dare you.'

Holding a torch for The Witcher series' Triss Merigold is less embarrassing than usual because she's well characterised. CD Projeckt Red can rightfully call themselves better than Jesus because they created an (ongoing) RPG series about elves, dwarves, kings, dragons and sword-swiping-monster hunting and actually made it novel.

In a similar manner to Miranda, Triss is a badass. Though in this case a witch. She isn't just sexy window-dressing but vital to the driving plot of Assassins of Kings and enough of an independent ass-kicker to not require your babysitting. In an industry full of squawking Ashley Williams begging for help, Triss is hot purely for not being a squealing burden on the player. Also, in case this was getting too progressive for you, titties.

Name: Bayonetta

Game: Bayonetta
Shame: Hairy.

Prospective buyers of Platinum Games's Bayonetta should have been warned at the counter that the game they were buying is certain to contain n-1 masturbation material.

Another, but quite radically different kind of witch to Triss, Bayonetta spends most of her time in her eponymous game fellating gun-barrels, lollies and generally doing her utmost to blue-ball her teen-boy audience. That's only part of the reason I like her.

Sure, she's an utterly one-dimensional character. Boobs and ass in mathematically perfect proportion. But I didn't get to where I am today by taking digital life seriously. That's why I only apply Pokemon logic to my daily life 27% of the time. Bayonetta's entire appeal to me sits squarely on her nose.

Glasses are hot and the sooner the rest of the world catches up to the fact, the sooner I can get my non 20-20 girlfriend to film that sex tape I've been wanting to do ever since Samus's.

Name: Tifa Lockhart
Game: Final Fantasy VII
Shame: Bruising

I will use your testicles as a nightlight.

Tifa might not have the relatability of Rikku or her gregarious spirit, but I'll always love a woman who can kick my arse and not look like a Williams sister after a particularly toxic steroid binge.

Name: Patricia Tannis
Game: Borderlands, Borderlands 2
Shame: Bacon-tastic.

Patricia is introduced immediately to players as a total brainbox. Let's not beat around the, umm, presumably ill-kempt bush; the developers only wrote her in to advance the plot. Smart people always get shafted in video games because they're only called upon to make a hitherto unexplored connection. That totally leads to the final boss's lair! Why hadn't anyone thought of this before! The actually original part of this is, that Patricia Tannis is batshit crazier than everyone else.

There are a small bunch, but a bunch nonetheless of female characters more objectively attractive than Patricia in the Borderlands universe. Lilith, Moxxi, umm, Claptrap? Hell, you could quite safely say that Handsome Jack is more handsome.

He's called that for a reason, you know. Wow. It's almost like you're trying to kiss me, Jack. Just... Just begging for it. Begging for a tast- what was I talking about?

Patricia, or, as I'll call her from now on (and have been for some time), Tannie, is neurotic like you would not fucking believe. Not in a simpering: 'oh goodness! Tush and fi! Who will save us from the tentacles?!' kind of way but in a more direct, mentally maladjusted fashion. Her every interaction with the player is two parts intellectual patronising, one part screaming, boundary-violating craziness and one part come-on.

Honestly? I've never been so confusedly aroused by a fictional character. To say I like my women on the slightly deranged side is like saying R. Kelly likes his to slightly smell of tiger urine. But Tannie is eerily perfect. It's like Gearbox knew exactly what I wanted in a human female: human, female genitalia; MENSA-grade intellect and all the hilarious mental illnesses that the preceding dictates.

I've spent enough time around certified geniuses to know two things. One, I'm not one of them. And two, being grossly above average clever opens a door to the kind of screeching, leather-winged neuroses that I, even in my darkest moments, couldn't hope to empathise with. But seeing Tannie, hopelessly incapable of controlling all those cognitive eruptions, I feel less bad for them. Because they definitely get the kinkiest women.