Listing Life Dangerously – The Four Most Irritating Enemies In Gaming

4. The Jockey (Left 4 Dead 2)

Left 4 Dead was bloody brilliant. Valve purposefully decided to make the sequel less good for some reason, by introducing a new Special Infected type that was about as much fun to fight as a skunk whose arse is attached to your mouth and farts when you punch it. The Jockey was very fast moving, very small and had far too many hit points. I guess if the Jockey didn’t have enough hit points, then it would be too easy to shoot off after it had grabbed a fellow survivor. The irritating trade-off is that it’s all but impossible to actually kill the damn thing before it grabs someone. I think the wise thing to do would be to halve its hit points until it grabs someone. I’d mod that in myself, if I wasn’t so busy being a billionaire jetpack astronaut playboy.

3. Jackals (Halo)

My hands are constructed of a fudge-like material not altogether unlike fudge, so I’ve always struggled with competitive Halo multiplayer. It’s all jumpy-jumpy, bouncy-bouncy, melee-melee while I’m all ouchy-ouchy, pleaseno-pleaseno, deady-deady.

The campaigns though? Oh, I’m all about the campaigns. The AI has always been an enjoyable challenge, the weapons are varied and deadly and the vehicles helpfully prevent the face-shooting from getting too monotonous. The only bad thing is the Jackals. Those guys are pricks. They carry around massive energy shields that deflect all gunfire, like yellow-bellied scumbag space chickens. The best way to kill a Jackal is to shoot a tiny gap in the side of their shield so that you hit them in the hand. Then they drop their guard and you can happily shoot their head off. Hitting that little gap is so damn fiddly though. It’s like trying to remove a lady’s bra using only your teeth when you have a skunk’s arse attached to your mouth.

2. Zombie Dogs (Resident Evil)

I’m not saying that Zombie Dogs don’t have their place. Clearly, we need something to chase Zombie Cats, tear up Zombie Newspapers, eat Zombie Homework and get all scared and hide under the table when there are Zombie Fireworks. I’m just saying that they are a great big throbbing ballache to fight. In the old-school Resident Evil games you could hear them sprinting towards you but the spooky camera angles would rarely afford you a clear view of them until they were right on you. At that moment, you would have to decide whether to fire with your gun at normal height, or whether to aim downwards first (the gameplay was cutting edge). If you aimed downwards and fired but the dog was too far away, or if you fired too late without aiming downwards, the dog would comically run past your bullets straight into your crotch for a maulin’. I never really got the timing right.

1. The Red Guys (Time Crisis)

I always loved Time Crisis because it combined two of my favourite pastimes – shooting people in the face, and hiding like a cowardly little girl (a scientist later discovered that I was in fact a cowardly little boy). Most of the enemies didn’t offer much threat, apart from The Red Guys. The game would let you shoot about a thousand of the normal chaps before suddenly having A Red Guy pop up and shoot you in the face so hard that the skunk would fall off. You’d memorise the levels, and you’d know A Red Guy would be coming, but shooting the normal chaps was just so damn satisfying and distracting that when the time came you’d fail to hide at the right moment and that would be it. He’d shoot you, square in the face, again, and you’d have to restart, again. I’d have liked the option to play through the whole game with just the normal chaps, no Red Guys, but I guess it’s hardships like Red Guys that made me the billionaire jetpack astronaut playboy that I am today.