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This week saw the release of BioShock Infinite, a game that's notable for many things, but mainly for essentially being one long escort mission that isn't awful. In fact, the game tells you right away to not worry about your escort, and that she can take care of herself. After years of horrible escort missions where you have to protect incompetent bullet-magnets who would sleepwalk through the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, it's hard to express what a joy this is. As a reminder of how well BioShock Infinite pulls this off, let's take a look back at some of the not-so-good escort missions in videogame history.

13. Emma Emmerich (Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty)

So what's the only thing worse than escort missions? Ah yes: water levels. "Stop!" screamed Hideo Kojima. "Let's have a water level escort mission!" Between this and the entire Raiden/Snake switcheroo, Hideo Kojima seems to have made this game in an act of extraordinarily elaborate trolling. Since Emma is also terrified of water, you have to carry her through most of the level, then hold her hand, and get her past bugs (by either getting rid of the bugs while Emma cowers and cries, or – more fun option – knocking her out, because – c'mon – who is THAT afraid of bugs?). And if she's caught by guards, she will literally curl up and scream as loud as she can while being murdered.

Luckily, if you manage to get through the mission, you'll be rewarded with…Emma dying anyways. A great reward because you hate Emma a lot by the end, yet still a great slap in the face, given what you put up with to get her this far. In other words: WELL TROLLED, KOJIMA.

Ever had a moment so nerdy that you needed to tell the Internet about it? Send your submissions to dorklypwnup at gmail.

A couple weeks ago, I was replaying the Mass Effect trilogy for the last few achievements I needed. I was about halfway through Mass Effect 3 when I had some real life stuff to do. As I was leaving my apartment, I saw the elderly maintenance man struggling to get a ladder over the fence around the pool area. I could have sworn my vision blurred for a second and my left index finger twitched a little. For those who don't know, that's how you do a Paragon action in Mass Effects 2 & 3, and I went over and helped him get the ladder over the fence.
-Steven

Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening has always been one of my favorite games, and it actually was the game that got me not only hooked on videogames. Anyway, for Christmas this past year, my girlfriend knew how much I liked the series and used ideas from the game to send me on my own "Secret Seashell Quest." I walked all around her apartment and even needed to go outside by getting clues from each shell I found, and (since she kinda knew the idea but not entirely) every 5 shells I found there was an extra little gift. In the end I received a Master Sword replica and she put the shells together in a case with the Hylian Crest for me to hang up.
-Tim

I've been going to yoga classes at my gym for a few months now and every class begins with a theme to keep in mind throughout the session. Our instructor began with "Does anyone know the true definition of insanity" Instantly, I thought 'Far Cry 3', after glancing around the room for a second or two, I raised my hand and answered "Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result". They said it was an Einstein quote, so I'm glad they didn't ask where I knew it from.
-Andrew

Dark Link

One thing's certain: Link's evil shadow doppelganger knows how to put together an outfit with a consistent color palette.
(via)

Among the many plagues visited upon gamers over the years, the unresolved cliffhanger ending is one of the worst. Sure, in a game it's the journey that's most important, but would Mario be as popular today if he didn't finally get his cake-baking princess? With the time and hours invested in a game one might think developers would be kind enough to reward us with just a little smidgeon of closure, but too often we're stuck waiting for sequels that may never arrive. The list below includes just a few of the great unfinished game sagas that, unlike this paragraph, never had a fitting end. Actually, even this paragraph never had a

15. Too Human

Like your dystopian robot apocalypse scenarios swimming in Norse mythology? In that case, you're probably one of the very few people who played "Too Human". Developed by Silicon Knights, a studio known for quality titles nobody played like "Eternal Darkness", the series was an action/RPG set in a world in which mankind's war against rampant machinery has left it on the brink of extinction. Survivors huddle in a futuristic metropolis and are watched over by cybernetics-enhanced ubermensch based off Viking gods who seek to end the threat posed by Loki's army – or basically the plot of the movie "Thor" (minus Natalie Portman). The first game was set to be part of a trilogy, ending with Loki uncovering what would likely be a new threat and your character leaving his comrades in a huff after learning a terrible truth about himself and his connection to – oh who cares? Apparently nobody. After ten years in development, crappy reviews and poor sales, it appears that we'll never know what happens to the people of Asgard. Want to play it once just to see what you missed? Too bad! After losing a lawsuit to Epic Games, creators of the game's engine, all extant copies of the game were recalled. So basically the game has become the equivalent of a quickly annulled Vegas wedding: we can't believe we were crazy enough to do it, and now we'll all pretend it never happened.

Ever had a moment so nerdy that you needed to tell the Internet about it? Send your submissions to dorklypwnup at gmail.

My freshman year of college was when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was released. The two weeks leading up to spring exams, my buddies and I played the game pretty much 24/7, surviving only on a diet of pizza rolls, diet tea, and cookies. By the end of the two weeks, it began to mess with my head. I even had dreams I was in the game. One night, there was a huge thunderstorm. I fell asleep on the couch after another long day of playing Call of Duty. While asleep, I had another dream I was in the middle of warfare. After a loud crash of thunder, I jolted up half awake. At that moment, my roommate came running down the stairs and said it sounded like shotguns outside. Still in a daze, I began to freak out. He asked me what was wrong but I told him to leave me alone. Before I went to sleep, I made peace with everything in my life ready for the war outside to take my life. The next morning I was alive and my roommates were wondering what was wrong with me last night. It was then that I realized the events that took place. Moral of the story: man can not live on a steady diet of pizza rolls, cookies, and Call of Duty without consequences.
- Robert L.

Since my fiancee and I live 12 hours away from each other, we decided to meet up halfway (in Dallas, TX) to take our engagement photos in May. I just rescheduled the day of the photos with the photographer so that we can be there for Dallas Comic-Con solely so that we can meet Nathan Fillion.
-Leigh

I asked a friend once the usual "What would you do if you had a time machine?" question. I was expecting the usual "I'd go back and kill Hitler" or something. But without much thought, he retorted "I wouldn't want a time machine. I'd have to beat Dark Souls again." It was the single best answered I'd ever received for that question. I was stumped and realized, I wouldn't want to a time machine either that point.
-Anonymous

Forget that musty old snake-hater we usually celebrate on March 17th. It's time for us to create St. Patrick Stewart's Day. Here's the illustrated tale of a man who deserves his own holiday for pioneering work in the worlds of acting, geekdom, and making baldness cool.

Sir Patrick Stewart was born in 1940 in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in northern England. He was one of the few adorable babies of Black And White Photo Times.

1. No More Zombie Games

Is there any genre more tired and worn-thin than the zombie genre? We've explored army zombies, tropical island zombies, mall zombies, urban zombies, British zombies – the list goes on. Resident Evil is creatively-sapped, Dead Island was a bore, and too many games are lazily coming back to the same old ideas. This genre should be left for dead!

2. More Zombie Games

…except Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 are actually really good. Hope they come out with some new campaigns sometime soon, or maybe a full-fledged sequel. Also – have you SEEN DayZ? Oh man, so good. Ever wanted a realistic zombie game – where you're in an incredibly frustrating, difficult, horrible, nihilistic environment and the only escape is the sweet release of death? Hell yeah, sign me up for some of that. Basically, gamers want to live in The Walking Dead – not the actual Walking Dead game though, because that game didn't allow gamers the freedom to lay down in a field for hours waiting to murder anything that came along…but The Walking Dead game was actually really, really good. Another one of those would be great. Oh, and a Zombies Ate My Neighbors remake! Why is no one working on that?!

The launch of the latest SimCity was, to put it mildly, not handled well. To put it spicily, it was a huge unimaginable mess – with people unable to download the game, play the game due to lack of available servers, features being turned off, and with a number of updates released post-launch trying to fix some of the major issues users were experiencing. This didn't go on for just the first few hours of its release though – some of this is still going on, a week after release. For a smaller game and company, this might not be such a surprise – but this is from one of the largest publishers in videogames and one of the biggest franchises in videogames. However, SimCity is not the first game to put users through this kind of launch mess. Here are 9 other games that had terrible launches.

9. World of Warcraft

The game that truly launched MMOs into widespread popularity, and possibly the most profitable game of all-time (also the most life-sucking – it's been played a grand total of 5.93 million years, cumulatively), World of Warcraft started off in a state of total disarray. As the first huge MMO of its kind, Blizzard had no idea what it was walking into, and the servers were instantly overloaded on launch day, with queues reaching the thousands. And even if you did manage to get into the game, everything was slow and glitchy. If this had happened today, it would be a nightmare – SimCity at least has most of their ducks in order a week later – but WoW's woes lasted for over a month, mostly due to outdated servers that were in dire need of upgrading. Thankfully, Blizzard learned their lesson and never had a rocky launch ever agai- OH WAIT…

Ever had a moment so nerdy that you needed to tell the Internet about it? Send your submissions to dorklypwnup at gmail.

The "Every Game Is Edu-tainment From Someone's Perspective" Award goes to…

I smile every time I read comments about how hard NES and SNES games back in the day, because it was even harder for me and my friends. We lived in Mexico and neither of us spoke English, but we were able to get our hands on American games. Our curse was that we were RPG fans – and that meant that we needed to talk to everyone in every town (with one of our friends using a dictionary to try to get the main idea of what was being said) in order to make some progress. Needless to say, our vocabulary improved a lot, and that helped me learn to speak English better than any course I ever took.
-Eduardo

The "The Family That Trains Together, Stays Together" Award goes to…

So I went on my first ever foreign holiday to Cyprus a while ago along with my step-brother (who I didn't know too well at the time). He asked to borrow Pokemon HeartGold for the plane ride. He only stopped playing a few times a day through the entire holiday, once to ask me to give him a quiz about Kanto. I've never been closer to any family member ever.
-Anonymous

The "Love Is A Complicated Thing" Award goes to…

Email 1:
My girlfriend and I met the day after my birthday. I went to a fall festival down by my house. The only reason her and I even met was that she was wearing cosplay of Chell from Portal, and the reason we got together? She had stopped to join a costume contest, and I placed my hand on her and said, (in my best Space-Core impersonation), "Space!" We had our first kiss that day at the park, and we've been together ever since.

Email 2:
We broke up. . .please don't publish this. . .if you've already decided then do if you must. . .however if you have not. . .don't publish it in the article. . .I'm sorry.

Email 3:
I sent that to soon…sorry – we're still together.

-Joe