Recently we asked what maps, moments or scenes in video games caused you to lose the plot or reach for ALT+F4. And people responded with some of the most incredible tales – so here’s a selection of the best.
We’ll start things off with badger, who describes a tale I know all too well: playing Dota 2 only to realise that you don’t actually enjoy it, and then realising how many hours you’ve spent not-enjoying said game.
I rage quit DOTA2 after a friend-of-a-friend had a go at me for trying to play a private match one-handed while holding a baby in the other. Then I looked at the Steam play time and realised that I’d wasted more than 200 hours on a game that I’d never actually enjoyed, so I joyfully deleted it from my PC.
Yup. I know the feeling. Had it with the original DOTA, then put 250+ hours into Dota 2. I don’t even know how.
NegativeZero adds another tale about a game that loves to hate its players: Dark Souls.
Dark Souls, my umpteenth attempt at Ornstein and Smough and about the tenth time in a row where I had gone human at the bonfire so I could summon Solaire to help, only to be invaded and murdered by a player that was so far beyond me that I had no chance of beating them.
Quit, uninstalled, never touched it again. Fuck that game.
I nominated The Evil Within because I remember having a completely bullshit moment with Ruvik. But there was a lot more to hate about the game’s initial release, which proved to be too much for pokedad:
Not because it was hard, but because the controls were janky, the camera was janky, the FOV was single figures, it had stupid black bars to make the screen EVEN SMALLER, the acting was bad, basic mechanics and controls weren’t explained, nothing made sense, and the first room was an instakill enemy that the game didn’t bother telling you what you had to do with.
It was so stupidly over the top from the beginning that it managed to turn a city exploding into ghosts so hard that you wake up in a dream hospital with a creepy firekeeper nurse boring.
Pylgrim also had a moment where his girlfriend got legitimately concerned:
This one is a bit obscure: The small indie game 1000 Spikes. There was a level where my frustration grew to a point where my girlfriend who usually gets a kick of seeing me fail at games and becoming an obscenity-spewing mess, was actually getting a bit scared at seeing how angry I could get. Haven’t touched it since.
And let’s not forget a game that made plenty of people flip the table: Destiny. D2 explains:
Destiny 1. Opening weekend, it was late Sunday afternoon, I’d been playing every spare moment I had that weekend. I was on a long story mission around level 8 or so. I’d spent about 40 mins progressing through this massive underground base, which consisted of a couple minutes of aimless wandering followed by a couple of minutes of hectic “wave after wave after wave of increasing difficult enemies”, followed by minutes of aimless wandering, followed by minutes of … you get the idea. Anyway, after about 40 minutes of that, there’s a section where the player is trapped in a small area with a huge wave of enemies that have swords that basically one hit kill you.
Normally, this is not a big deal, you figure out the gimmick and clear it and then continue on. Destiny even has checkpoints that you respawn at if you die, but in this case the checkpoint was about 10 minutes back before the battle (with a massive wave-after-wave in between), so each time you died you had to do some wandering through areas you’d already cleared, reach the battle, watch cutscenes again and then madly try to figure out how to stay alive and defeat the enemies … then die and repeat.
Also, respawning at a checkpoint didn’t respawn you with the items/equipment you had at the time you first passed the checkpoint … and none of the ammo drops in the mission reset at the checkpoint respawn either … so you use up all your ammo and can’t get any more.. you can see where this is going.
Eventually after a repeat or two, you’re completely out of ammo for all your weapons, you still have to clear the “super hard wave that you still haven’t figured out how to beat”, and the only way to fix things is to abandon the mission completely and repeat it from the start (in order to restock your loadout)..
Getting frustrated eventually, I started asking around and checking websites out for help, but it seemed (at that point in the games launch) that most people had just done the story missions in groups, and weren’t having the difficulty I was having trying to do it solo.
After a couple hours of this, I gave up, switched off the console and never played Destiny 1 again. I have no idea if the respawn/ammo empty situation, or the mission difficulty ever got fixed/better/more fun.. but that experience really killed the game for me, combined with the terrible loot drops (this was before the cave even).
Maybe one day I’ll go back and try again with all the latest stuff added to the game, but it’s not high priority.
That gameplay experience was so terrible that I didn’t even bother getting Destiny 2.
Hear, hear. But perhaps the best story of them all came from smegw0lf, who got so enraged at the original Tomb Raider that their neighbour got involved:
The 1st ever tomb raider on PS1 had a corridor right near the end of the game full of insta-kill lava flows. I died so many times and the rage got so real an elderly neighbour bashed on our door while brandishing a club-lock, ready to defend my poor abused girlfriend named “Lara”. Poor guy.
After hastily explaining that Lara was a video game character and my actual girlfriend was sitting there amused by my constant fails he was so embarrassed. I told him that his chivalrous behaviour was nothing to be embarrassed about and was honoured that he would risk his own safety to make sure my girl was ok. I made a conscious effort not to rage at games that intensely after that.
How incredibly sweet, and also a little hilarious thinking of someone dying over and over again to those lava flows. Oh, how I miss you Tomb Raider.
Thanks again to everyone for sharing.
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