Surely you guys can remember moments where you felt like throwing your controller at a wall, punching a pillow, or otherwise doing something because a game made you frustrated. What are some of those moments? The oldest one I can remember was in Pokémon Red when I was a kid, and really, any game in the series I played as a kid. I'd get really upset over not being able to catch a cool legendary Pokémon because it died, or because I ran out of Poké Balls. Also, Call of Duty. I don't get that mad over it, but if I'm on a really bad losing streak, I have a tendency to just quit mid-match and take a breather.
Well, this thread is oddly convenient! Since I'm playing Pokemon Stadium 2 right now there have been plenty of anger-inducing moments. I've managed to do everything so far using my Pokemon from my Red version (I would use my Silver/Gold/Crystal versions but they're dead :unsure: ) but now I'm attempting Round 2 Little Cup. Little Cup allows only Lv. 5 Pokemon so that means I have to use rentals since you can't breed in Red and the only Pokemon you can catch under or at Lv. 5 are Rattata, Pidgey, Weedle, Caterpie...garbage basically. Rentals are weak stats-wise and have sub-par moves so yeah Round 2 Little Cup is very difficult. I know I can win but I have to get lucky, like relying on critical hits lucky. I don't throw contollers or punch stuff or other things like that though. Never have. I just get frustrated, put the controller down for a while, relax and get right back in it.
Shooter campaigns are full of these for me, especially twitchy ones like CoD. Having to replay parts twenty times over just because I got overwhelmed by waves of endlessly respawning enemies makes me want to throw my controller like nothing else. I always manage to control myself though.
Playing Zelda II: The Adventure of Link right after coming home from having my wisdom teeth take out and while up on pain meds.
I don't know how I didn't think of it before...platformers in general will make me want to break things. You can expect gratuitous swearing whenever I play a Mario game - 2D or 3D, it matters not.
But Mario is so easy. For platformers... Donkey Kong mine cart levels and I don't get a long. Pixel-perfect jumps :|
BIT TRIP RUNNER. I hate that game so much but I'm on the third-to-last level or something so I can't bring myself to ditch it. I don't know why I forced myself to play past the first few levels to get to that point. It's a horrible game. It masquerades as a rhythm game when really it's just a bad platformer where you literally have to memorize every single jump and action in a level--as well as get ridiculously strict timing--or you start over from the beginning of the level. When some of the levels stretch to 3-4 minutes, it's just awful. The timing thing wouldn't be so bad if it actually followed any semblance of a beat when you played. It's the sequel to a game that was legitimately based in rhythm and as you progress through a level in Runner and collect power ups, more layers of music are added in, so everything points to it being a rhythm game. That alone trains you to make your jump on a beat or memorize the "song" that plays from the sound effects that crop up when you do an action correctly to make progress. But not only do those sound effects change every time (even if only slightly, it's enough to make it hard to discern what the "song" is supposed to be even if you get a section right every time), the entire thing doesn't match up to any of the music or sounds or baseline of the song. So the music which is already kind of grating (I don't mind chiptunes and maybe it's just because I hate the game, but they just sound like noise rather than music or melody to me) is distracting and wholly unnecessary. So essentially the game is a distracting platformer with bad level design. I wil be the first to admit I'm bad at platformers so I know a lot of my frustration comes from the fact that I'm so bad at the game which leads to a looot of restarted levels. But it's not entirely my fault. Intuition is pretty important in side-scrollers where you run at a constant pace. You have to be able to predict what's coming and react to it accordingly. I'm not horrible at that. What I'm usually horrible with is timing and I've already mentioned why timing is completely thrown off in this game. The game does do a good job of gradually introducing the elements you have to deal with--first you're just jumping over rocks, then you have to kick through other obstacles, you slide down to dodge airborn objects, etc. Generally it's pretty easy to know what to do. But then they started introducing these jump pads. You bounce off them and can reach higher objects in front of you when they come up so obviously you're supposed to aim for them every time, right? Nope. Sometimes you're supposed to jump on them, sometimes you're supposed to avoid them and jump over them. And there's no rhyme or reason to why. By the last set of levels there's so much crap all over the screen and you're trying to ignore the music and sounds and the levels are so long that sometimes you forget where you are in your memorized pattern and jump on a pad that tosses you up into nothing and then you don't have enough time to jump over something. Or you miss the pad and you needed it to keep going because otherwise you land and can't recover in time to karate chop an obstacle out of the way. It's infurating! If you aren't going to follow musical timing in your rhythm game, at least make all your obstacles work the same way every time. Don't punish me for doing what I was trained to do for half the game. It has different levels of difficulty. I started on Normal and was finding the game difficult for the reasons mentioned above, so I restarted on Easy assuming--you know, that it would be easier and probably more forgiving--nope. The only difference is that they cut out all the collectibles and extra levels for getting perfect. WTF. The collectibles weren't the part that were hard! Ugh! Ugh, the game is just horrible. I know a lot of people appreciate it for being a throwback to when games were really hard and unforgiving but at least most of those gave you cheat codes to skip levels or could use the excuse "no saving" or "not enough memory to have save states" or something like that. I want nothing more than to skip the level I've been stuck on for months so I can just get on with it and beat the game but nope. The level AND gameplay design is horrible. (Especially coming from Bit Trip Beat which, in addition to being a fun rhythm game, had proper difficulty levels and didn't punish you with death if you forgot a single part of the level or messed up somewhere.) I get so angry just thinking about this game lmao. At least with, say, NSMB Wii, the game makes me mad because it makes you hate your play partners (my roommates and I can barely take a single level without being ready to strangle each other afterwards). It's not so bad when you play alone. Games where the games themselves are the worst part though? No excuse.
