When I joined Respawning a year ago my first piece was called Five Fits of Fury, detailing five moments when game rage just took over me, usually concluding with me breaking something. As it has been a year I thought I’d mark the occasion with a further four moments, as each of these examples are quite long stories where I want you to feel every inch of the pain I felt before erupting like a beer, pizza and Monster fuelled volcano. Welcome to Fits of Fury – 2020 Edition.
Doom Eternal
The most recent example of me going through a game induced meltdown was with Doom Eternal. I’d been looking forward to this game for months, going so far as to not watch any trailers or gameplay videos as I was so convinced the game could do no wrong and that I would love it unconditionally. The hype train built even quicker when I received my copy two days before the official release day, giving me plenty of time to get a head-start over everyone else waiting for for this hotly anticipated title.
How wrong I was.
If I had watched any gameplay videos I’d have known going in that platforming played a major part in the moment to moment experience. I’ve never liked platforming games; partly due to being totally inept at them but also because I find them increasingly boring. On Doom Eternal’s second level there is a moment the Doom Slayer has to jump and dash twice, hit an orb floating in mid-air granting an additional dash, and land on a ridge across from where you start. What made it worse is that for every time you fail, you have to spend thirty seconds getting back to the point the ‘puzzle’ starts in, a walk I am all too familiar with now.
I spent half an hour attempting this basic traversal before giving up and screaming myself to sleep as I had to be up early the following morning. Before re-attempting I decided to watch a guide posted by Javier on the Respawning YouTube channel to see if I was missing something and was the only one struggling. It was just me as it turns out, as Jav successfully completed it on his first try, not even commenting on the sequence that was filling me with burning fury.
I eventually bested it after a further fifteen minutes of trying the following day, but by this stage it was a hollow victory and had eliminated any interest I had in the game. I finished the level and switched the game off, and haven’t returned to it since, making me one of the only people to say that they played and despised Doom Eternal before the game was even released. I did throw my controller during the first session’s attempts but these late gen controllers must be sturdier than those from earlier on as it still works perfectly well now.
For Honor
The controller I was using at the time of this outburst however, was not so lucky. It was July 2019 and everyone in Respawning were playing lots of For Honor online as it had been made a Playstation Plus game earlier that year. As I am extremely competitive in gaming, I was trying to get some offline practise in between sessions so I wouldn’t keep embarrassing myself every time we faced other player controlled opponents. Unfortunately I had made the rookie mistake of getting fairly inebriated during the course of this training session.
I was playing the campaign, if you can call it a campaign, and was somehow unlearning all the basic skills I had developed until that point. I was killing archers when I noticed that For Honor had had the audacity to put a timer on the segment I was playing, which hit zero within moments of my noticing and booted me back a way to start again.
The red mist descended, and after I had slowly turned the console off with adrenaline fuelled shaking hands, I launched the already fairly battered controller into the bin next to me. That wasn’t enough, and so as I couldn’t smash the disc (damn you digital media) I dug out my old work boots from my previous job in a warehouse, put on just one of them, and stamped on the controller until it no longer resembled a controller.
Forza Horizon 4
I’ve never been particularly gifted with numbers, and when you add alcohol to the mix when I attempt something clever it is bound to go badly. To those unaware, in Forza Horizon 4 there is an in-game online store where you can buy and sell cars to other players called the auction house. I had amassed a fortune of around thirty million credits and had managed to purchase a Rimac Two from the auction house for around eight million credits. Typically, this car can only be acquired by completing time consuming and gruelling challenges which I wouldn’t give the time of day. Failing this you could purchase it at the normal going rate of twelve million credits but I had managed to spot this one going cheaper and swooped in to confirm the purchase.
I should have left it here but I got greedy. I decided to purchase another Rimac Two, finding one eventually for ten million among the sea of twelves, thinking I’d sell it for the twelve million myself, securing a tidy two million in profit I could then use on another car further down the line. It was all going so well, I listed the car with a buyout auction price of twelve million and sat back waiting to see when I could claim my reward.
Disaster struck and I felt the cold fingers of dread reach in and crush my heart within moments of listing the car. I had forgotten to set a starting price for it! Before I could act some smug….person, had bought it for an absolute steal at TWO million (the starting price the game set for it). I was powerless as the two million credits dropped into my profile, the car was whipped away from me, and I had to sit there stewing in my crippling loss and failure.
No controllers were harmed in the making of this train-wreck, but I did smash a beer bottle like the big strong man that I am. I did say at the start I was bad with numbers, and alcohol really doesn’t improve my ability!
Shadow of the Colossus Remake
I’ve given this game a couple of verbal lashings in the past and it is time you found out why. Firstly I want to make it clear that I played and completed this title multiple times on the Playstation 2 and 3, and the gorgeous graphical improvement made me incredibly excited to play it again on the PS4.
I ruined my chance at the very much attainable trophy for completing a playthrough without dying during Colossus 8, as I had no recollection its poison clouds could kill you if you lingered in them for too long, as I thought they just made health gradually drain away. It did kill me however, and the unasked for autosave function kicked in immediately so reloading the game did nothing to help. My real anger at this game however, stems from the son of a bitch bastard that is Colossus 11, the smallest Colossus, yet the biggest prick.
Whoever remade the AI for him clearly took a lot of sick days as the job they did here was abhorrent. He shifts and jerks every which way while trying to get a foothold on him, and after being thrown off and nudged to death for the tenth time I decided to pack the whole thing in and delete the game from my hard drive.
While I didn’t break anything physically as a result of this, I like to tell myself that every time I mention my hatred of it I damage the games reputation just a little bit. That damage amounts to naught by the people flooding to play it when it was made a PS Plus game earlier this year, but in my head that was done because nobody was buying it after the verbal pastings I’ve given it over the previous year.
The things I tell myself to stay sane…
Thank you for reading my Fits of Fury 2020 Edition, I hope you’ve enjoyed my confessions and do let me know on Twitter @MaliceVER which one you found the most tragic. I’ll be back to speak to you again soon about something other than my misplaced anger and so I will catch you then.