I’ve just lost any sense of manliness to Fallout 3.
There’s a quest for Big Town where you’re asked to save some of their townsfolk from the Super Mutants over at a nearby building. Well, I was low level but managed to outsmart the super mutants in a ruined church before pushing on to the HQ. After some fire-fights and enlisting the help of an Enclave Bot I had taken out the guards outside.
Well, ammo was tight and more were inside, but through a liberal use of frag mines I was ready to push on.
Now my health was low and I found I had to clear another level. I took out another Super Mutant with mines. Creeping forward I saw numerous contacts ahead on my perception bar. Decided that with low health and low ammo that discretion was the better part of valour, I legged it.
Fast forward 14 levels and tens of hours of gameplay and I was ready. I’d learnt how to deal with these scum, I had psycho, I had jet, I had that thing that improves damage resistance, I had Dogmeat… I was loaded for bear, as the saying going.
Sneaking into the lower levels I pumped drugs into my system and prepared to whoop some ass. I snuck towards the contacts…
Fucking radroaches. A swarm of radroaches had single-handily stopped me saving the people of Big Town countless hours ago. I will never know the end to this shame.
#1 (didn’t happen to me) A guy I had been playing EverQuest with for 5 years found out the hot wood elf he’d been cybering (and lending money to) for years was really a man.
#2 (me) I was playing xbox live (original xbox) and getting my ass handed to me repeatedly in the game Godzilla: Save the Earth (awesome fighting game for people who like slower, godzilla based, fighters). At the end of the match, and me losing round after round (I was feeling pretty kick-ass up until this match) I say: “Good Game”, and the reply I got was something like “Dude, you suck”… from kid that sounded about seven.
#3: Oh yea. Also, the one time when a 100+ raiding party all got completely wiped out (at the culmination of a six hour raid we couldn’t possibly re-attempt that night) because I had the wrong weapon equipped while tanking (an identical looking, but completely different sword to the one I had that would normally proc a +hate/taunt spell)
Playing Quake 1 in a LAN match held at Cybersmith, an ill-fated attempt to get people to pay by the hour to play PC and console games.
Two other guys in their late 20’s (as I was back then) and a 12-year old. The 12-year old just murders all of us so badly that he feels confident enough to get out the axe and take us on mano a mano. We’re armed with chainguns and shotguns and he still kicks our ass.
At the end of the game everyone is shaking hands and I go over to tell the kid he’s really good. He asks who I was and I tell him my nic. He looks at the final scores (I had -2 because of the damn lava! Yes, I sucked) and is actually surprised enough to spontaneously say, “Wow, you really suck.”
I then told the 12-year old to fuck off and die. I’m not proud.
I went over to a new friends house to play Halo multi-player. They had two systems linked and it was a 4 on 4 match. Now, I knew I wasn’t a great Halo player but I had played against others before and had finished the game on the highest difficulty.
It didn’t go well. Things got to the point where my friend came over to give me “help” because he felt I was hurting the team too much.
Playing a game like that with a bunch of college kids who are attending a game industry oriented tech school when you are older is a bad idea.
Dying to “Frogger” in Naxxaramas, in World of Warcraft.
Anyone who has been in Naxx knows what I’m talking about: personal feeling of failure magnified by 9-39 other people laughing at you/bitching at you for holding up the raid.
Unreal Tournament. I was on CTF-Face getting owned over and over by one player. He’s sniping me, shooting rockets at me, jumping all over the place and basically making me feel like an utter turd.
I type a message to him along the lines of “Jesus, you’re good!” He ignores me and continues to pound me mercilessly.
I get a little peeved now and I say, “Hey, asshole, how about letting me play for a bit?” He continues to ignore me.
Oh boy it’s most certainly the online aerial arena for me. Be it WW2OL, Aces High 2, or IL2 online there are some insanely good virtual pilots out there who will kick you in the balls and laugh in your face as lie curled up like a fetus in the gutter. No matter how vigilant you check your 6 there will be someone who will nail you in a one pass bounce or explode your crate with a wicked deflection shot. It’s a very humbling experience and I’ve been wasting my life in front of the computer as virtual airline captain and F16 pilot since I was 11 or 12 but that means nothing in the online arena. For some of these guys it’s no longer about flying a simulation but more about rolling over the score in a coin op arcade as they rack up kill after kill.
I sadly still die maybe 1 out of every 10 times on world 1-1 in SMB on that first Goomba. Dunno what it is. He just has it out for me and lords his awesomeness over me like a champ. Once I make it past him, I’m gold, but it’s always tense those first couple of seconds.
I’m still hilariously bad at Super Mario games, mostly because I don’t have a good sense of how to control jumps properly. I can muddle my way through, but I didn’t grow up with a NES and missed out on years of practice.
As for humiliating experiences, I was playing Rainbow Six team deathmatch against some buddies, managed to completely flank them, and then discovered that I had inadvertently remapped “fire weapon” to something else.
When I first started playing COD 4, I wasn’t very good. It took me several matches to get my first 3-kill streak, and when I finally did I yelled out at my partner “Hey Jo! I got a 3-kill streak!” The only problem was that I forgot to mute my headset, and everyone in the game heard me scream this. I quickly unplugged my headset so I wouldn’t have to hear the jeers. :)
It was the day I finally learned that no matter what, I would never, ever be really good at any game. Ever.
I had owned a Nintendo 64 for a year, year-and-a-half, and mostly played Goldeneye multiplayer with friends (back when we had time for that sort of thing). And I mostly won. My nephew then gets a 64, and he’s had it for about two days when I visit and he asks if I want to play this game that he’s barely heard of but which came with the console: Goldeneye.
It’s not so much that he wins (I’m not terribly good at any game). It’s that it quite literally doesn’t matter if I touch the controls or not. He kills me just as quickly and efficiently. Two days he’s played that game.
