Yeah, I always screw up the run-jump somehow. My run-jump always either overshoots or undershoots the little pixel.
I’ve full-cleared later Mario games that most people would consider more difficult, so I dunno what the hell. It’s just that one jump.
Probably in Eve Online when we had just gotten into a war and hostiles started jumping into system. I undocked my relatively expensive Raven battleship from the station before it got locked down and warped off to join the friendlies. I realized I didn’t have much ammo on me and for some reason ignored the voices on Teamspeak saying “Do NOT go near the station” and warped back to the station to try to pick up some ammo. Heard “Whoever just warped that Raven out is an idiot” (and I was) and was vaporized almost instantly when I got back. Was so pissed at myself I had to stop playing for the day.
World of Warcraft here. Shortly after release, my roommate (playing Leonidas the Mustache-specced paladin) and I are tooling around through Loch Modan at around level 15 or so. We head north and see a scenic canyon-like vista and decide to go check it out.
You must understand, this is before either of us had frequented online strategy guides or anything of the sort. We did not know where we were headed.
We cross into the literally-red area and stroll about with “ooh” and “aah” at the scenery. Then we notice the critters about all have skulls for their level.
“WE’RE SOMEWHERE WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE!”
We start backtracking out of there, but on the way draw the attention of a very hungry coyote. Now, this is the Badlands. The coyote was probably, in the grand scheme of things, a glorified nuisance mob for level 40-something ore farmer. But to us, this slavering beast was the ruiner of worlds, the ur-coyote from which all other feral beasts were wrought.
Does he head for the paladin? No. He heads for me. Paladin starts waving his hands - hearthstoning! Great! We’ll just port back to Ironforge where it’s safe!
I start hearthstoning and I watch that bar get shorter as the coyote gets closer and closer. Leonidas vanishes as I see those fangs drawing closer. The coyote leaps and my poor under-leveled warrior hearths out…
…and appears in the tavern in Ironforge.
Right in front of an identical coyote - likely some hunter’s pet, but I did not know that.
I shout out loud - literally - “IT FOLLOWED ME THROUGH!!!”
I have never lived that moment down.
If anyone in QA dies in one of these pre-release multiplayer sessions, they have to do all the shitwork for the next week or so. True everywhere.
Ugh. The worst is when they do a big multi-publication event and instead of random teams, they set it up to be “journos versus testers”. Sadistic bastards.
Ha. Your only chance as a designer is to use some feature QA doesn’t know about yet.
Hah, not true! When we were doing SW: Battlefront back when Pandemic existed, the testers over at Lucas were adamant that certain characters were totally overpowered and break the game. The designers on our team thought otherwise, and a challenge was issued. I got recruited because the design team knew i was good at FPS games. So a ragtag team of designers, programmers and artists faced off against QA who should’ve been playing our game non-stop for several months.
We demolished them pretty handily. I vehicle hogged the AT-TE (yeah, i knew all the Episode 1 vehicles pretty well thanks to having worked on that game) and did fairly well.
Was that the Digipen students over at Hampton Greens? It may very well have been me or Rock8man you were forced to play against. Rock8man’s roommate was annoyingly good at that game. That training served me well later, I went on to win an in-house tournament at Pandemic and won myself a free copy of Halo 2. (and I won the following Halo 2 tourney as well)
That was an amazing night when we played with 16 people that time, with four of us versus 8 people on the other team. And we cleaned up so badly. It was capture the flag and the four of us had to constantly kill a seemingly endless stream of respawning players in order to capture the flag.
We tried to always make more balanced teams after that though. :)
And I object to the implication that my roommate was better than me at that game. He was definitely better at certain in certain situations, but I bested him in others. All four of us were quite a formidable team, actually. Which is why it was quite humbling when Halo 2 came out and we played against certain teams in the clan playlist. Some of those clans were so incredibly good, we weren’t even in the same league.
Nothing too serious or entertaining for me. Probably just having to check over my shoulders a few times while playing STALKER or FEAR with the lights out and my back to the door in the room, because I always think my wife is going to sneak up and scare me as a joke. Of course, she never does this and wouldn’t know I am playing a tense game anyway, so I feel kind of silly about it.
As the then-roommate playing Leonidas, he is correct. We have never let him live this down.
For my story – same two guys, Nute and myself. We’re playing Halo 2, a game I’ve never played and he’s playing for the first time, I believe. We’ve got split-screen co-op going, and for the early going, things are smooth. Neither one of us can drive the Warthog worth anything, but all of the enemies are nice and color-coded so I can shoot them without getting into too much trouble. Then we start the Arbiter levels, where everything looks like us, and it’s also taking place in largely dark chambers so I can’t see anything.
We’re in this big elevator, and the game is surprisingly spooky at this point, probably because I can’t see. So I’m jumping at shadows as we move around looking for enemies.
“AAAAAH!”
“It’s me! Don’t shoot!”
“Oh, okay.”
Half a minute later, circling.
“AAAAH!”
“Still me!”
Zombie-type things attack, and we fight them off. The door opens, and I turn to face the other guy in here with me.
“Shouldn’t we get going?”
“I left like two minutes ago, man.”
“…then who is this?!”
YOU HAVE DIED
I may not be competent, but I’m sure as hell entertaining.
Ha, it was Digipen students (some of them, anyway), but I’m not sure what you mean by the "Hampton Greens’ reference.
The first time I tried to play multiplayer in Diablo 1 I partnered up with a guy who was a lot more experienced and said he’d show me the ropes. We entered the dungeon and he killed me right away. I had no idea what the fuck had just happened. That was not only my first Diablo multiplayer experience but my first ever online multiplayer experience.
Since it’s supposed to be humiliating and I don’t feel humiliated by losing to more skilled players (and anyway I’m usually just mediocre) I’ll instead admit that the cat jumping in the garage in Phantasmagoria made me drop my glass of water.
I can still get scared at monsters appearing in computergames.
Back in college I could kick all of my friends’ asses at LAN Doom. I didn’t use a mouse, and some friend of mine got in an argument with a dude he knew about mouse and keyboard vs. mouse, which ended up in my friend talking all sorts of shit about how good I was to this guy I didn’t knew. Anyway, we ended playing a game to sort it all out, but we played on the computers in his dorm room. His keyboard had some sort of issue where if you pressed too many keys at once, some sort of glitch happened (I can’t remember what - maybe one of them didn’t register or something like that). If you’ve ever played Doom with only a keyboard, you’ll remember spending a lot your time hitting strafe, side, back, and fire all the the same time to do stuff like circle strafe. But I couldn’t do that on this keyboard, and I got worked hard.
And, for some reason, my explanation that it wasn’t my fault, the keyboard didn’t work right, no, really, didn’t make it better.
Haha. I remember I downloaded some BobaFett hacking program for Diablo 1. You could do all kinds of weird stuff like get access to fully leveled spells and kill people instantly. You may have even been able to kill people in town. Sometimes I’d go into the dungeon with someone relatively new and kill them with the heal other spell. Then I’d use resurrect which raises them and slays them immediately. I’d pretend I didn’t understand what was going on, perhaps the game was broken, and continuously murder them while more gold and ears popped onto the ground. It was pretty fun, but it got old after awhile.
Yeah, my first time I walked down into the dungeon with a Rogue, who proceeded to shoot my to death, put a fire wall on my body, and continuously rez me while coins kept flying out of my body. Took me a while to even figure out what was going on.
Years ago making a game I thought was for kids. Then giving it to my son to play, over my wife’s objection … and have him cry because it was too frustrating.
It hit all the “bad dad” , “bad husband” and “bad at my job” buttons at once.
On the plus side the lesson stuck with me.
The only thing that ever happens to me is that, in each MMORPG, without fail, about two or three days to four weeks in, I hit some stupid key that either makes my skill buttons disappear, or locks me into a mode where mousewheel is the only way to run forward or backward, or has me autoattack every single npc. The problem is never fixable by even death, and after an exhaustive search of the games printed materials proves fruitless, I am forced to attempt to consult the pigpen of anonymous twelve year olds referred to as “/s.”
The answer is always a single keypress, which I, having smashed my hands upon the keyboard in both systematic and chaotic fashions, alternating, am absolutely sure I have already tried at least thirty times.
The embarrassment might be hard to picture, but i’ll try anyhow:
I was playing LOTRO, riding through the eastern trollshaws on my horse. I was in an engrossing conversation with someone in kin chat, and put my horse on auto-run while typing. I had typed up a lengthy response to something this person said, but it was not quite finished yet. I glance back to my horse, and it’s fast approaching a cliff. For some reason I decide to try and finish typing the response before correcting my horse’s path. I don’t quite make it. The drop was long, and actually quite graceful to watch.
The embarrassment did not come until I suddenly remembered I was leading a group of 5 in my kin to a quest drop location. They all peered over the edge and laughed at me. The worst part was I was typing in the kin chat channel, so they all knew what I was doing and why I fell.