Roundtable: The Worst Rage Quits You’ve Ever Had

Sometimes when we game, we all hit that breaking point where you’re pretty sure that you just can’t take it. While the it can vary between game breaking mechanics or overall frustration, we all do the same thing when we hit that point — we do a Rage Quit. There are many methods of the Rage Quit, it could involve screaming at a friend and tentatively ending a friendship, breaking controllers or consoles, or making such an ass of yourself in front of others that you’ll never be allowed to live it down.

We here at Nintendojo are no different. So the question that I posed to myself and the Nintendojo staffers was “What are some of your worst Rage Quits from your time gaming?” Here’s some of their answers:

Mel Turnquist

I can Rage Quit with the best of them. I use video games to help de-stress and also pour out my frustrations into a singular game. There’s something so soothing about grinding through levels that can give you a real peace of mind. So when there’s games that act unreasonable and are flat out terrible, I get to the mind frame of rage quitting. Usually, I’m alone when I go through my little fits of Rage Quit, but there was once when I did it while playing with a friend.

We were playing Mario Party 3 at her house on her N64. Now Mario Party games are usually a breeding ground for these kind of frustrations, so it’s basically nothing new that a game like this would cause some serious anger issues mounting even between the best of friends. As we played, I ended up the Butt Monkey on everything. Anything that could go against me in the game, went against me. I was playing as Luigi (no surprise here) which didn’t help matters at all. But there was this one game in particular cause me to go over the edge — Ridiculous Relay.

For those who don’t know, Ridiculous Relay was a 3-on-1 game. The one player would be on a hang glider, trying to steer their way away from bullet bills. Meanwhile, the three players are on three different water-type mobiles. The first is on a shell with a paddle. This one is fairly easy to do. The last one is a bullet bill motorboat that basically consists of button mashing A all the way. The second one, however, is the awful awful terrible one — the water glider. It may not seem so hard to some people, but man I had such issues with it. And every single time we drew that game, I was always on the damn water glider!

So we get to racing on this one particular game. My friend was on the hang glider and my fellow CPU players had given me a hefty lead. But for some reason, my ability to mix the right combination of buttons kept failing me. I kept screwing it up. And after the fifth time of going nowhere, I just screamed in frustration, took the controller and hurled it towards the system yelling out every obscenity known to man. My friend was stunned at first, but then got pissed off when the game froze. She (and for good reason) was yelling at me for destroying her N64. I insisted it wasn’t destroyed and even reset it to prove it. Thankfully, I was right. Because if I wasn’t, I would’ve had to pay for a new N64 for her and I didn’t even have a job yet. And that is pretty much when I learned that playing with friends is sometimes a horrible horrible thing.

So that’s pretty much my worst Rage Quit…freaking Mario Party…

Joshua Johnston

I was in junior high, and I borrowed the original Final Fantasy from a friend. I logged in probably 20 hours, plowing through the random-battle infested lands, dying more times than I could count, and slowly leveling up my party.

Then, one day, while I was out, my dad meandered casually down into the basement, powered up my NES, and started playing the game. His characters wandered into an inn and took a nap. Since the inn was the save point, and since the game only had one save slot, he wiped out my entire campaign with a single button.

I’ve never gone back.

Joseph Nelson

I’m a pretty laid back guy. It takes a huge amount to irk me. My vitriol may be evident from various social network status updates, but that’s different — those are just words, a way for me to vent. Most frequent among my online rages recently, are my tirades at what an expletive Joffrey is in Game of Thrones. He makes me want to hurl something at the screen. Besides Joffrey, the only things that have enraged me with such regularity are video games.

Back when I was but a young boy, off on my Pokémon adventure (Blue if you must know), I decided to do that MissingNo. glitch thing. You know the one, talk to the old guy in Viridian City, etc. I mean, I’d caught all the rest, so why not see this legend too? So there I was, surfing along Cinnabar Island and I encountered MissingNo.! I didn’t catch it though, I wasn’t stupid. Then I just carried on, saved and turned off. Next time I powered up, I noticed my Hall Of Fame entries were all weird! Nothing else went wrong though, so I was alright.

Few years later, I’m playing Silver Pokédex so near to completion, I must have only needed about 20. I saved right before my battle with Red in Mt. Silver, just to be sure, then turned it off ready to battle the next day after a nice sleep. I wake up turn my Game Boy Advance on… “NEW GAME”. What? No I’m seeing things. Where is continue? WHERE IS CONTINUE!?

My Mewtwo, traded from the corrupt Blue to Silver had wiped my file. I ripped the cartridge out of the system and hurled it into the fireplace, and buried my head in the cushions of the sofa to muffle my screams, and was in a tizz for the entire week. I never played Silver again.

In milder rage quits, there was GameCube’s StarFox Adventures. Not a particularly challenging game, and quite mediocre, but I was doing fine up until the Dragon Rock level, where you have to fly around on the CloudRunner’s back and shoot at some regenerating targets. I couldn’t shoot them fast enough, and in between dodging projectiles thrown at me, and tring to mash the A button, I just couldn’t do it. Cue another case of me throwing the controller somewhere and getting in a huff. (I did eventually invest in a controller with a turbo button though, which helped me through this level with no problem).

Then there’s my Grandmother. Seeing as I grew up with Nintendo consoles scattered around me, (my first memory is of playing Tetris on the Game Boy), pretty much everyone in my family is a gamer. My Gran used to play the NES, and mutter “cheating bloody thing” when she lost, but that was it. However, my Nan could contain her rage no longer, when she began playing Super Mario Bros. Wii . Single player mode, fine. Multiplayer…? Let’s just say my friends are scared of my Nan thanks to this game. “STOP BLASTED DAMN WELL MESSING AROUND AND PLAY BLOODY PROPERLY!” snatching Wii controllers from everyone’s hands, and hurling them across the room, waving her bamboo stick in the air, swearing, kicking the Wii…
Needless to say, we have since banned her from playing this. She is now restricted to Wii Scrabble.

M. Noah Ward

Speaking of rage quits with family members present, I have an embarrassing one. At first I couldn’t think of one. I’d rather forget moments where I threw a tantrum over a game, but this one was recent, and it was with Kirby. Kirby! How could Kirby result in a rage quit?

Well as it turns out, Kirby’s Epic Yarn is very accessible and near impossible to die in. It makes for a great co-op game too, especially with kids and even casual gamer family members and friends. Yet inexplicably, amidst all that fantastic art design, incredible soundtrack and easy-but-deep challenges, there’s one little platforming section that drives me insane. Worst part? It’s in the the game’s second world– stage 2-3, aka “Cool Cave” in Hot Land. Honestly, the remainder of the game’s bosses and many, many additional later levels don’t have the one insane moment this stage has. It’s hard enough to play by yourself. It’s even worse trying to play it with a casual gamer who’s not good at platformers.

What’s this diabolical element? It’s a screen’s worth of platforms that continuously slide up. Much like the old sliding platforms stage in Super Castlevania IV (am I dating myself again?), the platforms slide up and off the screen, and run into other stationary platforms, so if you happen to be standing on one that does such, you get squished, lose all your beads and have to back up. And there is no shortcut or easy way out: you must dexterously jump between these platforms to proceed and complete the stage. No super guide. Get it done.

The scrolling platform area features one- and two-second windows per jump that you have to wait 20 seconds to roll around again for if you miss one, and each jump requires the full height of Kirby’s jumps to land. The timing and precision required is nerve-wracking, especially when the rest of the game is so sublimely easy and smooth. It sticks out as blatantly out of balance, and I’m getting angrier the more I just write about it. I know that when playing it solo, I was stuck a good ten minutes on this area (far too long for any Kirby challenge), trying over and over and then starting the whole stage over because I wouldn’t have enough beads to get a medal at the end. As for casual gamers? They may never play the game further than this moment.

That’s what happened with my mom at least. We kept trying, and trying and trying to get past it. I tried carrying her, New Super Mario Bros. Wii style, to get through it, but our combined height was too tall for the narrow gaps. I started venting my frustration and my mom got freaked out. We eventually got through it, I think thanks to my mom getting squished and going into “bubble save” (also like NSMBW) and me somehow struggling through it by myself, but we only played a couple more stages before stopping. We never came back to it, and I don’t think my mom wants to because she’s now written the entirety of the game off as “too hard” because of that one stupid stage so early in the game.

So it wasn’t a traditional rage quit, but it was definitely a rage-inspired quitting of the game. Too bad, because the rest is really great.

This is only a sampling of what a rage quit can do to the normal Nintendojo staffer. But it doesn’t have to end there. So for you fine readers, I pose the same question onto you– what were the worst Rage Quits that you’ve ever had? Ever broken a video game because of it? Ever engaged in fisticuffs? Had to have your mouth washed out with soap? Share with us!