Before I launch into this post, let’s define “ragequit”. How about: quitting something in the heat of the moment, without putting much thought into it, because you are thoroughly and completely frustrated. Does that work?
I don’t ragequit games very often. I mean, I quit mid-game a lot, sure. I’ll quit because I’ve been playing for a while and my mind is wandering; and sometimes I’ll quit because the game isn’t going my way and I can’t be bothered to spend a bunch of time changing it so it IS going my way– especially if I know I’m already proven and capable of doing this.
Quitting out of rage, though, is not a typical aspect of my gaming modus operandi.
…until recently.
X-Com. This game is hard. There is no mercy. There is no handholding. There is just your troops being shot in the head by an unseen alien the second they exit their ship.
I ragequit this game pretty much every time I play it. Then I go play something easier for a while. Like, you know, Hearts of Iron II.
…but then I go back and play X-Com again, because there’s something deliciously addictive about it and I just can’t help but wonder if maybe this time I’ll figure it out. I mean, if I keep trying, then eventually I might live for more than five minutes. Right?
What about you guys? Do you ragequit often?
I don’t ragequit terribly often, or if I do, I tend to immediately start the thing back up.
HOWEVER!
When I was younger I would get SO MAD at games, ragequitting happened like, multiple times daily.
It doesn’t happen as often as it used to. XD
There was once I got so mad at the last boss fight in DMC4 that I threw the controller at the tv. Thank god it missed.
My latest ragequit has to be when I was attempting one of my Halo: Reach dalies to get three sprees in one match, which I was attempting in zombies mode (getting 5 kills, 5 zombie kills and 5 shotgun kills at once) In this mode it’s humans vs zombies, and you spawn as one randomly when you join. When a zombie kills a human, they become a zombie. So after about 15 games, where I had been human about a grand total of 3 times, dying before I could get my sprees each time, I finally gave up in frustration.
I don’t ragequit, but X-Com was one of the games that stood out in forcing me to go backwards and re-do things. Not just individual missions, but complete purchase or research decisions. I completely started over after getting pretty far several times before I finished it. Very challenging game. Wish I had the time nowadays to play like that again. Now I have to be satisfied with quick puzzle games or something I don’t have to devote a lot of focus to in order to have fun. Angry birds anyone?
An indie game named “N way of the Ninja” gets me everytime, sadly it’s a quality game that keeps sucking me back in :(
You know there is a Warhammer 40K game which uses the X-Com engine right. It is practically the same game, but with space marines.
You might like Bloodbowl too…
You know… the X-com games, especially Terror From the Deep which was the beginning of my adventure with the whole genre, made me who I am today.
They forced me to think in a way I never did before, and eventually do stuff I’ve only seen in movies or read about in books…
In short – I started hex-editing the games saves in order to not get beaten so badly. It was fun. Not the playing with terminator-like agents, who could take a hit with a rocket and continue the alien-massacre of 1995 with merely a flesh wound.
It was fun to poke around below the surface of the program, to see what I can change without breaking the program.
Then came high school, college, and a job as a Linux server administrator :)
Concluding – in my opinion the best games are the ones that challenge you on many different levels. For me it has been the Terror From the Deep in 1995… and few games afterwards.
@ Lukasz – That is a fantastic story. :)
X-Com TFTD was the first tactical game I played. I loved Microprose. I read articles today that assert that TFTD was punishingly hard, but I never felt that way when playing it. Sure, I’d make mistakes or the Aliens would get in a lucky shot and I’d turn back time a bit to try again, but it never felt like it was really unfair. I could almost always pinpoint the trouble as a bad tactical choice I’d made or a gamble gone sour. That’s just… the nature of warfare. I’d go back and try again. (Not exactly the nature of warfare…)
Years later, when Final Fantasy Tactics and other Tactics games came along, they all seemed easy, though I love them as well. Even Fire Emblem doesn’t seem like much when I look fondly back at my X-Com days.
Consequently, I don’t ragequit. There are arbitrary RNG annoyances like a character in Fire Emblem getting a totally worthless level that make me restart a level, but I’m so used to just backing up and trying again that I don’t quit, I just shrug and take another stab.
…maybe it also helps that I was raised not only on hard PC games but also Nintendo Hard games. I never did get far in Battletoads, but I liked Ninja Gaiden and other similar titles. Those were ragequit days, more so than today, and I got through them just fine. Today’s games just don’t faze me. ;)