A big draw of gaming is to experience all the highs and lows, the agony and the ecstasy, that the medium offers us. We may think that the biggest satisfaction comes from completing a game, scoring a great goal or toppling an infamous boss, but none of these would amount to much if there wasn't the threat of failure always looming. While failure is something most of us happily accept, there are moments when everything in a game seems to conspire to drive you out of control - causing you to scream at the screen, smash your controller or - my favourite - laugh at the game dismissively as if it's ridiculous and you don't even care anymore, despite being positively furious deep down. It's not just the broken, poorly-designed games that lead to these moments either, as some of the greatest games of all time are equally capable of filling us with rage. Maybe it's a testament to their overall quality and how heavily invested we are in them that they cause many to boil over, or maybe it's that they should stop being so unrelentingly harsh - whatever the explanation, here are 10 gaming moments that made you rage quit.
10. Assassin's Creed - Broken Jumping Mechanics
The historical series is as much loved as it is hated, and part of that can be attributed to its constituent parts being a mixture of brilliant (like the well-realised settings) and hair-tearingly infuriating, like the eavesdropping or chase missions that are way too prominent in all of the Assassin's Creed games. For the uninitiated, these missions involve you running across rooftops or through city streets, chasing some character, or trying to listen in on someone's conversation while not being detected. Not only is this mission structure mundane, but it also doesn't work well with the patchy parkour mechanics of Assassin's Creed, which up to this day often cause you to latch onto the wrong ledge, jump onto a chimney, pillars or box when you don't want to - or just fall face-first onto the streets below. It's annoying enough when things go wrong through your own fault, but when it's down to dodgy in-game mechanics, you direct your rage at the publishers, developers, and everyone involved in the entire system that put that game in your lap. When each time you play one of these missions, you fail it five times in a row because your character is stuck humping some post or has jumped over to a rooftop that you didn't even tell him to jump to, eventually you just think 'why should I bother?' before abruptly switching the game off.
Gamer, Researcher of strange things.
I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.
