What Is the Angriest a Game Has Ever Made You? – Burning Questions with The Escapist

John Friscia

Published: Jul 14, 2023 04:18 pm

Hey, all! We’re trying something new at The Escapist, something I’ve slapdashly christened “Burning Questions with The Escapist,” and it is exactly what it sounds like. I gave our large stable of Escapist writers and content creators a simple prompt: “What is the angriest a game has ever made you?” And below is an incredible variety of answers, from outright hilarity to somber lessons about the creation of art. I’m pretty proud to be able to showcase the diversity of voices we have at The Escapist, so I hope you’ll enjoy reading through them, letting us know which stories are your favorites, and sharing your own answers in the comments section!

Alex Berry – FIFA

Nothing quite grinds my gears like playing Ultimate Team on FIFA. Every match is tense and makes me want to throw my controller every time I concede a goal, and with my opponents rubbing it in with a lovely emote each time, that only throws fuel into the fire. Even if you stick it out through the matches and earn yourself some nice packs to open, FIFA will just kick you while you’re down, and you’ll pull absolutely nothing of value while you watch videos of countless people opening up insane players left and right. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Even if you do push past all of that, get to a decent rank, put together a solid team, and think to yourself, “Alright, now I’m in with a shot,” well, FIFA has other ideas there too. As soon as you start winning, you’ll just be put up against the sweatiest player with the most people named Ronaldo you’ll ever see in one place and have to eat goal after goal while you fume away as your opponent kicks away your sanity piece by piece. Yay, FIFA.

What Is the Angriest a Game Has Ever Made You? - Burning Questions with The Escapist

Antony Terence – Yakuza 0

Yakuza 0 is a game filled with powerful moments. But nothing could prepare me for the harrowing unease I felt when it revealed a character with stress-induced blindness. (SPOILERS!) As one of the protagonists, you form a special bond with this person across the game’s interwoven story arcs. She unknowingly inherited the contested Empty Lot in Kamurocho, making her a target for the Tojo Clan and the Omi Alliance, two of the game’s biggest Yakuza groups. One gunshot to this woman was all it took for my enemies to witness a purge.

I felt defeat wash over me as I rushed the injured character to an underground clinic. Known for his ruthless combat prowess, my one-eyed protagonist knelt and broke down in tears right at the door. This furious man then heads to the office of the Yakuza family responsible for this. The rampage through a patriarch office puts you in charge of single-handedly clearing dozens of men with your fists and a trusty dagger. Taking down a Tojo Clan lieutenant and a Chinese assassin with multiple health bars taught me the catharsis and desperation of a defeated man. And while you eventually learn that your blind friend lives, delivering justice with my fists is an experience I’ll never forget. Bearing his burden as my own was more exhilarating than any competitive multiplayer experience.

Chris McMullen – Heavy Rain

I have never, ever hated another game like I hate Heavy Rain. Games do sometimes annoy me every now and then, but whether I push through or give it up as a bad job, the memory usually fades. My hatred for Heavy Rain has only become more potent, more white-hot over time. And it’s all down to that late-game twist.

Don’t think of this as a spoiler; it’s me saving you from experiencing this narrative abomination firsthand. Playing Heavy Rain, I grew particularly attached to private detective Scott Shelby. He wasn’t your typical hero; he used an inhaler when he was out of breath, and he certainly wasn’t going to win slimmer of the year anytime soon. But he was going to nail the Origami Killer to the wall.

I tolerated the other three playable characters, but each time I stepped into their shoes I was counting the minutes till I got to play as Scott. In particular, I loved the budding but awkward romance between him and Lauren Winter, mother of one of the victims. And I cheered as he, or rather I, dragged her out of a sinking car.

But then the game delivered the biggest middle finger I have ever experienced playing a game. It revealed that Scott was in fact the Origami Killer, and he’d been collecting evidence to dispose of it. Screw you, David Cage. I was Scott Shelby, and that sure as hell wasn’t my agenda.

It’s what convinced me that, to this day, David Cage sees himself as a film director. That twist might have worked in a movie, but in a game, where the character in question had been under my direct control? How dare he undermine everything I’d been accomplishing as Scott, pissing on every choice I’d made?

Heavy Rain can burn in hell.

Colin Munch – Ninja Gaiden

Remember in Ninja Gaiden for Xbox 360 / PS3, after slamming your head over and over into a Ghost Samurai Boss for hours and finally beating him, you move into an area stuffed with floating Ghost Piranhas that materialize out of thin air, bite you, stun-lock you, and then swarm you until you die? I remember. I REMEMBER.

Damien Lawardorn – Resident Evil 5

This feels like a super basic answer because all the cool kids still love to hate on Resident Evil 5, but that final boss fight against Wesker was a pisstake for the ages. I already wasn’t enjoying the game all that much, but I persevered because I started it and I was damn well going to finish it… I think this is the game that actually cured me of that mindset.

The funny thing is that the fight isn’t really all that difficult. It’s bog-standard pattern recognition and basic combat. For some reason, though, I just couldn’t crack it. It starts with the frustrating juxtaposition of abilities between Wesker and Chris. He catches rocket-propelled grenades and moves like Neo from The Matrix, while I was stuck as a plodding nincompoop. But that’s just the first stage. In the second stage, the action moves to a volcano, Wesker becomes a tentacle monster, and you have to shoot his yellow pustules. But there’s a big problem with readability, made worse by Sheva going critical. I don’t know how many times I died, how many times I had to take a break and walk away, but the sheer nonsense involved in that fight is seared into my memory. I’m not sure if it epitomizes the ludicrousness of the Resident Evil series, but it surely comes close.

Oh, and let’s not forget that Chris has to punch a boulder in the middle of it… Just go away.

What Is the Angriest a Game Has Ever Made You? - Burning Questions with The Escapist

Elise Avery – Shrek 2

I have no idea what possessed us to rent Shrek 2 (the video game) from Blockbuster, but somehow, I ended up in my mum’s living room playing Shrek 2 co-op with my sister and a friend. Most of the game was unremarkable licensed game stuff, but since it was co-op, we were having a decent time until we hit the rhythm game portion.

So, Shrek 2 features a bunch of random minigames sprinkled into the campaign, and most were pretty easy. But for some reason, the rhythm game was so goddamned hard that even with all three of us, we kept losing. We must’ve spent half an hour replaying the same minute and a half of gameplay, growing more and more frustrated. Eventually, everyone was ready to give up except for me, furious at being so utterly destroyed by a Shrek video game, of all things. My friend and sister took a break to walk the dog, but I refused to leave, convinced that I could beat it if I only kept trying. Through some miracle, I beat it a few minutes later, but was it worth it?

I have no idea if the game was actually hard or if I just sucked at games as a 10-year-old. But regardless, I’ll always remember the rage-inducing rhythm minigame of Shrek 2.

Fran Ruiz – God of War

I think it has to be when I first went through the remaster of the original God of War on PlayStation 3. (I never played the original PS2 release.) There’s something about the quick-time events in that version of the game that feels off, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my controller, as God of War II wasn’t nearly as much of a struggle when I had to perform the same actions. From the button-mashing moments that needed me to destroy the face buttons to strings of inputs for finishers that almost never registered properly, the controls rarely worked as intended during bits that were supposed to be monumental.

As a result, many major encounters quickly went from Greek epic to Greek comedy, with PS2-era Kratos hilariously failing over and over again to perform the simplest of (murderous) actions after pulling off some sick moves with the Blades of Chaos. Sadly, this also meant I died many times because enemies kept beating the shit out of me while I faced a “trial and error” penance that would make Atlas shudder until the controller chose to accept my half-circles and whatnot. Needless to say, some of the later stages in the game had me shaking my fists at the Gods of Mount Olympus, nearly as angry as Kratos.

Jesse Galena – Silent Hill: Homecoming

I wasn’t angry as much as I was disappointed.

In 2008, my friend and roommate got a copy of Silent Hill: Homecoming. He knew I was a Silent Hill fan. He knew Silent Hill 1 introduced me to horror as a genre in any medium and started my love for psychological horror. He was a guy I’d spent so many conversations with talking about symbolism and story beats and game design regarding the first four Silent Hill games.

To sit with a friend and fellow fan and play through something that felt so empty and so far removed from the passion and imagination of the thing I fell in love with brought up all seven stages of grief.

It wasn’t anger at the developers. It wasn’t even anger at the publisher. It was anger at human limitations. The fact that talented folks with resources, understanding, and a solid foundation could still create something so misguided — regardless of the source and the product — meant no matter how hard I tried to create art in any medium, I could suffer the same fate. I could be the one showing off something I worked hard on that people didn’t appreciate for completely justifiable reasons.

For a while, I was angry that no matter what I or any of us do, who we do it with, or what we try to create, no one is above the possibility of failure.

Jesse Lab – Ride to Hell: Retribution

There are few games that have ever broken me, but it should come as no surprise that the game to break me was a broken game itself, the infamous Ride to Hell: Retribution. Back in college, my roommate and I had a fascination with the game and did everything in our power to beat what was considered the worst game of all time. And there were sections that made us rage, but none were as infuriating as waiting for an elevator to come down and then ride it up. During that agonizing wait, we had immortal bikers wearing Jason Voorhees masks swarm us and kill us repeatedly, driving my roommate and I to literally break a TV. It wasn’t the TV we were playing the game on, but rather a TV that some guy left in our room, but we screamed so much and threw such a violent fit that the TV fell off the bed and shattered on the floor.

We both agreed to stop playing the game due to this, but one year later, we went back and finished the job after finding the game at a GameStop. We knew we had to finish what we started, so we purchased it for $5. Unfortunately, we had deleted our old save files, so it was back to square one for us again. One rage-filled week later, we proceeded to break the disc into a million pieces and throw them into a field once we finished it. Better than it deserved.

Jess Hoops – The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I’ve played my fair share of punishingly difficult games and chased some challenging achievements, but oddly enough, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is responsible for the most frustrating moment I can recall. I adore games that allow you to customize a “home base” area, so as a new Skyrim player, I was immediately enamored with the Hearthfire homesteads. I selected Lakeview Manor as my primary estate and began decorating its shelves with the treasures and trinkets I’d collected — potions, skulls, insects in jars, Daedric artifacts, dragon claws, and bowls of gemstones, all carefully curated and meticulously organized despite the extreme finesse required to place objects precisely using a console controller. One day, I returned from a quest to find that the shelves’ original contents (pots, goblets, plates, and the like) had respawned, causing my prized possessions to effectively explode all over the house. With hours of work nullified and some items seemingly lost forever, I abandoned that save file completely, and my enthusiasm for virtual interior design never quite recovered.

John Friscia – Final Fantasy X

Final Fantasy X had unskippable cinematics and a turn-based sports minigame called Blitzball that it introduced for the first time after one of those long cinematics. You didn’t have to win this minigame, and it wasn’t even mandatory to play after this first instance. But I wanted to win. I was playing at two disadvantages: I missed a special ability I could have gotten earlier in the game, and the opposing team is just outright better than that of the player. I understood the game well enough though, so when I lost, I felt compelled to sit through the cinematic and try again. I lost. So I sat through the long cinematic and tried again. I lost. So I sat through the long, long cinematic and tried again. I tied! I might’ve tied more than once! But ties weren’t allowed for this game, and then I lost. Finally, I had lost so many times that I got up out of my chair, clenched every muscle in my face, and felt my eyes narrowing… narrowing… narrowing.

The next thing I remember is that my body was wedged between a bed and a desk, a scrape on my arm from where it had banged into the desk. What had happened was I had gotten so angry at Final Fantasy X Blitzball that I literally blacked out in rage and lost consciousness. It was arguably the dumbest moment of a life that has been filled with cartoonish decisions.

And the kicker? I never lost another game of Blitzball afterward. I was a killer at the sport!

What Is the Angriest a Game Has Ever Made You? - Burning Questions with The Escapist

KC Nwosu – Genesis Noir

If I ignore highly competitive titles like Smash Bros., Rocket League, and Street Fighter (which I think says more about me than those games), then weirdly enough, I think it could be the adventure game Genesis Noir that made me angriest. This abstract story-driven experience takes you from the creation of the universe straight through the entirety of human history as well as the heat death of the universe, and I truly enjoyed it. But during my review, I ran into a strange connect-the-dots-style puzzle that I was unable to solve for several hours. I’m unsure why, but I became unreasonably agitated at the idea that I couldn’t figure it out. I reloaded the chapter numerous times and called in my non-gaming fiancée to try her hand at it, only for it to sort of solve itself without me knowing exactly what was done differently. It’s a testament to the overall experience of Genesis Noir that my affection for it wasn’t changed by whatever was going on with that puzzle, but it took me to a dark place.

Lowell Bell – The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

I love Zelda games. My dog is named Zelda. I replay Ocarina of Time every year. I only play Tears of the Kingdom when I can guarantee I have an uninterrupted hour or two to truly get into it. But I hate The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. It’s the source of my most frustrated moment in gaming because, up until the final boss, blowing into my 3DS’s microphone worked fine. However, after defeating Malladus, I had to play the flute one final time — except my microphone decided to no longer work, registering each huff and puff as strange warbles as Zelda berated me for messing up the tune. I ended up not finishing the game, frustrated beyond belief, and watching the ending on YouTube. To this day, it’s my least favorite Zelda game because of that mechanic.

Marty Sliva – Banjo-Kazooie

Banjo-Kazooie is my favorite Nintendo 64 game, my favorite 3D platformer, and probably one of my 10 favorite games ever. Which is why it pains me so much whenever I have the finish line in sight during a replay, only to once again subject myself to “Grunty’s Furnace Fun.”

The penultimate challenge in the original Banjo is a quiz-show board game where you have to navigate a gauntlet of tasks that test your knowledge of the game. While some of these are simple time-based challenges from earlier in the game, others are trivia questions where you have to identity a level based on a zoomed-in screenshot, a character based on a bite-sized sound snippet, or a piece of trivia that you’d only know the answer to if you spoke to every NPC in the game and took careful notes. If you get enough questions wrong, you have to start the entire thing over. If you get a single question on a skull space wrong, you have to start the entire thing over. And it isn’t a set board either, so you can’t just memorize the path through.

This challenge was the bane of my existence as a kid, and it frustrated me just as much last year when I replayed the game on stream. The first 95% of Banjo-Kazooie is perfection. But “Grunty’s Furnace Fun” can go straight to hell.

Matthew Razak – Mega Man (DOS)

Did you know that there were Mega Man games on the PC? No? Good. You’re better off for it. Because no game has ever made me angrier than Mega Man’s PC port. Back in 1990 when the game came out, little seven-year-old me, oblivious to its true nature and the horrible reviews surrounding it, excitedly got this craptacular port made by some random guy Capcom paid to move the Blue Bomber to PC. I think my dad may have bought it for me to be precise, in which case I should probably call him up and tell him I hate him. Five minutes with the game and I was frustrated I couldn’t get past the first enemy, 10 minutes and I was bashing the keyboard, 15 and I was in full-blown tears of anger and rage. My seven-year-old brain became apoplectic at the poor controls and bad design, though at the time I had no idea what was going on. My dad came in and took the game away. I spent probably 20 minutes with this game 33 years ago playing no further than the first enemy in it, and yet it is seared on my mind like some form of PTSD (Pixelated Terror Stress Disorder).

Michael Cripe – Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

Every time I see Meta Knight — that metal-masked, edgy tryhard — I am filled with rage. I don’t hate him because of any of his appearances in the Kirby games, mind you. To me, as far as his home series is concerned, he is nothing more than an admittedly cooler version of his round, pink counterpart, just with less sucking. It’s because of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U that I find myself looking at that winged menace with disdain.

My Meta Knight trauma traces back to 2016. I was younger and more naïve, but that didn’t stop me from being the king of Smash among my friends. I dominated the skies with Jigglypuff. I dunked on hundreds of competitors as Mario. I controlled the competition as Mewtwo. I even perfected each Mii Fighter’s combat style. I could spot-dodge and dash dance with the best of them, but one mountain I had yet to climb was Meta Knight. Something about his hummingbird-like fighting style had always turned me off to the point that I never took him into battle… ever. Naturally, I thought I could pick him up and master his combat in an afternoon.

Match after match, my friends put me in my place. They mopped the floor with 2016 Michael. Fighting with Meta Knight felt like speaking a language that everyone understood but me, and unfortunately for my fragile ego, I didn’t want to give up so easily. “Again!” I yelled after each match drew to a close, hoping that the Meta Knight-shaped light bulb above my head would finally click on. Any outsider could see my brute-force tactics were only making me worse at Smash, not better.

Still, I continued on until joking anger became a fit of frustration as my friends mocked my fall from grace, leaving me to sling my controller against the wall. There were some… choice words helicoptered around the room, and I haven’t played as the character since. I still see him from time to time, gliding across my social media feeds, lazily hiding in a pile of stuffed animals at a store and, yes, in Smash Bros. Like a cold message from an old friend, his razor blade glare still haunts me every… single… time.

Sebastian Ruiz – Star Wars: Battlefront II

Oh, I found it. I was thinking on my angriest gaming moment and couldn’t figure it out, but now that I have I regret it. Star Wars: Battlefront II (the good one) had its hooks in me from the moment I started playing it. This was absolutely a vice. They say you don’t have a problem until it starts making your life worse, but I was so addicted that it improved my life. I became more studious so I could get my homework done faster so I could play more. I kept a strict bedtime so I could have more waking time so I could play more. That was the only year I ever had perfect attendance in school. Nothing was getting in the way of my playing Star Wars: Battlefront II.

But I had two problems. I didn’t have a memory card, and I grew up with an overly religious and overly Hispanic mother. The Star Wars: Battlefront II campaign isn’t that lengthy, but if I played too long in a single sitting, she’d drag me out for fear of bringing shame to God and the Virgin Mary. Single sittings were the only way I could make any progress, because my mother demanded all the electronics be turned off when you leave a room. If I left to go eat, I’d come back to a turned-off PlayStation 2 and all my progress gone.

During that summer I hid the PlayStation with my game still running. I plugged it in a different place so she wouldn’t glance in and see it. I put a towel on it to drown out the hum. I was finally making progress, but I grew careless. I forgot to place the towel on the console before heading out to church, and when I returned I saw it neatly folded on my bed. My Star Wars: Battlefront II was turned off, and I felt an anger that’s never resurfaced since. It wasn’t the type of anger that drives people to break monitors and controllers. It was pure defeated grieving anger where you finally realize it doesn’t matter how hard you try to push the boulder; your mother will always send it rolling back down, so you lay down, let it roll over you, and it drags you with it to rock bottom.

Tyler Erickson – Tiger Woods PGA Tour

Back in the olden days of Tiger Woods PGA Tour, I was ranked in the top 3 on Xbox in the Alternate Shot mode in both Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 and 14. The top few players messaged each other, and we decided to have a best-of-7 of the best Alternate Shot teams in the game. It was great and really close — we were tied after six matches — and the final match was really close too.

I had the approach shot for my team on the final hole and made a good shot — so good, in fact, that it hit the pin in the air. Normally, the ball would deflect just a few feet and land near the pin with an easy putt for my teammate ahead on the next shot. This time, however, the ball reacted as if it had been shot out of a cannon and rocketed straight into the lake.

I’m not the type to get super upset when I play a game, but that was the exception. Not because of that thing alone, but because we put so much time into playing to decide the best team, only to have it decided by that utter garbage.

If the game had been a digital copy, it would have been uninstalled on the spot. What ensued was the type of rant where my dog was trying to calm me down.

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