My point is that the wonderful world of video games has been a large mainstay of my life. Even as a child my parents would take me to arcades and waste their quarters on me so they could watch me mash the joysticks endlessly on Frogger as I squealed like an idiot, pretending like I knew what I was doing. They would smile and laugh at my happiness, the whole while hoping that I wasn't mentally handicapped and was just easily distracted by bright colors and loud noises instead(note: technically I am mentally handicapped).
Throughout all these years I have been able to do one thing for the majority of my game playing: keep my cool. By that I mean whenever I lost, or sucked absolute anus at a video game I didn't start yelling or screaming at the top of my lungs, or cry like the tips of my pinkies had been cut off. Nope, I just went on playing and generally kept an even keel.
Generally.
Unfortunately there are always exceptions to the rule. It could be something as simple as fatigue, caffeine or even a dead pet. For me, my own exceptions were just the games themselves. They were my breaking point, the things that were to cause me to briefly go insane.
I know it sounds sort of like an obvious reason, but the games that made me lose it weren't just any games. No, these were games that were so ungodly hard (or stupid) that they couldn't be beaten and the entire time you played them it felt like they were mocking you for even trying to do so. And for some stupid reason, even though I knew better, I kept trying to beat them regardless of how many times they spanked me in defeat. And when they spanked, they spanked hard.
Now when I say I reached my breaking point, I don't mean I raised my voice at the T.V. and said "Come On!" or threw my hands up in the air. Oh no. I broke down like a blubbering idiot. I stomped my feet, screamed like a girl, and after 2 hours of being bettered by an 8 to 16 bit machine I started to shed tears and blame the machine for cheating. Which it was.
What I would like to present to you now is a condensed list of the various games that have caused me irreparable mental anguish in my life, the ones that have done the most harm.
- Ghosts and Goblins (NES) - Why man was allowed to create this game I will never know. It's difficult to the point of embarrassing...literally. Any upgrades you receive are actually worse than the weapon you start out with, the equivalent of the mouth of hell opens up and is constantly out to rip you apart every two feet, and on top of that you are forced to walk around in your underwear if you underperformed. Difficult AND degrading. If you want your child to never play video games, force them to play this one over and over.
- Battletoads (NES) - Pretty fun game at first. It's a strange Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle knockoff whose main characters are named after bodily fluids. It's fun for the first five minutes, and then the game punishes you for enjoying those five minutes. Every moment you play after that is absolutely unforgiving to the point where you can't even play the damn game.
- The Super Star Wars Series (SNES) - It looks Awesome! It sounds Awesome! It's Star Wars! It must be the greatest thing ever, right?! Eat my butt. These are the games that actually made me burst into tears because it made me feel like I wasn't a good enough person to play them they were so effing hard. What made it worse was that it would give you glimpses of hope that you could actually progress further in the game, and then it would slap you down like a fool and crush those glimmers of hope, or do one better by letting you go to the next level and not even let you move five feet without killing you mercilessly. I loathe these games. I'm crying right now.
- Street Fighter Series (Arcade) - Now I wouldn't cry after playing these games, but just get pissed off. Why? Because any time you would go to an arcade to play one of these games, some A-hole would come up, put in a quarter, play Ken and beat the crap out of you because he memorized every special move and then he would go on and play for three more hours. So you just had to stand there without anymore quarters and not play as E-Honda for probably what would have been five more minutes, because some prick wanted to be just that: a prick. You know what, screw it, I hate all fighting games because of crap like that.
There are of course other games that I loathe and hate, that cause madness and anger to spring up inside me, but these are the ones that have caused me the most pain. These are the ones that have poisoned my life. I'm sure there are more than this, but I think that the traumatic impact of playing them has caused my mind to blank out that experience altogether.
So it's a Fact: Unless you want to see me turn into a blubbering idiot keep these games away from me.
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