Ever gotten so mad at a game you broke a controller, cartridge or even the console?

[Froboz]

I generally only shout at games when they piss me off. I try not to get physical with them. I'm more likely to punch myself in the head or tear fistfuls of my hair out. lol. But when I was a teenager it was a different story... I vaguely remember a few times I actually squeezed the Playstation controller so hard that I was lucky it didn't break, and numerous times that I ripped a cartridge out of my Colecovision or Atari 2600 Adapter and threw it across the room. But my best friend at the time was way worse than me. He actually picked up his Nintendo one day and threw it out of his window (he lived on the first floor). It went crashing across the sidewalk and landed in the gutter, ruined. I couldn't believe it. A week later he'd bought a new one. There was also one time he came over to my place to play games with me and actually hit my NES a couple times with his fist because he was mad at the game he was playing, and I had to tell him to stop or I'd kick his ass.

Please tell your story if you have one, and be sure to include which game you were playing at the time if you remember (not just which console), what it was that got you so mad, what you broke and how you broke it. Because I'm bored, and enquiring minds wanna know.

[buzz_n64]

No, never. Someone has anger issues.

[Froboz]

<@#$!!

[treismac]

My friend, Michael, and I use to play Tekken 5 religiously on the PS2. He taught me how to play the Tekken series starting out at Tekken Tag and he initially dominated me like a wizened old kung fu master. However, after much practice we became equals around 4 and, eventually, I began to dominate in 5. Michael, a rather proud fellow, did not take this well. He went out and bought a fighter stick (joystick), claiming that the d-pad controller was hampering his skills. A marathon of matches ensued with me crushing the utter shit out of him. I had became so much better than Michael that I actually held back or picked weak characters so as not to break his spirit, but not this time. No. I was irritated by his lame excuse. I beat him so thoroughly, so horribly over and over and over again that he just f*cking snapped. Lifting the controller over his head, he screamed and slammed it down into the ground, sending a geyser of plastic and electronic parts spraying up almost to the ceiling of our two story loft apartment. Although I was upset that he just destroyed an expensive joystick, I was also incomparably satisfied. The destruction of this new joystick was more than an awesome physical token of my supremacy over him; it was a sacrifice made to a god from the hands of a lowly mortal [no pride on my part, eh?]. Naturally with my friend as enraged and well armed with firearms as he was, I kept this thought to myself.

Mike and I didn't play Tekken again until Dark Resurrection for the PS3 came out. Needless to say, I always used half a fist on him from then on.

[Froboz]

LMAO! I don't think I ever got mad at someone else whipping my ass in a game until I started playing Killzone online with my aforementioned friend (the one who broke his NES) and his cousin. His cousin became so incredibly good practically overnight that I swore he must have found some kind of cheat. He would dance around us like we were clumsy children. We would shoot at him and never hit a vital area if we hit him at all. But he would shoot at us and it was always a head shot. It got so bad that he was killing us within like six seconds after we respawned. I couldn't understand how he kept finding us. He swore up and down that he wasn't cheating, but finally I gave up and didn't play anymore when he was playing. It wasn't fun not being able to get two feet before you got your head blown off.

But what got me mad most of the time were the games themselves, especially when there were certain areas in a game that at first seemed impossible, and I had to keep trying them over and over and over again, but kept dying... especially if the game was easy at first and then all of a sudden got wickedly difficult. I hated that. Super Mario World had a lot of areas that really pissed me off. But the worst were things like in Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance when you were in the thieves' guild and it was moderately difficult until all of a sudden they threw this stupid seemingly endless succession of areas with things like towers throwing fireballs at you and rocks floating in mid-air over an abyss that fell as soon as you jumped on them, so you had to quickly jump to the next one, and that one fell, and so on... aaaargggh!!! It makes me blood boil just thinking about it.

[Jack_Burton_BYOAC]

Only one time in my life.

I was playing through Final Fantasy III for SNES when I took it a friends house. I was 99% of the way to the end of the game with almost all the side-quests completed.

I plugged the cartridge into the SNES and flipped the power on switch and nothing happened. The SNES didn't come on because the DC power adapter wasn't plugged in.

This particular power adapter of his was sort of finicky, and if you barely touched it it would go off and back on.

Now, in hindsight I knew full well that using a battery backed game with this situation was a bad idea. But I forgot about it at the time.

I plugged in the power adapter with the power switch to the system in the ON position. The system came on and then back off again. I touched the power adapter another time and it did the same thing. One more time.

That time it worked, but when I started the game my saves were wiped.

I ripped that power adapter out of my best friends wall and smashed it against the carpet covered concrete floor of his room. He predictably flipped out, but took it a little better when I told him I would replace it from my own spares the next day. I think the same thing had been happening to him for years.

Now how many games have I given the old double middle finger F**K YOU at a game over screen? Countless...countless.

[Froboz]

Wow, that sucks. I think I would have cried. And I don't cry easily.

[8bitgamer]

No, but I did jump up and plop back down one time on a wooden chair and broke it into pieces. My brother-in-law had just barely beaten me on some side-scrolling shooter for the Commodore 64, back in the 1980s. Can't even remember which game, but I definitely remember shattering his chair--he still kids me about it.

[Balloon Fight]

I've never broken anything that I can remember but about 5 years ago had a hilarious experience with someone raging. I used to play Marvel vs. Capcom 2 in tournaments every other week and was pretty good at the game. Played this guy at an arcade who clearly thought he was good. Beat him 4 times and the last time perfected him. He said something, shook my hand then started to leave the arcade. Once he was near the front he ripped his shirt off before completely exiting the arcade. One of the funniest things I've ever seen from a competitive game.

[jonebone]

Hell yes. Pretty sure I broke a Genesis controller as a kid, then an Xbox controller later in life. Also, one time I gently flicked a X360 controller out of my hand in disgust, and it hit the LCD screen on my TV breaking it. Luckily I was living at home and it was only a $400 TV to replace but still.

As an adult I just turn off the system if I'm getting frustrated. But damn did I get pissed off over games growing up. I'm not even that aggressive, I just never understood the importance of taking a break.

[kedawa]

I generally only break things that are already worn out or malfunctioning, but I did snap a dualshock controller in half after repeatedly getting killed on one of the later levels in Doom.

[IHatedSega]

I think the same thing had been happening to him for years.

If that had happened to him, why didnt he tell you "Hey man I hope you havent gotten far in that game, cause my system may zap your save data on it." Or why did you play at his house that day? Im sorry if Im asking stupid questions, Im just curious.

Recently though I had been going to my moms on the weekends. Her roomates have a ps3, and I was on my way to the "cake", and i stopped. The next week when I went back to the house the save wasnt there. Didnt make me mad about the game, but Ive found that any saves I do dont last on it. I really miss memory cards so I do a real save that will be SAVED. I dont want to get a ps3 cause of this.

[Hunter19XX]

I used to kick the crap out of my nes when I would lose, I mean that was when I was 4 but that's about it. Since then I've mellowed out a bit, just shouting "your mother" through gritted teeth lol.

[BlastProcessing402]

Only one time in my life.

I was playing through Final Fantasy III for SNES when I took it a friends house. I was 99% of the way to the end of the game with almost all the side-quests completed.

I plugged the cartridge into the SNES and flipped the power on switch and nothing happened. The SNES didn't come on because the DC power adapter wasn't plugged in.

This particular power adapter of his was sort of finicky, and if you barely touched it it would go off and back on.

Now, in hindsight I knew full well that using a battery backed game with this situation was a bad idea. But I forgot about it at the time.

I plugged in the power adapter with the power switch to the system in the ON position. The system came on and then back off again. I touched the power adapter another time and it did the same thing. One more time.

That time it worked, but when I started the game my saves were wiped.

I ripped that power adapter out of my best friends wall and smashed it against the carpet covered concrete floor of his room. He predictably flipped out, but took it a little better when I told him I would replace it from my own spares the next day. I think the same thing had been happening to him for years.

Now how many games have I given the old double middle finger F**K YOU at a game over screen? Countless...countless.

First time I was playing FF3, right after it came out, I lost my saves late in the game as well. So disheartening that I didn't manage to actually finish the game until years later. But I didn't break anything over it.

I think the worst "anger" moment was when I threw an N64 rumble pak (3rd party generic) across the room and it bounced off the wall. It was fine (still worked at the time) but if I look closely I can still see a small dent in the wall there. Don't remember what game made me so mad, though.

[xelement5x]

Haha, this is so true for some of my friends. We used to play Goldeneye at a friends house on the N64 all the time. I was the first one to have the game, and I'd bring my cart with so we could play it with all the unlocks and such.

I was also the best at the game for a long time since I was the on who owned it so I could play more. But one time we were playing and one of my friends got so mad one time he ripped out the controllers from the N64 and pulled my cart out while the system was on and slammed it on table. I was pissed at him possibly messing up my game (it was fine), but looking back on it, its funny to see how focused we were on the game.


Semi-related though, did anyone else here while playing a game do the "pause, rub your hands on your pants to get the sweat off, then unpause and keep playing" maneuver? Maybe I was just a sweaty kid but I know other people that did it as well and wondering if it was that common.

[Froboz]

Semi-related though, did anyone else here while playing a game do the "pause, rub your hands on your pants to get the sweat off, then unpause and keep playing" maneuver? Maybe I was just a sweaty kid but I know other people that did it as well and wondering if it was that common.

Yeah, all the time! Especially when playing games like Super Mario World when things got frantic & you had to be fast.

I also did the shutting off of the system thing when I got mad. It's like the gamer's version of talk to the hand. lol

I don't recall having any problems with lost saves on cartridges, but it's possible that that happened but I just blacked it out. I did however, start to have real problems with the system not reading the cartridge. I used to have to blow inside of it to make it work. When that old trick didn't work, however, it was really exasperating. Playstation changed all that... until my PS2 stopped reading certain discs. Don't remember if the PS did that as well, or only the PS2, but that had me tearing my hair out as well. It always seemed like the best games, or at least the ones I most wanted to play, became unreadable after a while, and it wasn't because I didn't take good care of my disks. It wasn't until later that I did a search online only to discover that this was a design flaw in the system itself.

Oh and then there was one time I accidentally saved over a game of Lord of the Rings: The Third Age that my mother and I had gotten really far in. She had stopped playing to make dinner or something and I wanted to keep playing so I started a new game as a single player. But in Third Age your newest save is always at the top and if you don't look before you save you can easily overwrite it. I did that, and like a nanosecond after I pressed the button to save the new game I had started I realized what I had done, but it was too late. I wasn't mad, I just felt really, really bad, not to mention stupid. I had to break the news to my mother then & apologize for being such a dumbass. But she was cool about it & then we just started over again with a new game.

[skaar]

I have gone full Office Space on servers and network cards before, particularly if they were causing massive amounts of grief. I'd wait until they were ready for "retirement"

We retired an Everex Cube at a police department on the firing range, officers emptied rounds into it for about an hour. Nobody liked that box.

The SNES power adapter story happened to me too on a game, except it was Dragon Warrior 2 for the NES. I still have never finished that game, but we took the power block out and threw it under a train. We had the wire tied to a piece of string and the brick on the track, first train cut the wire but the brick flipped up and smashed underneath a car, second train killed it. We were very, very happy.

[Atarileaf]

I'm more likely to punch myself in the head or tear fistfuls of my hair out. lol.

Seriously? Dude, that's messed up. There's no "lol" about it.

[Froboz]

Well, the pulling fistfuls of my hair out part was a gross exaggeration. As for the punching myself in the head, yes, you're right. And I should've mentioned that I don't do that anymore. I was a pretty messed up kid.

[RPG_Fanatic]

I've broke 3 Xbox 360 controllers paying COD online...lets just say 360 controllers brake real easy if you throw them down on the carpet.