Happy Labor day! Today we celebrate the working people in the United States and also in Canada! What am I doing today on this day off? Well, it’s a great day to catch up on some gaming and bump up my gamer score! I have quite the array of video games that I haven’t finished and one of them in particular I was very interested in pulling out.
There is a mode specifically that I hadn’t conquered and the last time I had attempted to complete it was in 2009. Fifteen minutes into the game, I realized why I had retired the game. The mode I was trying to complete is called the Tower of Lost Souls. Basically, you have to fight a bunch of NPCs while you’re either ascending or descending this tower. Sounds pretty easy but… as you get farther and farther into the mode; the NPCs become a lot harder and you only get to choose one character. Long story short I decided it was probably time to put the game away once again after yelling at the TV and almost breaking a controller. After this, I realized there are a lot of reasons why gamers “nerd rage” and the reasons are pretty valid! I decided to compose a list of the top 5 reasons why gamers nerd rage.
5. Terrible Team mates
I know more than once I had gone into a battleground in WoW or a match in CoD and had extremely high expectations about myself and my team. The objectives on most of these co-operative modes are fairly easy. Capture the flag, kill the opposite team members, hold bases, and so on and so forth. You come in thinking, “ALL RIGHT! This time we’re going to win” and then all of a sudden you see all of your team mates lolly-gagging in the middle of the battleground, AFKing in a corner, camping, or just not completing the objectives. You just want to win and all of your team mates are like mindless monkeys! The nerd rage consumes me after several matches of not winning because of horrible team mates!
4. Dying For Dumb Reasons
I know I’m not the only one who has experienced silly deaths in video games. I don’t know how many times I have face-palmed because I threw a shell in Super Mario expecting to defeat an entire troupe of Koopas to have the shell hit the wall and come right back at me resulting in a game over. How about meticulously analyzing a jump in a platformer and then being pushed into the hole by an enemy? Playing Soul Calibur this morning I was dumb-founded at the fact that I jumped off of the edge of a stage expecting to dominate my opponent with a finishing move.
3. LAG!!!
Experiencing lag in video games is painful. You are in the middle of a raid in World of Warcraft and you’re doing top DPS in your group. You reach the boss and think, “I’m about to top the charts and we’ll finally beat this boss after wiping 20+ times!” All of a sudden, you experience lag in the middle of the boss fight and you begin viciously SPAMMING your hot keys and wiggling your mouse frantically around the screen in hopes it will speed up the horrible experience faster. You run to your modem and reset it and then make your way back to your PC to find that you have been disconnected completely from the game. Logging back on, you lower in head in shame as you announce to your raid in Vent, “sorry guys… had some bad lag”. Lag does some terrible things to gamers and it’s one of the main reasons for severe nerd rage around the world!
2. Paying for Content and Release day DLC
You bring home a brand new game on the release day, load it up, and the first thing that pops up on your screen is, “Experience a brand new character with extra maps! Only $12.99!” WHAT!?!? I just opened up my new game that came out the same day and there’s already DLC that I have to pay for?! Whatever, you ignore it and continue on your game and think about possibly purchasing the DLC later. A few hours into your game, you encounter your first boss fight and the guy is HARD! After dying a few times, the game opens up yet another pop-up but this time it says, “Having issues defeating Evil Warlord Number 1? Buy a Superior Chest Piece that boosts your HP and Critical Strike chance for only $5.99!” It drives me crazy when I feel like my wallet is being milked to experience some awesome parts of a game.
1. No Fast Travel
I can’t even explain how frustrating it is to not be able to run or fast travel in a video game. If you’re used to fast traveling in games whether it be with some sort of warping system, opening the map and instantly traveling to the city of your choosing, being able to run, or having fast mounts. Fast traveling just makes games a little bit more enjoyable when you can easily travel to your objectives in an efficient way, avoid enemies, or even catch up to your enemies!
There are obviously plenty more reasons why gamers “nerd rage” but these are my top five reasons that make me nerd rage! What makes you “nerd rage”?