Getting to Know Your Geek (Part 1)
27 Jul, 2010
Here at Elder Geek, you, the reader, spend countless hours surveying our reviews, previews and articles. Well, we really appreciate it and, honestly, we would like to get to know you a little better. We weighed the option of taking all of our readers out on a candlelit dinner, but we simply didn’t have the finances and collectively can only socialize in a virtual setting. So, in order to introduce ourselves to you, we decided that we would tell you a little about ourselves in this feature titled “Getting to Know your Geek”. Here, we ask our staff the less-than important questions and hear what they have to say.
This month we asked the staff “What was the most you have ever raged while playing a game?”
Here’s what they said:
Gavin Greene (News Editor)
I can deal with underwater levels, I can deal with sewer levels; but for the life of me, the bane of my gaming existence is turret levels. The worst was 2/3rds of the way through Wanted: Weapons of Fate, a disastrous mounted machine-gun abortion of a chapter which put you atop the upper -perimeter of the main location of the game’s elite assassin force. As you suffer through the temperamental handling of the gun itself, wave after wave after endless goddamn wave of repeating enemy character models pop from every nook and cranny in the place.
Not in a challenging, whack-a-mole kind of way mind you, but an abusive, meant-to-get-you-to-rip-your-spine-out-through-your-nostril kind of spawning algorithm. Such a testicle-blister of a stage would be a momentary aggravation if not for the exacerbated length of it all, the body count rising well beyond most Call of Duty games within the first three minutes. After a literal 56 attempts (I counted them by the head-shaped holes in the adjacent wall), I begrudgingly sunk down to the depths of the troll and internet-ed my way to victory. In the shame that still lingers in my trophy count, the mounted machine-gun chapter of Wanted: Weapons of Fate remains in my mind…taunting me…
Pretty much what developers are telling you on turret levels.
Kipp Pietrantonio (Feature Writer)
He looked over me as a lie on the canvas shuttering in pain for the third time. It was difficult to predict when he was going to strike next, as his movements were erratic and spontaneous,…he was fueled by the bottle. His bald head, lack of clothing, and pink subtle glow should have been an indicator that this would be a long and painful night. He ruthlessly pounded my face over and over, and I was defenseless. I had long ago lost the heart to even attempt to put up a defense. I thought of the good times back with my friends Joe, Kaiser, and the King, but those times were over now, and he relentlessly shoved his fist deeper into me. His bald head shined as a small Mediterranean man with a thick black mustache looked on disapprovingly, desperately calling for me find it in my disheveled body mount some form of attack. I simply could not, and I’ll never forget one thing…his laugh. He looked down at his work, and laughed at what he had done to my body. There was not a trace of empathy, or human decency left in this man, and he cackled over me, as I lay eclipsed in his shadow. Damn you Soda Popinski…Damn you…
This is before whoop ass came in cans.
Justin Johnston (Staff Writer)
Without a doubt, the game that made me rage the most was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Hearing this, you may think I’m referring to the online community, and this is certainly true to an extent. An average session online would see my competitors questioning my sexuality, my skills, my mental development, and my relationship with my mother. But what made me rage was the obsessive pursuit of one accomplishment. I, of course, refer to the Mile High Club. Before we all climb into the gutter, please know that I’m referring to the difficult task of beating the final mission of the single-player campaign on the hardest difficulty. You had to make your way through a plane which had been taken over by terrorists, shooting your way through the compact space and avoiding enemy grenades, hull breaches, and more. At the end you must kill a terrorist who is using a VIP as a human shield. To top things off, you had to do this all in sixty seconds. This requires perfect aim with the MP5, wired reflexes, expert use of grenades, and rote memorization of enemy spawns, weapon drops, and scripted events. At first I responded to this challenge with rage, but as the hours passed and one unsuccessful attempt stacked on top of another, my rage turned into a single-minded focus. I didn’t move from my spot on the couch until at last I jumped from the falling plane, VIP in hand. What started out as anger turned into sheer determination, and twelve hours later I had my achievement. Guess it just goes to prove a point: sometimes in order to get something done, you have to get angry.
If your character is anywhere in this picture, he is about to die.
Randy Yasenchak (Head Geek)
The last time I can honestly remember getting SUPER frustrated to the point of physical outrage with a game was the summer of 1994. I was 15, and my parents house was not air-conditioned yet. To counter the heat, I did as little moving as possible and settled into some Super Metroid action. The little cuddly inter-galactic koala space monkeys were trying to teach me how to wall jump. Try as I might, I could not get the wall jump to work properly and just before I’d reach the very top of that now-famous shaft, I would miss the wall and Samus would plummet all the way down to the bottom. I was forced to start the arduous climb all over again.
I can’t remember what album I was listening to at the time, but I remember the CD started playing from the beginning again and I had realized I was doing the same insane sweaty motions with my controller for about 45 minutes straight.
If you put 100 lbs of armor on them I bet they would have some trouble too.
Tune in later this week to find out what the rest of the writers had to say!
About the author
Trevor Faulkner
is a writer and editor who joined Elder Geek in June of 2010. Mostly, he just complains about how games don't live up to what they used to be, or how a new game is the holy grail that will save all man kind from mediocrity and quick time events. You can check him out on Elder Geek's retro game show, Two Button Panic, or simply read stuff he writes. Either way, he thinks you're swell.
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17 Comments
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July 27, 2010lol, these are great! I made the same mistake as Justin with CoDWAW… in which I counted 32 grenades landing near me in 1 minute.
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July 27, 2010Actually, when I first started reading Justin’s I thought he was going to mention the TV room in Modern Warfare on Veteran.
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July 27, 2010Fucking last stage in World at War on Veteran.
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July 29, 2010Augh. Don’t remind me. That one just came down to pure luck. At least with Mile High Club you’d be fine if you memorized the scripted events and knew how to trigger all of them.
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July 27, 2010
I feel like wall jumping, although usually fun, always comes off as a huge pain to the player. First, there is something like Mario 64 where the button timing is so finicky that oftentimes you miss the millisecond window where your character would be able to jump. Then, when they try to streamline the process a-la [PROTOTYPE], it becomes so sensitive that you usually are just flying off walls as if caught in a breeze. It’s rare that I’ve played a game that has done this well.
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July 27, 2010Randy, I too hate that wall jumping shaft. I hate it as well, I have had so many problems with it.
For me, it has been Tekken 6 lately and the final boss in the arcade mode. That huge creature Azazel. I get his patters, but man is he annoying. I beat him once with Christie after quite a few attempts, but I still have the rest of the roster to beat him with, and I still can’t beat him with Lili which I am the best with right now.
That, and I raged over Uncharted at the end. There should be no instance in a Third person game where the camera swings to the front of your character and makes you run across a collapsing bridge, when you can’t see that far in front of your character and the controls get a little messed up. It is the equivalent (to me at least) to running backwards with your head cocked over your shoulder in hopes of seeing what is coming up next.
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July 27, 2010
Oh god, I HATED the end of Uncharted 1. It was all punches and pistols until, all of a sudden, I’m being forced to use a crappy uzi and trading intelligent AI enemies for stupid, run-strait-at-you one-shotters. Argh, to this day I still haven’t beat that game- not because it was hard, but because it was stupid.
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July 28, 2010
Sorry, I was more talking about the end of UC2, but yeah, I hated the end of UC as well. Also the end boss of UC2 is super cheap and I hated that.
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July 28, 2010
Actually, I had something similar in Dead Space. During the final boss fight, your character gets dragged by a tentacle and you need to shoot a couple of things while hanging upside down. Even after completing that final boss fight three times now, I still don’t understand how the controls work in that part.
I always play with an inverted Y-axis, but that no longer makes a lot of sense when your character suddenly hangs upside down in your screen. To me, it would have made sense if MY right and MY up on the controller also made Isaac aim to HIS right and HIS up (basically, that the controls remained the same and that HIS right and HIS up would be left and down on-screen respectively), despite the fact that he was hanging upside down. However, for this final sequence, the devs suddenly decided that this shouldn’t be the case and changed the scheme. This resulted in more than one incredibly unpleasant deaths for me, just because I couldn’t figure out the control scheme in time.
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July 28, 2010
I didn’t have a problem with that fight, in fact I never really had a problem with the game at all. Normal mode was a piece of cake, and I need to play on hard mode. My only deaths were environmental, and it was only in one level where you are near that generator with no air, can’t remember what chapter, but it had a big spinning thing in the room. That end boss was awesome though, and the end was crazy.
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July 28, 2010
You didn’t play much Crash Bandicoot? It felt the same to me, and I liked all of the third person run-towards-the-camera stuff.
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July 29, 2010For some reason, Jinpachi Mishima from Tekken 5 was always a much more difficult boss for me. What’s with the series’ final battle difficulty progression? There’s challenging (Devil, Tekken 2) and then there’s just annoying.
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July 27, 2010
I raged pretty hard during that stupid upstream river section in Uncharted 1. And that Star Destroyer section in Force Unleashed. And when I’m having a bad day in MW2.
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July 28, 2010One particular mission in FFTactics for PSOne had me throwing the controller and breaking it
Can’t think of anything else. I managed to beat High Mile Club thing in hardened but veteran just bored me.
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July 29, 2010
Haha. You want easy mode on FF Tactics? Arithmeticians + Rubber Boots on all allies + Calculate Thundaga. Even more OP than Orlandeau.
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July 28, 2010
The Axom Rangers in Super Mario RPG were also extremely annoying. Also the fight was littered with annoying dialogue.
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August 03, 2010
Currently Split Second… when you’re going for gold and some low down dirty @#$% makes you wobble and passes you with smug ease.
ggggggGGGGGGGGRRRRAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!! FOR FIFTY FIFTH @#$%ING TIME!!!
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