I've got four I want to talk about.
1. Turning it off doesn't count as losing
Me and a friend once spent an entire day playing Worms 3D on the Gamecube. I lost. Every single game. Every. Single. Game. I'm talking for eleven hours straight, constant loss. No matter how close I came, in the end I would always lose. Whether it was from being out-played or making a mistake like jumping forward off a cliff instead of backflipping to a ledge, using the wrong weapon and thus leaving an enemy weak but alive instead of in tiny bits, or just plain being an idiot, I didn't win a single game all day. As you can imagine, I was ready to go off. Eventually, during what was to be the final game, I was losing — again — and after taking what should have been a killing shot, my mate's worm survived with 1HP, against all odds. I jumped out of my seat like a one-frame animation and hit the Gamecube's off switch hard enough to make the table under it creak, then whirled around and gave my mate the Evil Eye, lips pursed, fists balled, ready to bring the fight into the real world and see who wins there (it would have been him, of that there is no doubt).
2. Rip in peace Mad Catz 360 controller
Back in 2007 (ten years ago ... kill me) I was trying to complete Call of Duty 4 on Veteran difficulty because gotta get those achievements or you'll get bullied in college. There's a mission called 'No Fighting in the War Room' or something along those lines which involves fighting in the War Room. Picture an underground bunker with three parallel corridors, an overwhleming number of particularly aggressive Russians, nigh-instant death, and a strict time limit. It's horrific. I must have spent over an hour trying to get to the end of this one single corridor and every time I thought I'd made progress being knocked back by some fresh hell the game decided to throw at me: unexpected enemy spawns, wayward grenades, getting caught on a single pixel of the scenery. After my one-hundred-and-thirty-second death I couldn't keep calm and carry on like the Queen wanted and I hurled my Mad Catz controller (that looked a bit like a Batarang) at the wall and, before I could say "£32, plus VAT", watched it explode into plastic shards and exposed circuitry.
3. Sometimes you just gotta get it out
This one wasn't me, but the friend who was better than me at Worms 3D. I forget what game he was playing (I want to say Vice City), but he was in my house playing something and failing repeatedly. He went through phases. At first, he took failure in his stride. After a while he started grunting and eventually yelling when he lost. Then he went eerily calm, just silently restarting after a loss, without taking his eyes off the television. After a while, he came close to success, only to fall again, and his response was to yell like a Viking attacking a fishing village, then spit on himself. Full, thick, white spit, on himself, slowly dribbling down his shirt. He then turned the game off.
4. Cfrock SMASH!
The year was 1997. Tony Blair had just been swept into 10 Downing Street in a landslide election victory. The Star Wars movies had been re-mastered and re-released to a new generation. And everyone was dancing to Hanson's 'MMMbop' while The Spice Girls launched Channel 5 in the UK. It was a time for hope, optimism, and Micro Machines V3 on the PS1. I came home from a gruelling day at school, eager to relax with a simple game of racing toy cars. But it wasn't to be. There was one race I just could not win, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how well I did. And my volatile child brain could't handle it. After trying and failing for a long while I lost my rag and sprang up, rushed to the Playstaton, slammed my beefy hand onto the Open button, yanked the lid up, tore the disc from the machine, and began punching it as hard as I could. I punched the disc until it snapped and then I punched the pieces on the floor, shouting insults and epithets as I did so. I never played a Micro Machines game again.
Bonus — 5. Collateral damage
I just remembered this one so I'm adding it in. Not only was I not playing the game in this one, it wasn't even a game that made me angry. My brother and his friend were playing Bomberman on our SNES in my room. Meanwhile, I was being yelled at by my mum for something or other and being told to go find something I had lost (it was something she needed that I'd be messing about with when I shouldn't have, I don't recall what it was). Upset and feeling it was unfair to be shouted at, and that my brother got to play games while I got told off, I was enraged and stomped upstairs to look for this thing. I had no clue where it was, so stormed into my room to look. Hearing the sounds of a fun game only wound me up further, and after a few minutes fruitless searching, went to leave the room. Just before I did, I scowled at my brother, engrossed in his game of Bomberman, and then shoved the cartridge sticking out of the SNES. The effect was the game immediately spazzing out (and probably some physical damage to the cartridge and/or SNES) and my brother losing his temper, too.
