Most people who know me will tell you I am a pretty mellow person.  I am not one of those people that goes nuts when they lose a game, or get destroyed by a boss.  If anything, many say that I should get more emotional in these situations, but I have long moved past getting worked up by a game.  I mean, its a game.  No need to destroy a controller, or punch a wall.  Just move on and sooner or later, you will be fine.

Then again, there are those days where so many things go wrong, that you completely lose your mind and delve into a rant of insanity over a game.  That game would have been The Ascent, and it was not the game itself that got me but the lack of being able to get it to run a three player game.

As you can see, things got really dicey for me.  When a game breaks, it breaks, but here, we had actually played a three player co-op game of The Ascent the previous Friday and had a blast.  No connection issues, no nothing.  And yet, on this fateful Wednesday evening, the game broke every way possible when we tried to add a third person into the game.  Did not matter who was the host, or the platform that played host (we tried Xbox One X, Series X and PC, and none worked), the game would not let the third person in at all.

After an hour and twenty minutes of nothing working right, I snapped.  I mean, it was a frothy rage that most would never expect from someone like me.  I was ranting, deleted the game from my Xbox while I was live on stream, the whole works (and it still remains deleted).  One might think that the game broke due to a recent patch, but it did not matter.  Losing two hours of a hard, scheduled co-op session was too much and I lost it.

So why do I bring this up?  Well, we all have our moments with this grand hobby.  There will always be things that break us.  But it is how we go about it with that rage.  I blew up certainly, but there was no racial slurring, no shaming of any one person, and no breaking of equipment.  Sure, I was swearing like a sailor, but it was more jokes than rage, trying to find levity in the moment of the situation.  Yes, a game can break you, but it does not have to make you a violent, misogynistic, racist idiot.  Have some fun with it, and before you know it, you will have moved on and be better for it.  Sure, I still haven’t gone back to The Ascent, but I am not raging about it.  Now, me and my friend just make a lot of jokes about the night in question and laugh.