How do you do what you do to me?

I wish I knew!

We’ve all been there – the point at which frustration overcomes us and we simply snap. I know that there is more than one contributor to this very site who has a collection of broken controllers attesting to the fact that sometimes games wind us up! The corollary of this of course is that we get the elation which comes from success, warm toasty feeling inside when a puzzle is solved, a race is won, a foe lies beaten and broken or dust and debris left drifting in is all that remains of our opponents ship. We have Yin and we have  Yang.

Perhaps sometimes through the balance is wrong, at least for me! I’ve found myself frustrated and angry to the point at which the console gets switched off, simply because I’ve lost and the rewards for winning have not stacked up. I had a GORGEOUS car and lost it in a pink-slip drift race against Nicolas Jamet (damn his eyes!).

Nicolas Jamet – my nemesis!

Now I’ll give you this; Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights is not the most cerebral of games, it’s not even the best of the games in it’s class but, up until that point, it had been harmless fun and I LIKE winning races and lusting after the Skyline R34 GTR. Then I lost, I had beaten this character on a number of occasions before doing the same discipline and I thought it’d be a sweet deal to take his car – but no, I lost by a country mile and then in a fit of pique also lost another car trying to win the first back! Well, I’d done a lot of work and was a bit proud!

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

After the loss of the second car I flung down the controller and switched the machine off. I was genuinely angry and upset that this had happened and also very surprised at the severity of my reaction! Now, I wasn’t about to go out and massacre a street full of people as a result of these feelings – games do NOT cause people to do things, being a diagnosable whack-job does that – but the loss had really hit me hard. I believe it was because the wins had come so easy and this event was simply measured on a different scale, if I’d been pushing hard for the wins, having to make sure every lap, every drift, every move was close to perfect then I’d probably have been more prepared than I was but they’d been easy, I’d driven like a god and left them eating my dust and breathing my tyre smoke.

Suffice it to say M. Jambert has become my nemesis and I’ve won back FAR more than the cost of the cars I lost and also taken vehicles from him in other disciplines too, but nothing has removed the scar which that first loss has left. I’m sure that, one day, I’ll be able to be friends with Nicholas, but that day is a long.. long way away.