Your Greatest Video Game Defeat

Video games can move us, teach us, anger us, and give us a breadth of emotions. But in the end we are most often playing them to win; we are in many ways partaking of a victory simulator. That is, we often play them to experience a sense of accomplishment and triumph.

However, victory is meaningless without defeat. A game you can never lose might not even qualify as a game at all. So while I'm sure we all have stories of triumph that we remember, let us examine that other side of the coin; What is your most memorable defeat in a video game? When was a time you vividly recall defeat being snatched from the jaws of victory? What made it so memorable for you?

As a lad, I remember making it all the way to the end of the NES version of Operation Wolf with the Light Zapper and, with a hand cramp the size of Nebraska, dying at the hands of the final boss when he had one hit to go.

I wept.

I also never played that game again. I realized the Zapper was entirely inadequate to playing that game, and went back to Hogan's Alley instead.

Getting it in my head that I'm somehow mentally qualified for the likes of DCS: A-10C Warthog, Crusader Kings II, et al.

Spoiler:

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I still enjoy throwing myself against the wall with them. But I do find it funny that for genres that are supposed to make one feel smart through mastery, they sure do make you feel dumb on the road getting there!

I'm not sure if this is really my greatest defeat, but it's one that has stuck with me pretty solidly over the years.

It was a GWJ Halo 2 night where I had won a couple things in a row or topped the scoreboard in team games a couple of time or something like that. I don't remember the exact initial circumstances.

Anyway at that point out in the lobby chat our very own Fletcher1138, now more recognizable as the internet's Russ Pitts, said something clever and snarky and it was aimed at me and I recall whatever the remark was ending with "What do you say to that?"

I am not a clever person. So my brain basically locked and I spewed forth the first stupid string of words that I could get my mouth to form, those being "I'm better at Halo than you." It was maybe the lamest, most meaningless thing I could possibly said whether it was true or not. I knew it even as the words were traveling the internet to everyone's ears. I was embarrassed before I had even finished speaking.

So at that point there's lots of well deserved sarcastic/mocking oohs and aahs from (I think?) Sanjuro and the other accompanying crew, and we load up the next map. A king of the hill match with a stationary hill on a tiny map in a 12 or maybe 16 player game and everyone started with a shotgun and grenades. It instantly turned into the only thing it could, a hilarious grenade spammy mess.

And Russ won rather handily, as I recall by a margin of close to thirty seconds. I think I got third.

Insult, Injury, etc.

*So I had to change this paragraph because boy does my memory suck. Mr. Pitts' article named names, multiple names, and shamed us all, although he did slightly alter certain details. Good times. he makes it sound like the game was close but I recall there being quite the gulf between my total accumulated time and his. Note: I was *not* part of the group saying "Don't let Fletcher win!" in the chat. That was KrazyTaco and Pyro and I think Lester too, but I digress

Well played Pitts. Well played indeed.

Thin_J wrote:

I think if you go back he wrote an article here on GWJ...

Perhaps?

AUs_TBirD wrote:
Thin_J wrote:

I think if you go back he wrote an article here on GWJ...

Perhaps?

I found it and edited in a link to it. It is significantly more direct than the one you found

C'Thun in WoW.

Tail end of the Vanilla, Naxxramas was already out and we were bashing our heads against something... probably Patchwerk, but we were pushing through AQ40.

Got to C'Thun, after a couple of months working on the place on and off. In the first phase, the stupid elder god has two abilities:
1. A green beam that chains to the nearest person and does more damage the more jumps it has. It can easily one-shot the entire raid if clumped.
2. A rotating beam of death that will end you if you get hit by it. Not bad, just run around the room avoiding it in a circle.

I'm not going into the other phases because they don't matter. We never saw them at level.

We never got to deal with much beyond P1. Because of the green laser of doom. Here's what happened to people who were too grouped up 5 seconds into the fight:

That was about 50% of the "attempts" we had on that stupid thing. Why? Because of the room and where the encounter trigger was placed. C'Thun was in a big circular room with 1 entrance that you see in the video. The encounter start trigger was roughly that entire room and about 5 yards out from the entrance. You get too close to the edge, the fight starts. You run across the entrance too close(which half the raid had to do to get positioned for the start and to turn in drop tokens for gear), the fight starts. And if everyone's not prepared, you all die to green laser doom.

Keep in mind that running back from the entrance of the zone took roughly 10 minutes, even counting a teleport to the previous boss. And that the trash in that place was easily the hardest trash Blizzard's ever done. Seriously, they've made full bosses that were simpler and easier to kill than that trash.

Now, let's talk about addons. WoW UI addons allow incredible customization and extension of the UI, and range from things like boss helpers to simple crafting enhancements.

Everyone was using a C'Thun addon that beeped if you were close enough to another player to chain the beam. And it started beeping the moment the fight started because there wasn't enough room in the entranceway to spread out. So imagine this. You're in position for an attempt, chatting, just shooting the sh*t as a couple of people figure something out. You see... let's call them Bob, jumping around as every single WoW player ever does. Bob jumps into the entry way.

You start to hear "beep beep beep beep", and someone on Teamspeak goes "What the f*ck is..." Then half the raid dies. Then, 10 seconds later, the rest of the raid dies.

And you have a 10+ minute run back. Because of Bob.

That fight killed groups. Not nearly as much as Vashj and Kael about a year later, but close. Vanilla's the only WoW expansion that I played entirely through but didn't clear everything. Cataclysm I didn't play through entirely, and I skipped Panda. But TBC, Wrath, and WoD I've beaten everything.

Cube, I'm sure I've got some awful tale of trying to tank Violet Sanctuary (is that right?) heroic as a Paladin for the first time and failed miserably! So, epically that I closed WoW, my laptop and haven't been a subscriber since.

But no, my biggest defeat is in Final Fantasy X on PS2. After all of the time put into the game, I was unable to defeat Sin. This was the first time I allowed myself what I felt was the ultimate shame, watching the end of a game one couldn't beat on YouTube (over dial-up).

Mine comes from Final Fantasy XIV. I was running a four-person dungeon as a melee attacker, and we'd made it all the way to the final boss in the dungeon. There are two attackers in each group, one healer, and one tank to keep the boss's attention and absorb all the hits.

Our other attacker died almost immediately, so the burden of actually burning the boss down fell on me. We got the boss down to maybe 15% health when our healer bit it, and then our tank died not too long after that. Entirely on my own, I managed to dodge the boss's attacks and eek out my own minimal healing to burn the boss the rest of the way to 1%.

And then I died, and we had to start the fight over from the beginning.

Zoso1701 wrote:

But no, my biggest defeat is in Final Fantasy X on PS2. After all of the time put into the game, I was unable to defeat Sin. This was the first time I allowed myself what I felt was the ultimate shame, watching the end of a game one couldn't beat on YouTube (over dial-up).

There is no shame in skipping Sin. My wife, veteran RPG and JRPG player since the before the NES, couldn't beat Sin. I watched her beat her head against it, unable to offer any advice because I'm terrible at JRPGs. That boss was total bulls***.

Also, blitzball is terrible.

Oh God, in most recent memory it's probably my Football Manager game with Monaco last year.

2nd last game of the season and I've just broke the Ligue 1 record points total, but PSG are 1 point behind me in the league. For the 2nd last game, I have PSG away, needing just a point, knowing the last game is against some side I should easily trounce.

All is going well, until the 93rd minute of the game (which if you don't know much about football/soccer, that's 3 minutes beyond the full regulation time) and PSG score.

For me, that was when I stopped playing Football Manager 2015!

Thank you, DT. PS2 era me feels vindicated.

FFXIII-2

generally I believe that if you do all the side missions in an rpg, the final boss should be relatively easy to reward your diligence. I rolled through that game with very little difficulty, did every side route I found, went through all the optional time periods... final boss was still a brick wall.

I couldn't come close to beating him, and there was no way I was going to backtrack and grind levels after doing all the side stuff.

Way way back, when i was 14 i think, a friend of mine and I spent a Sunday afternoon trying to actually beat Ninja Turtles on the Nintendo. We got tot he final shreadder fight before finally having defeat snatched from the jaws of our victory. Other than that special attempt occasion we were never allowed to play video games more than an hour at a time, so this was a special occasion to be allowed to make a complete run at the game, however long it took, that day.

I still remember that vividly 21-22 years-ish later now.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Mine comes from Final Fantasy XIV. I was running a four-person dungeon as a melee attacker, and we'd made it all the way to the final boss in the dungeon. There are two attackers in each group, one healer, and one tank to keep the boss's attention and absorb all the hits.

Our other attacker died almost immediately, so the burden of actually burning the boss down fell on me. We got the boss down to maybe 15% health when our healer bit it, and then our tank died not too long after that. Entirely on my own, I managed to dodge the boss's attacks and eek out my own minimal healing to burn the boss the rest of the way to 1%.

And then I died, and we had to start the fight over from the beginning. :P

That sounds more like an epic defeat for the others in your party, but an epic triumph for you!

I've had some epic defeats in FFXIV, including one where I had to flee in shame because we died so many times all my gear broke and I couldn't repair it.

Another epic defeat that comes to mind was when I spent a very long time stealing all the Genji equipment from Elmdor in the original Final Fantasy Tactics, only to screw up and accidentally kill him before I had finished stealing the last piece.

Still haven't killed Oryx in Destiny. Just haven't found a group, and I don't want to be 'that guy' in a lfg group.

Here's your Thread of the Week, Conference Call Crew!

Bloodbourne. 15 hours of the same alleyway.

Grenn wrote:

Bloodbourne. 15 hours of the same alleyway.

I laughed at this. I don't recall exactly, but I had a 3 to 5 hour period were it seemed I was doomed to eternal failure. Then it all fell into place. I completed the game and it was close to being my GOTY. What a turn around!

Grenn wrote:

Bloodbourne. 15 hours of the same alleyway.

Same here. I made it to the first boss, I think, three times. After playing the same twenty minutes of the game for eight hours I realized I'm probably incapable of learning so I traded it in.

CK2 - going from controling all of Southern Italy and Sicily to only having one province left in the space of 3 generations as everyone took advantage of weak young leaders.

UpToIsomorphism wrote:

Still haven't killed Oryx in Destiny. Just haven't found a group, and I don't want to be 'that guy' in a lfg group.

Same here, I have over 400 hours into that game and I still didn't do the last raid. Everything else but that, oh well.

Mine is Heroes of the Storm. I played it for 20 hours or so just fighting bots...played my first game against people and we got destroyed. Haven't played the game since.

I did that with Demigod back in the day. I actually really enjoyed single player and bot matches. I didn't get completely p0wned against other players but I probably lost 2 in 3.
My most memorable defeat came at the hands of (whatever happened to) Cornelia, a legendary Quake player back in the day. I don't want to come across sexist but it was a thing back in the day to have a female compete with the male competitive Quake players. She was one of the two at that time. (her and Killcreek) I would like to think of myself as a semi-pro Quake player so when Gamespy was having a contest at E3 or GDC where you got to play one on one with Cornelia for swag, I jumped at the chance. It was Rocket Arena 2 and I was huge into Rocket Arena 1 so despite the fact that I didn't know the maps at all for RA2, I felt this challenge was right in my wheel house. I lost 10 straight matches.
Now to be fair, I know I got close every match and despite not being able to see her health, the way the matches went she was just able to get in the last shot. There were times where I hit her 5 times with the rocket launcher (into the air for proof) but she didn't die so some combination of getting the armor or minimizing the splash damage must have been how she always ended up on top.
Frustrated the hell out of me but man did I have a serious crush on her for a long time afterwards.