That Starcraft post made me think of Team Fortress 2. It's taken me a long time to get good at that game, but often if I top score I get mocked on the class I'm playing. It seems to me that out of the NINE classes available there are very few that are acceptable to the elitists to play. Medics = no work and easy points, Soldiers = spam, Heavy = more spam, Sniper = not helping team, Engineer = camping + grind, Pyro = no skill. So Demoman, Spy and Scout (providing you're not using the 'noob gun' which I like as scout) are the only acceptable classes. Sigh.
On topic, though Team Fortress 2 makes me rage quite a bit. More often than not, though, at my own team rather than the enemy. Rather than the game becoming more fun as I got better, it's become more frustrating as I notice the large amount of rookie mistakes that get made that regularly cost us a round. Simple things like SHOOT THE GUY WITH THE F*&^ING INTEL!!! I'M A MEDIC ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MAP! WHY IS IT MY JOB TO KILL HIM??? Really, multiplayer kinda sucks. I only play the game because my computer is so buggy it basically can't run anything else...
Previous rages... playing the original Call of Duty recently.. that game has aged badly. Although massively hyped at the time the friendly AI is god-awful. What made me snap and put on God mode after trudging through over a dozen missions on the hard difficulty (I know saying a CoD game is difficult now will elicit laughter but the original was legitimately tough) was a mission with the Russians where you have a full squad and need to clear out and then defend a large office building in a massed assault. Now, what made this difficult were not the nazis, who by this stage are easy enough to deal with. But my own squad. Who are constantly getting stuck in doorways, facing walls while they get shot in the back. Standing right behind me when I need to get out of the way of a grenade. Never calling out when they see an enemy. Never actually doing anything to hold a position or co-ordinate. Ahh!
When I think about it, I usually don't rage about difficulty (but I have quite a bit) but more often game design. I raged at an adventure game, in fact (Runaway. God damn that game and it's retarded puzzles) and Knights of the Old Republic at those awful final Star Forge levels where you endlessly go between one massive room filled with 20 heavy troopers and another, and the pathfinding on Carth completely failed making me yell "YOU WANNA STAND NEXT TO ME, YA C*%#?!?" Also, Assassin's Creed Revelations where they made the task of obtaining a guard's uniform unusually strict in how it was to be achieved for the series..
I definitely don't like raging, but it doesn't stop me from enjoying a game when all is said and done. Oddly enough I'm not sure I raged during the most difficult game I ever played (Iron Storm) but I did several times during the much less taxing Deus Ex: Human Revolution - I think because the promise of playing the game the way you want to only goes so far when I seem to be getting ambushed by masses of armed soldiers every five minutes toward the end of the game...
