| Outsmarting Rock Band's Online Quitters: A Half-Assed Essay (Assay) |
[22 Apr 2008|04:43am] |
My brother hated to lose.
I learned quickly that playing competitive games with an eight-year-old was futile. The second my brother would fall behind in Mario Kart 64, up would come his pause menu and he'd quit. If he lost all of his lives in Contra and ran out of extra ones to steal from me, he'd reset the NES.
Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey for the N64 was the worst. Pull a few goals ahead of him -- at any point, ranging from a few minutes into a match to the very end of the third period -- and he'd pause and quit in an instant. He had "pause, highlight 'quit', press A" down to a rhythm that took less than half a second. It was amazing. Infuriating, too. To this day, all I remember about Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey is the way the announcer would suddenly and cheerfully declare, "That's the end of the game!" at the premature conclusion of every match.
Playing Rock Band on Xbox Live takes me back to those days. It's like my brother never grew up, and there are now millions of him all around the world, ready and willing to ruin my fun at a moment's notice. It used to be that quitting early would be punishable by a punch in the gut. Xbox Live affords no such luxuries.
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