Today, my friend and I took breaks from our usually hectic and busy lives to engage in playing video games again. While we started with Diablo III, we quickly moved to Super Smash Brothers when more people came to visit my friend’s apartment. The first two were par for the course for us taking a break and wasting the day away.
But then we got to the third and main event of the night: Rocket League. Initially, Rocket League was suggested by my friend’s roommate. He described it as a soccer game with cars. I was confused at the premise, and then we started playing the game. We had four people left in the living room by the time we started playing Rocket League, and I was instantly intrigued.
We played through a couple of matches for us to get the hang of the game, and then we started playing local player, split-screen. The game includes using rocket-powered cars to hit a ball into an opponent’s goal. My friend’s roommate, who had played the game before, agreed to play on his own against the three of us with three rookie-level AI bots. Since he was significantly more skilled at the game than us, we thought that the challenge would be fair and we’d have close matches.
We could never be more wrong. For three consecutive hours, we were obliterated in Rocket League by more than five points in almost every game. Imagine being blown out by five points in a soccer game and the feeling — and that was how we felt every single time we played against him. No matter how hard we would try and no matter what adjustments we would make, we just simply never stood a chance. We watched helplessly as he made spin moves to perfectly angle the ball into the goal, and we tried helplessly to alleviate our positions to stop him from doing it to us again the next time.
Never have I felt so bad and incompetent at something. Never have I been so bad at something repeatedly, over and over again, at the same thing I did for three hours in a row.
After we finished playing and I had to go home, about half an hour ago, my friends and I resolved to never play Rocket League again. To us, there was no joy in constantly being embarrassed, obliterated, and being losers repeatedly.
