In Glick on Gaming, Dan Glickman leaves baseball (mostly) behind to talk video gaming. This time: Metroid Dread for the Nintendo Switch.

I had spent parts of the last few weeks becoming increasingly frustrated about a stupid giant three-eyed space reptile that throws giant claw-shaped fingernails and spits rock. Its name: Kraid. Its location: Cataris sector.

Its crime: BEING GODDAMN NEAR IMPOSSIBLE TO KILL DESPITE COUNTLESS ATTEMPTS!

(More after jump)

The way to beat Kraid, a longtime boss character in the Metroid series, is fairly straight forward: shoot for the mouth. Shoot as many missiles as you can. Dodge some rocks and fireballs it sends your way. Then, after enough missiles have been fed to Kraid, it breaks free and sends you falling down. Then you need to shoot its belly until it hurts enough, at which point it shoots out a bunch of spikes and brings down a wall elevator. Then you need to jump on the sliding wall and ride it up to shoot at Kraid’s mouth again. If you get hit by anything, you fall down and the cycle begins again with shooting the belly, all while still dodging a bunch of stuff. Even if all this works out fine, though, there is one last thing you need to do: time a counter-attack against Kraid’s punching of the wall you are on. If you don’t time it right, you are at best back to step two again, at worst dead.

After falling in one of those final stages of the fight enough, you inevitably want to throw the controller at the TV. Well, not really, but you if you lived in a world without consequences and/or the need to buy another TV if you did so, you probably would.

But then I thought: why? Why am I making myself so aggravated with this game right now? The game just came out not that long ago. It’s not like there is some sequel right around the corner. So why frustrate myself so much?

So… I stopped. I gave up on Metroid Dread for now. I’ll get back to it eventually, but I’m not going to drive myself crazy right now when I am supposed to be playing games in order to avoid excess frustrations.

So instead, I’ve moved on to some more chill things: the Animal Crossing expansion and the new Pokemon remake.

Much more chill.

So, let this be a reminder to everyone: video games are supposed to be games. Fun. So if a video game is causing you more frustration than fun, just step away for a bit. It’ll be good for you.