"Rage Quitting" is going to be a regular (but not too regular, I hope) feature, in which I talk about games that I have stopped playing out of pure, mind-ripping fury. First up:  EA's Facebreaker.

Facebreaker is hard; the game tells you that pretty much up front.  Later on, one of your opponents encourages you to read the manual, because "This game is not, how you say, a 'button-masher.'"

Sure.  Fine.  It's an arcade-style cartoony fighter with all the twitchiness of high-level Tetris, twice the racism of Punch-Out!!, and the in-game help/tutorial system of E.T.:  The Extra-Terrestrial on the Atari 2600 (by which I mean, of course, that the game doesn't have one).

The game is ostensibly 3-D, but fighters only move relative to each other, and the largely useless "Dash" move only works along the 2-D plane the two characters occupy.  You have three rounds to knock your opponent down three times; otherwise the match goes into a "Sudden Death" mode, in which the first person knocked down loses.

It's a reasonable enough prospect until you discover, as I did, that the computer starts fighting, not at the word "FIGHT," but rather at the "r" sound on "Ready."  You are therefore likely to lose a large chunk of your health by the time the game has actually announced that the fight has begun.  Of course you also have the option of starting early, but it's hard to see what you're doing with the giant Fight Text covering half of the screen.

I guess if I cared enough, I could practice and get better, but on top of the difficulty, Facebreaker is an exceedingly ugly game.  The character models look like they've been made out of dough or wax (depending on if the character is fat or skinny), and they only get less attractive as they get beat up.

The voice acting is similarly terrible, as before and after each round you are "treated" to a too-close close-up of your opponent, who annoyingly spouts whichever cliché is appropriate to the lowest-common-denominator version his/her ethnicity or gender.  "Characters" include the Stoic Black Guy, The Bubbly Girlie-Girl, The Ice-Cold Bitch, The Huge Violent Russian, The Enormous Idiot, The Latin Pretty-Boy, and The Guy From Some Island Who Says "Brah" A Lot.  I fully expected to see The Drunken Irishman, but I guess they swapped him out for The Nerdy White Kid.

I quit playing Facebreaker with two fights left, partly because they were too hard, and partly because I didn't want to hear the characters talk anymore.  Life is just too short for this kind of bullshit, and I had to put my controller down before I snapped it in half and ate it.