Gaming The System: Brick breakers and heart breakers - Games to help you end it this Valentine's

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: RARE
Battletoads is a Nintendo Entertainment System classic that allows you to make people curse the day they ever met you.

It’s that time of the year when love is in the air. But let’s face it: for some of us, love plain stinks. Maybe we need more alone time on a couch in a poncho armed with Doritos and every single season of Scrubs instead of yet another date so tense it makes a death row inmate’s last supper seem like evening tea.

What better way to say, “I’m done with you,” than through the medium of video games? Games that can assist you well in the ways of smooth breakups include:

Mario Party

Do I even need to explain any further? It’s the Monopoly of relationship breakers, the destroyer of many friendships into spiteful, mutual hatred. And under the sadistically evil guise of fun, multiplayer entertainment too.

Portal 2

Frustration is dealing with incompetence, and Portal 2’s co-op mode with the two cute little robots is the perfect way to get people pulling hairs out of their heads through your own supposed incompetence. “SHOOT A PORTAL THERE! NO, THERE! LOOK, LOOK!” they’ll scream, even using the game’s “shoot here, dummy” target marker button, as you glide around the level in blissful idiocy, occasionally spawning portals under her robot linking to a far-off wall for a death fall.

Battletoads

Besides being the butt of a long-running internet prank meme, this Nintendo Entertainment System effort by a fledging young Rare – before its big Nintendo buyout – makes the aforementioned frustration-through-incompetence a relative cakewalk. Battletoads is a game where both players fail no matter who’s at fault. Hitting that conspicuously placed rock during the infamous turbo tunnel section may send your character flying off the screen. But in the end, everyone suffers with a level restart. You’ll be yelling, “ARE YOU SERIOUS? HAVE YOU EVER PLAYED A VIDEO GAME IN YOUR LIFE?” in no time.

Left 4 Dead

Turning on friendly-fire damage would be too obvious in this co-op zombie shooter whose emphasis on player teamwork isn’t just a marketing gimmick. Sometimes, they will need help getting that smoker tongue strangling them off their neck, which gives you the perfect time to simply scoot ahead yelling “I FOUND A KATANA, CHECK THIS OUT!” instead of – you know – actually saving them.

Any Lego co-op game

It’s really as simple as constantly hitting your level partner until they blow up into a burst of collectible studs. Making them frustrated isn’t a matter of blatant incompetence as it is a build-up of irritation as you constantly keep punching his or her characters as they, the brave Lego Luke Skywalker, try to brawl with Lego Stormtroopers.