(Title ganked from the chorus of Low’s “Monkey,” a song with whose imagery I never identified until now.)

I don’t have any raw data on this, but I assume the German phrase most familiar to people on the internet is schadenfreude — the sensation of pleasure rooted in the misfortune of another; it is the Nelson Muntz of the European idioms. (An aside: Would Youtube even exist if not for schadenfreude? Something to think about.¹) Everyone knows the word because the language of specificity is so useful; a staggering amount of the media streamed through the internet involves the balls of others, and the objects that hurtle into them. However, there’s another term everyone should be as familiar with: Backpfeifengesicht, which, when translated literally, means “a face that cries out for a fist.”

Keep this in mind while I talk about Mario Strikers: Charged.

The face of cruelty.

“No! Nooo! Fuck you, monkey!”

Owing more to Mutant League Hockey than to, say, Winning Eleven, Mario Strikers: Charged is the second soccer game starring Nintendo’s mainstay characters, and the first Wii game to include play over Wifi (which sort of makes it like having a best friend who finally caved in and bought a cellphone). Unlike the time I tried to learn how to play NCAA ‘07 without ever having watched a full football game ever be played², the conceit of Strikers is far less details-oriented, and a lot more frenetic. Not that this comes as a surprise, since a lot of the late-generation Nintendo sports titles are like this — what is a surprise is Diddy Kong’s shocking evolution into a psionic supersoldier, resulting in perhaps the most frustrating experience I’ve had since I tried to beat Ninja Gaiden.

“Not the fucking red card! Aaahhh, Jesus, I hate this!”

The game has three trophy tournaments; the first is easy, as a first runthrough of a new game should be. The second is of moderate difficulty, and had me perched on the edge of my couch, peering and swearing — this is good! The middle of three cups, sorted by difficulty, should be trickier than the first! But then the final match started, after which several things happened instantly:

• A lazer came out of the sky and zapped my team captain out of existance.
• Diddy Kong scored approximately eight goals against me.
• A tractor beam descended from the heavens, and sucked up the rest of my team.
• Diddy Kong, undefended, scored six more goals.

“How the fuck did that go in? How did — AHHH, FUCK THIS!”

I should make it clear that up until this point in the season, my team was literally undefeated; we won most of the games in the first cup by a margin of twenty points. Up until the Diddy Kong match, I was refining my strategies and finding my self-improvements functional, like you do in any game (excepting, I suppose, Erotic Photohunt) — and then, suddenly, I had ceased to play a game, and began instead to play a frustration simulator.

Why Diddy Kong would be waiting for you at the end of an unskippable twelve-game series in a stage that physically removes players from the field, with a special move that physically removes players from the field, and, as far as I can tell, a bribed random number generator — these are questions impossible to answer. As I write this, my friends appear to be executing higher-level strategy and shouting out on-the-fly plays based on which teammates get lazered, but there’s no precedent for any of this. It would be like attempting to go to work one day and having the subway turnstiles replaced by guys you had to kickbox. Be forewarned.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuuuuuuuuuck!”

¹ The results of my analysis: Maybe, if all of it were replaced with bare breasts.

² My parents were really into having me learn origami and memorize famous speeches rather than watch television³, and I can only really imagine that they ever let me save up for a Nintendo in the first place because my dad really wanted to play it.

³ The resultant experience of manually teaching myself pop culture references at the age of twelve so that I could better talk to people I didn’t know may explain why I like Twin Peaks so much.

⁴ Not unless you got really, really ridiculous and pulled out all the also-rans from barely-licensed spinoffs, like, say, Freddie the Talking Fish from the old Valiant comic books. Actually, you know what? I’d actually really like to see that.