Ever since Modern Warfare 2 came out, I played it pretty much non-stop. It was fun at first, then it started degrading, then it felt more like a grind with the prestige system, THEN it became way too common that I'd get hit by a nuke because two people hiding in a corner were helping each other get some stupid spinning green star icon so that they could run around with their phallic hats saying "HEY HEY LOOK AT ME I AM SO LEGIT/BEAST/(insert any other retarded gaming lingo here)."

Then Bad Company 2 came out. Oh how I missed Battlefield so much. You see, the only other Battlefield games I have played are Battlefield 2: Modern Combat for the Xbox 360, and the original BF: Bad Company, but I didn't find much interest in it as much as BF2: MC. Bad Company 2's multiplayer does a number of things that makes me just want to take it and shove it in everyone's face and tell them "You have got to freaking get this."

The Kits are Simple and Easy to Understand

You have 4 kits. Assault, Engineer, Medic, and Recon. They all have their advantages and give your team/squad a boost on the battlefield. Assault can quickly take down someone with grenade launchers and give the team an ammo box to refill. Engineers can rocket the crap out of tanks and vehicles, as well as slap down some mines and repair vehicles. Medics save the ticket count via reviving recently killed players and throwing down some heal kits to boost everyone up. Recon players can spot enemies with their sniper rifles and hit a building with a mortar strike, or rig a flag point with C4, as well as throw a motion detector down to track nearby enemies.

Spotting is a Grand Feature

The Spotting system has got to be the greatest thing implemented in an online FPS. Being able to relay enemy positions to your squad and team gives you an advantage, if ever so slight. With spotting, someone can shoot the punk you can seem to hit behind a hill or that UAV that's floating around above everyone's heads. Spotting is one of the major things I constantly do. If I'm not ready to gun down someone like a banshee, I'm hitting SELECT like a crazed son-of-a-gun to see if I can get a ping out there.

The Dog Tag System (a.k.a. The List of People I Shanked and Humiliated)

Being able to see everyone you've knifed in BC2 is one of the reasons I like it so much. There's 3 (from what I've seen) different kinds of dog tags: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. The rank of the person you knife determines if their dog tags are one of these metals or colors. I shanked a guy while he was a lower rank, and then knifed him again in a later match a few days after, and got a Silver dog tag off of him. The Dog Tags screen shows exactly what kind of dog tags you got off a guy, so I saw I had a Bronze and Silver one. So satisfying.

Destruction, Destruction, and More Destruction.

The fact that I can literally take down a building to kill someone that's been hiding in it for the past 5 minutes and get a <DESTRUCTION 2.0> kill? Yeah, that's pretty much a gigantic reason I find BC2 so freaking fun. Not only that, but it's hilarious that if I'm sitting in a building sniping at people as they run by, people will get fed up with me and start shelling the ever-living daylights out of the building I'm in. It's fun to see how long they keep it up before they decide to run in and deal with me themselves.

I Can Actually Snipe!

Thanks to Modern Warfare 2's 60 frames per second or whatever the frames per second is when they were all doped up on adrenaline, sniping became more of a chore than a fun thing to do. BC2's frames per second allows me to carefully aim and pop someone in the face. The fun factor about this is that gravity actually AFFECTS a bullet's path, and that means I can pop someone that's right behind a hill using some clever thinking.

Bad Company 2's that one game I've been waiting to sink my teeth into, and when I did, I entered a state of enjoyment, excitement, and laughter. Freaking love this game.

There's something about me nearly everyone that meets me likes. Some like my quirky sense of humor. Some like the fact I brighten the place up whenever I walk in. Some like my brown hat.

There's only a very, VERY limited amount of people that consider me annoying and/or idiotic, online and off. I can hop in a matchmaking lobby in Halo 3 or Modern Warfare 2, simply talk, and people enjoy the fact I'm in the game, or walk in a LAN party and everyone's extremely happy that I'm there. This isn't always the case though. Some people down-right HATE the fact I can play these games, have fun, have a good score at the end of a match, and not trash talk nor rub it in someone's face.

Either way, I just love doing one thing: Having fun. I like to enjoy the game or match I'm currently playing, and I set out to find a way to make it fun if it's getting dull. It makes the game more enjoyable to play and people do react toward it, positively or negatively.

The people that usually hate me are the over-competitive types. I'm not saying that competitive players can't have fun. I just have fun all-around, and some people either find that annoying or just want to punch my face in because I'm the guy running around super fast knifing them in the face. I literally had a guy at a LAN party just freaking throw a fit over the fact I was using a weapon that was, you know, FUN to use. This brings me to one way I have fun:

Setting Myself Apart



A game to me is like a playground. You got your slides, the monkey bars, that basketball thing that would plop the basketball out of one of the three holes (have no clue what the heck you call it). Then you have the swing-sets. You know every single person, after entering the playground, will SPRINT to those darn things. Every kid wants to play on them. You know you did when you entered, running toward them and finding that they were all taken, and instead having to spend your time on the slides.

It's kind of like that with online games. Halo 2 and Halo 3? Run to the rocket launcher/plasma sword. Modern Warfare 2? Assault rifles, assault rifles, and assault rifles (and Stopping Power). World of Warcraft? As soon as a new raid boss hits, every raiding guild is rushing to be the first to down it.

I like to be outside the norm and play the game MY way. What did I do in Halo 2 and Halo 3? Sat in corners and assassinated people when they walked by, along with charging a Plasma Pistol and punching them in the face. What do I do in Modern Warfare 2? Run around with Marathon, Lightweight, and Steady Aim, slapping people with a SPAS-12 shotgun blast to the face. What do I do in World of Warcraft? Sit in Trade Chat and bug people while I'm waiting for my dungeon finder to find that last tank. Not a great idea, but you get what I mean.

Online matches/games are enjoyable when I play outside the norm. It gives a new experience that I can change at any given moment, and continue having fun with new formulas and ideas. There are more things I do to make my time more enjoyable!

Using Hilarious (And Effective) Tactics



Along with playing outside the norm, there is nothing more I enjoy doing than devising hilarious ways to get ahead of my competition. Countless times I've done something that was effective and lead to the enemy being blown to smithereens or flung across the map.

Example: Modern Warfare 2, I will slap a C4 pack against a wall, run toward an enemy, start firing wildly, and run away. While he's chasing me down, I blow that C4 pack up when he reaches that wall and watch the guy's body stop moving and get knocked back from the explosion.

I love doing things like that. Crap-tons of fun.

Being a Socialite



I bought a headset for a reason. I enjoy conversation and communication. This can be annoying to some, enjoyable to others. If I'm having fun at that moment you'll either hear me cackling like a maniac or listen to me laugh for five minutes straight without taking a breath. No, really. It happened in Team Fortress 2. Ask me about it.

I'm either muted or constantly told to shut up. Mainly due to the fact I'll say random crap, such as "There's an angry-faced man in there. Don't walk in." I'll even remind people of how epic that death was when I got hit by a random grenade or something. The funny thing is people take offense to THAT sometimes and yell at me. You never know.

Friendship



I'm a firm believer that gaming can bring friends closer together. I have awesome, AWESOME amigos online and offline. Me and my best pal Shane? We're the freaking gaming duo. We do all these shenanigans and have a ton of fun doing them. There's so many more people I can list right here on this blog and describe how awesome they are. I love playing any game with these guys and they're amazing at the fact they know how to enjoy a game and make it even more fun.

So yeah, that's all about my expertise. Having fun when it seems like fun's hiding in a dark corner somewhere. To anyone that's played with me at all while traversing the tubes of online gaming: Hope to see you again!

If any of you folks were one of the lucky 11,111 people who received a Gentle Manne's Medal in Team Fortress 2, take a second look at it in your inventory.

Recently they've added a number on your medal saying which number you snagged while all the fuss was going on.

Just giving a heads up for those who haven't found out yet

All righty. Since seeing all the wonderous hats available with the Classless update today (Oh Dear Lord the glorious Glove Hat), I'm ready to get back into the groove of playing TF2 on the PC.

The only problem is I don't know what servers are known to be awesome and what-not. From what I remember of PC TF2, I didn't like:

-HlStats. It makes me overcompetitive when I see "OH HEY YOU DIED YOU LOSE 25 POINTS FROM THAT GUY. :D"

-Servers that are completely composed of custom maps. Don't feel like traversing the internet in order to download a map faster.

-Class limits.

SO. If there's any servers you'd like to suggest to me, go ahead and lay them on me in the comments.

Not too long ago, the 360 version of Team Fortress 2 saw an update. This update would enable the host of a match to control whether or not damage spread and critical hits would exist, as well as set limits on the number of a particular that could be available on each team.

Here are my thoughts on it:

1. It's Useful for Competitive Matches


Panel from a doodle comic I did on a forum.

I can see where the idea for class limits came about for the 360 version. Nobody wants a 2fort match where both teams are entirely composed of Engineers and Snipers, just chilling at their base hoping that some brave soul would head out and try to attack them. The limits can be wisely set so that there's only 1 or 2 Snipers/Engineers, as well as other classes that may be getting a bit out of hand (Soldier/Demoman rushes).

2. It's Useful for Trolling. Big time.


Me being sad/guilty of this. Also I have a big head.

Well since this update came out, nearly every public match I've joined either had the entire team composed of Spies and the host on the opposite team was a Pyro, or the host, being an Engineer, would then limit everything else except Scouts so he could easily spawn-camp them. Man did I hate that... well, at least when I wasn't doing it.

3. It's Useful for Having Awesomely Fun Matches


IT'S TIME FOR SOME FREAKING ADVENTURE.

This right here. Definitely have had some awesome matches with friends using the limits. We freaking limited ourselves so we could only be Heavies, while the other team could only be Engineers. We tried to see who could successfully defend/attack. The Engineers had us beat, their little offensive sentries pinging about. We had fun either way.

So yep, there's my thoughts on the update. Yadda yadda. I'm going back to my college courses now.

For the love of EVERYTHING.

Most of you people who've downloaded Dig-Dug on Xbox Live know of the "Dig".

Completely dig the entire area of any level. No bit of dirt left. At all.

It keeps taunting me and saying "Hey, try and accomplish this task. You're going to get screwed over big time."

It seems I can get so close. SO CLOSE. 2 LITTLE LINES OF DIRT LEFT. Then all of a sudden a Pooka gets way too close to me and I can't turn around and pump it full of air to stun it for a second and I lose my last life.

And I thought "Aperture Science" on the Orange Box was annoying.