I love Team Fortress 2. Valve's multiplayer online first-person shooter is filled with colorful characters, tons of fun explosions and plenty of great user-created content. It's exact opposite of what you'd expect in a FPS title, and yet, it's the best game of it's kind I have ever played. But alas, not all is wonderful in the world of TF2 for me.

I know, I know, JT IceFire wrote about the game as a whole when he mentioned his suckage at the FPS genre, but this is not the same old story. Not in the least. Instead, it's a story of an old-school gamer running into in adversary created by his own damn incompetence, an adversary that's definitely not going away any time soon.

Unlike JT, I don't suck at FPS titles, and I certainly don't suck at Team Fortress 2. I often play it as a way to relieve stress from work, and lately, I've been playing it a whole hell of a lot. All that experience has made me a very, very talented player. I'm a world-class Pyro, a lightning-quick Scout who specializes in hit and run tactics, a Medic that can stick to my teammates like a Chinese finger trap around your thumb, a Sniper who only needs to see the top of your hat to blow your head clean off, a Spy who doesn't backstab well but can still cause all kinds of mischief, and while I don't play them nearly as much anymore, I can still throw down as Demoman, Engineer or Heavy when necessary. But there's something missing from my TF2 skills, and it's down right embarrassing.



It's not something you'll see in my final tally for a map, not anything noticeable when I'm pushing the train in Frontier, capping points in Badlands or knocking people off the edge of the cliff in Offblast. That's bcause it's something that's not visible at all to anyone but yours truly. At least that was, until now:



Still don't understand what I'm hinting at? Let me just highlight that for you:



Yeah, that's right. 11 minutes. That's all I've played of the Soldier in the nearly year I've had the game. And, of course, you can guess the reason why by now, too: I really, really suck as Soldier. Stepping into the boots of that crazed killing machine turns me from champ to chump in a heartbeat. It is, to say the least, an exercise in extreme frustration.



I can't rocket jump. I can sticky bomb jump as a Demoman (though admittedly, not well) and I'm learning the air of airblast jumping with rockets as Pyro (hint: it's really, really hard to do). But the simple act of rocket jumping? Can't do it. I just end up blowing myself up 99 percent of the time, and the one percent of the time I do end up in the air, I land and get blown up by someone else. Add on top of that my difficulty in actually using the rocket launcher effectively, and the fact that every time I'd get my shovel out, I would eat a backstab, sniper rifle bullet or baseball bat, and well, Pyro seemed like such an easier way to go. Plus, I didn't have to deal with the W+M1 Backburner n00bs that way.



What frustrates me is not that I haven't tried to play Soldier, but that I just can't get the mechanics down of his game play. I didn't have any trouble learning to become a reliable, dependable teammate in any of the other 8 classes, so why is this one lone class giving me such headaches? It's enough to drive me to actually stay away from playing the Soldier class and thus continuing to impede my progress on being a good Soldier. There are times I think a tweak here and a tweak there would fix everything and that it's perhaps all the game's fault ... until someone playing Soldier pops down another rocket in my face and I'm back to getting frustrated at myself again.

Maybe Mr. Soldier and I are just never fated to be together as one. Honestly, that's okay with me, because I'm much happier as a Pyro or Sniper anyways. But it still irks me that I may always have that black spot on my record, no matter how good I get at the game. It's the kind of thing I could imagine people conversing over as they lowered my casket into the ground.

"Man, that guy was the best TF2 player ever, wasn't he? Dominated me every time with that flamethrower of his."

"Yeah ... but he totally sucked as Soldier."

Ugh ... the thought of it is just so stressing. I think I'm gonna go play some more Pyro to help get rid of that.