[Bridget]

I haven't played Bad Company, but I played Modern Warfare 2 during the free weekend. It's a pretty fun game at the core, but it has some serious irritants. The lack of dedicated servers didn't really matter to me initially. I actually enjoyed being able to play the game immediately and without being confined to the rules of some stupid server controlled by people wanting to play 'realism' or be 'family friendly'. Then when I wanted to play specific maps, with a specific amount of people, under a specific game-mode, with a decent host, I realized how badly I missed being able to search a dedicated server browser.

The killstreaks are now interactive, and you can choose which rewards you wish to obtain during the game. However, the kills you make with these rewards (except from rewards obtained from care packages) contribute to your overall killstreak. You can often chain killstreak rewards one after another and build up to the tactical nuke, which literally kills everyone on the map and instantly wins the game for you and your team. If your team is stupid and feeds the attack helicopter, games can end in a few minutes.

The weapon customization is pretty nifty, and it was interesting trying to pair the right attachments with the right guns to get a decent weapon. However, there were far too many cheap combinations of attachments and perks. In the first Modern Warfare, there were always those 'lone guns' that people singled out as noob-friendly and overpowered. The same thing is retained here. Whenever you see someone in your killcam with an UMP (which has the damage of an assault rifle, it would seem) with the double rate of fire and stopping power perks, you know you're in for a bullshit round.

The game also retained a lot of the cheap mechanics from the first game. Stun grenades are still in. If you are unaware of what these grenades do, then imagine getting hit by a really loud grenade that completely slows you to crawl and makes it impossible to make really sharp turns. Sure, you could kill someone like this if you happened to have been facing them when it hit you. Ever more annoying is the flashbang grenade. Do I need to explain this one? Then, finally, there's the knife.

The knife actually locks on to people near you and guides you into them if you are at a certain distance. This is always an automatic and instant death for the person getting stabbed. You just press the q key by default within a certain range and can instantly kill anyone infront of you no matter their health or armor or condition or whatever. There's even a perk to double the melee range. I can't count the times I've let three rounds off into someone's chest at close range, only for them to survive those rounds and instantly kill me with a knife.

There's also the grenade launcher. The 'noobtube'. This is also in Bad Company from what I hear. It's an attachment on your weapon that allows you 3 or 4 distanced grenades that explode on contact. These pretty much instantly kill anyone and everyone they explode near, unless that person sacrifices an actual useful perk for the decreased explosive damage. This encourages a broken mechanic in games where it doesn't come down to skill or tactics, but rather who sees who first. Then again, the whole game is like that, so fuck.

Let's not forget Snipers. This is another 'who sees who first' mechanic. There are two perks that both make the rifle accurate from the hip and increase the speed by which one looks into the scope. This allows people to run around at close range sniping people and killing them in one hit from the hip or from really quick scopes. This isn't my idea of fun. Sure, it makes sense in this type of game, but that doesn't mean it's fun to play against. I'm at the point where I think Sniping should only belong in Sniper-themed games. It's not an alternative means to play (except, I would and have argued, in Red Orchestra) but a blatant upgrade or advantage over regular players.

The reason Kenny instantly jumped to level 70 is because of hacked servers. There are tons of hacked servers and there are tons of hackers. It's nice that Infinity Ward made the move to Valve Anti-Cheat as to avoid the brb putting the right to spy on you and read every file on your hard-drive anti-cheat we call Punkbuster, but at-least Punkbuster did its job. It's a double edged sword. I don't have to install software on my system that has printed in its EULA the right to scan every file on my harddrive and report its contents back to the company at the cost of effective anti-cheat. I'd rather play with hackers, then.