[Guitar Woman]

Sometimes I forget how absolutely brilliant TF2 is until I go and play a much shittier online shooter in an attempt to wean myself off of Valve's primary-colored smack addiction.

Modern Warfare being the shittier game in this instance. I've played it for about 16 hours so far and every 30 minutes or so of getting knifed or shot out of the blue with absolutely no warning I'll remark to myself, "Holy shit, I hate this game." Visibility is really the most massive factor. Tn TF2, you can see pretty much everything and always know what's going on; where you are in a level, how to get to the place you want to go in said level, who's attacking you, the direction your enemies will generally be coming from, whether or not you're about to die, etc. In MW2, by comparison, everything is an absolute clusterfuck, you won't know you're going to bite it half the time until you're already dead, and you generally can't fucking see anything. That might be more like real life combat than anything TF2 does, but realism does not go hand in hand with fun. Like, ever.

Not sure why I keep playing it, though; probably because I've found I'm not a horrible sniper, and I've always had a thing for intensely lying prone and peering daggers down my scope while I wait for an oblivious schmuck to wander into sight. Although it's sort of annoying in MW2 since sniper rifles are considerably shittier at distance-killing than most of the standard assault rifles. I get one very precise and very loud shot, while unable to move easily. The other guy gets 30 mildly accurate shots while lumbering at me, and if none of those hit me he'll probably instakill me with the fucking stupid combat knife attack instead.

Another thing I've noticed is that smoke grenades are useless; I tried throwing them at demolition targets a few times to give me some cover to set a bomb up, but the guys outside the smoke's range can see my outline plain as day while I'm fucking blind as a bat inside of the thing and they murder me just as easily as if I'd charged in Leeroy Jenkins style.

I've not touched the single player yet, but seeing as how MW2 was pretty much built around milking the multiplayer popularity of the first one it probably isn't as good. It certainly won't have anything as masterful as Pripyat.