Why do I even play Modern Warfare 2: Black Ops? I’m awful at it. I have something like a .49 K/D ratio and I’m almost always the worst guy on the squad.

If I was this bad at any other game, I would’t play it. But for some reason, I keep going back for more humiliation. I can’t figure it out. By all accounts, I should hate this game. I should put it away and never play it again. So why do I pick it up again, over and over?

I die alot

I’m too slow on the melee attack, which results in people appearing to run past me and then I get knifed. This is particularly weird, because I was awesome at melee in Halo.

I never win a face-to-face quick-draw contest. Maybe I sprint too much, or something, because it seems that the other guy can always raise his gun and shoot faster than I can.

The game likes to spawn me in front of more than one guy, too. Particularly on Crisis. Sometimes in the path of three guys.

My technique is weak

I really try to study the kill cams to find out how each guy beat me, but much of the time they’re shooting me in the foot or whatever. Hell, I can usually unload an entire clip into someone’s feet before they just casually finish reloading or whatever and then off me. It is frustrating, though, when the kill cam doesn’t quite jive with my recollection of the encounter. Like when I’m pretty sure I shot first, but the kill cam shows the other guy very obviously getting the jump on me.

I also can’t figure out how these guys finish a game with ridiculous stats, like 38/3. Guys like that look like they always know exactly where I am, from the Kill Cam. Maybe they just know the maps extremely well and can anticipate where someone ought to be? I saw one shared video of a guy who got 100 kills in a game, and he spent much of the time standing in the open, turning from side to side, shooting guys as they rounded a corner and ran up a hill.

Maybe I’m doing it all wrong. Maybe standing in the open is a genius strategy, but my gut tells me to find a place where I can protect my back with a claymore and shoot down a hallway or something. Or, if I decide to just always keep moving, I run the perimeter so that there is less opportunity to be ambushed. But neither of these tactics is going to get me 20 kills per game.

Like one dog waiting on another

Instead of going all lone-wolf all the time, I sometimes try to follow someone on my team in an attempt to combine our firepower. This seems to be a decent strategy on paper (and I sure get mowed down by multiple enemies enough to think that it’s effective), but more often than not, we’re both taken out by a grenade within about 15 seconds.

If I enter a room and see a teammate crouched down, gun pointed at the door, I typically figure he’ll be standing guard long enough for me to look out a window. The guy’s got my back, I figure. But no, I’ll get knifed in the kidney the moment I start looking down the street. It happens every time. Where’s the camaraderie, fellas?

Impossible

I get killed by these physics-defying grenade tosses that bounce in impossible ways, or fly half-way across the map and through the window to land at my feet, but I couldn’t get a grenade through a barn door. Chances are, my grenade will just bounce off a wall and come back to get me. At least the grenade physics part of the game is consistent with MW2. I probably have a 1 in 20 chance of successfully avoiding a grenade. I’d like to see stats on that.

A single napalm strike typically gets me more than once. I feel certain that I’ve actually spawned in the napalm.

Cover

I am forever trying to be sneaky and realistic, moving from cover to cover before looking around a wall or something. Usually, I’ll be seen before I locate my enemy and the cover will appear to be at least partly effective. I’ll get knicked a few times, but feel that I was very smart to have cover so close, then gracefully move back into the cover, then fall down and die. Are they shooting me through the wall each time? Because it sure feels like the game is just lagging and it’s decided that I’m already dead before I move behind the wall.

Even so, even with all the frustration and suckiness, I’m really looking forward to Modern Warfare 3. Plus, I heard they improved the completely lame and irritating slow-motion final kill cam stuff. Maybe now the guy doesn’t run past the cross hairs half a second before the blood splatter materializes out of thin air.