Some MW2 action...

 

    Well, I got my feet wet with the totally unexpected and very awesome Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Xbox Live multiplayer demo. I heard of the demo through the intertubes grapevine and had it before Major Nelson tweeted about. :) I didn't know at the time of the download was that it was a multiplayer demo! Expecting a single player demo, I was surprised when the menu loaded and I saw the magic words "Quick Match".
    I played a few matches, but I didn't get much traction. I'm going to keep playing the demo for a while to see what happens. I don't know yet whether the Battlefield series is my cup of tea, tho I'm certainly going to buy it for the single player. I really enjoyed the Battlefield 2: Bad Company single player. (In fact, I restarted it on hard today. :D)
    Reibo and I quit playing the BC2 demo for a meal break at around 9PM. While I was eating my Pierre microwaved angus cheeseburger, my friend JKDJose sent me a chat request. We wound up playing MW2 for an hour, and my 2Old2Play bud, Gasdaddy2531, joined us in progress. GasDaddy had a really good game on a really tough match on Sub Pen. He actually won the game, too, snagging the winning kill and the killcam. It was a tight match; we only won by 2 or three kills. For the record, I went 15/9, and I camped hard. Every time I could lay low with my silenced SCAR-H, I did. :D 
    A couple of random douchebags who joined us our team on a Rundown match objected to our (Reibo's and mine) camping ways, as well as our liberal use of One Man Army. It came to a head on an Afghan game, where one of these 2 douches went 6/16 and complained that Reibo went 14/0 by using OMA and the grenade launcher. Mind you, these weren't random tube kills. Reibo was direct tubing seen enemies with it, as well as making aimed indirect fire kills. These two douches talked non-stop thru three matches, clogging up the comms horribly. Things degenerated into incessant swearing and cursing as these two carried out a dual monologue about One Man Army and camping. JKDJose dropped off for the night before this crap, then GasDaddy followed due to intermittent connection problems. I'd had enough douchebaggery from incompetent randoms for one night, so I quit as well. On to the links:

• Kotaku: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Xbox Live demo seen in the wild. It's official, blessed by the developers. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Xbox Live DL Link. DICE press release on Battlefield: BC2 Xbox Live Demo and PC beta.
  
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• DICE: Bad Company 2 not competing with Modern Warfare 2. Oh, yeah, right! It's Medal of Honor: Afghanistan that's doing that.
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• BASHandSlash: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 PC dedi servers on sale.
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• GiantBomb: Mass Effect 2 review. Kotaku: Mass Effect 2 Frankenreview.
  
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• VG Reloaded: MAG Review. Kotaku feaure: The Guns, Skills and Buff of MAG.
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• Team Fortress 2 patch adds hats. You know, I remember when Team Fortress 2 was going to be a team-based military shooter. I played the Half-life mod Front Line Force, which was awesome, and drooled over the idea of a Valve-generated, class-based, team-oriented, name-your-own-hyphenated-adjective shooter. Instead, TF2 is cartoons. Meh.
  
• Pixel Pansies: Eight badass characters turned into wimps in videogames.
• Damnlag thru digg: How to Fix Videogame Enemies.
• Blog of the Day: A long, hard look at Bayonetta. 
• Bayonetta patched for the PS3 to improve load times. Plus, Zero Punctuation molests reviews Bayonetta.
  
• Xbox Live Suspension Link of the Day.
  

    Non-Gaming Links:

• Slashdot: Twitter developing technology to defeat government censorship.
• Apple unveils the iPaid iPad. Joystiq: Gamers won't care about iPaid, ah, iPad. IGN: iPad hands-on. GamaSutra: Is the iPad good for gaming? Games Radar: Eight game genres that are perfect for the iPad. Kotaku rant: The Problem with the Apple iPad. Edge Online: Where were the games?