DICE, you stole my pro-ness.

While it's true I play quite a lot of games (well at least more than the ordinary, which today is literally just CoD, Guitar Hero and Wii Sports), I can't avoid that it's rare for me to actually get very good at one. I can be respectably good, beat-it-on-the-hardest difficulty good, but nowhere near the sort of skill it takes to have a K/D ratio of 5 and do jumping 360-degree headshots like wannabe MLG players with irritating tags like XxiiLiiTeRaT3xSNiiP3rxX you unavoidably find in every single match on Gears of War 2, Halo 3 and CoD.

An exception I found was in Battlefield: Bad Company. Yes I still wasn't getting triple spawn kills using nothing but a medipack and the jump button, but I could genuinely play it seriously and get a heckload of points. My K/D ratio isn't even 1 - entirely because I sent the first 70% of my playtime either being new or driving around Oasis in a HUMV with two or three friends singing David Hassellhoff and firing rockets in the air - but I played with a definite vigour later on and to be honest, I bloody loved it. However, all that changed after the release of the Bad Company 2 demo.

I'll make no bones about it; Bad Company 2's multiplayer is just about perfect. It's at least the best online multiplayer I've played in my life, and it's only a demo. Every problem with Bad Company 1 is effortlessly solved and we're given more, down to the very detail (like vehicle handling, damn that sucked in BC1). Problem is, after playing hour after hour of it in the same way Gary Glitter watches Saturday Morning CITV, I've become not just adept at it but adapted to it. Playing it isn't just now second nature to me; it's become how I envisage Bad Company. I've gone back to Bad Company 1 recently and I'm pathetic. For example, while being the Assault class, I was 'wowed' by being reminded how many 40mm grenades you get for the assault rifle. I instinctively let one off to feel the satisfaction of them without worrying about wasting them... only to forget friendly fire is on in BC1 and I blew a teammate sky high. On top of that, I shoot enemies so inaccurately now that they probably think I'm hoping the loud noise will scare them off. It's just an embarrassment. 

So it's all gone. The one game I had going for being awesome at I now play as I if I had one hand. A prosthetic hand. And it's all DICE's fault for making BC2 so amazing. Yet another situation where I wish some games didn't blow my mind so much.