The MW2 perk Hardline sounds good in theory — it reduces the number of kills you need to get a kill streak reward by one. UAVs come in after two kills, chopper gunners fly overhead after 10, and so on.

The problem is that it’s ultimately not that useful. At best it reduces the number of kills required to get all three of your kill streak rewards by 25% — at worst it’s only a 5.88% reduction. The lower your rewards the higher the percentage of kills you save by running Hardline. Conversely, the higher your rewards the less Hardline actually helps you. It’s simple math.

If you’re running UAV, care package, and predator missile (3, 4, 5) you need 12 kills total to get all your rewards. Hardline will get you all of these with only nine kills — a savings of 25%. But if you’re running the very popular reward setup of predator missile, harrier strike, and chopper gunner (5, 7, 11), you’ll find Hardline only saves you 13% in total kills. Here are some handy charts so you can see this visually.

UAV, care package, predator	Predator, harrier, chopper gunner
Harrier, chopper gunner, nuke	Chopper gunner, EMP, nuke

Since Hardline is most useful with 3, 4, 5 kill streak rewards, it’s best to run a class that isn’t designed for big kill streaks. Use something annoying to pester the enemy team — something with Marathon, for instance, so you can constantly flank the other team.

Strive to get a least two kills for every death so your team will have constant UAV coverage. Let your team worry about camping and getting the big kill streaks. A 2:1 ratio is certainly nothing to scoff at, and with UAVs overhead for most of the match, you’re much more likely to do better than that.

Less pew-pew power

Running Hardline means, of course, that you won’t have access to Stopping Power to lessen your burden in killing enemies. Whenever I’m not using using Stopping Power I tend to run a gun that can kill in 3-4 shots or one with very manageable recoil.

Any assault rifle will probably suit you fine with the possible exception of the F2000. The others are either heavy-hitting (FAMAS, TAR-21, etc.) or easy to use (M4A1, ACR). The MP5K is a great choice for flanking duties as it takes three shots at close range. Similarly, the UMP will kill with three shots at any distance and is thus a nice choice (especially silenced).

If I were running Hardline I’d probably go for the SCAR-H with a noob tube or a silent UMP and use Marathon and Ninja. Then again, I probably wouldn’t actually run Hardline. Stopping Power is quite good and doesn’t lessen in usefulness due to the kill streak rewards I’ve chosen.

I am now level 27 in MW2. I’m not very good yet but I have managed to figure out how to go positive in most games. Sadly, this involves a lot of playing the opposite way I played in CoD4. However, I’m generally okay with this as my biggest flaw is my inabilities in aiming with a thumbstick. I almost feel annoyingly gimped since I’m so used to 1:1 aim translation that you get with a mouse and I’m actually good at that. It’s been a moderately humbling experience going from always 2:1 (and sometimes something crazy like 7:1) in CoD4 on PC to being happy simply to go +1 on the PS3. My current kill-death ratio is a mind-blowing 1.03.

As expected there is no balance

MW2 has, at best, a basic semblance of balance. In reality it is every bit as unbalanced as I anticipated. Air support is as ridiculous as you’ve seen in various YouTube videos. But the upside of that is most people you’ll come across aren’t good enough to abuse it frequently.

And even if you do happen to be playing with someone going harrier, chopper gunner, nuke consistently, you can always leave the lobby and find new people to play with. That’s the biggest plus regarding a lack of dedicated servers — there’s theoretically an infinite number of places to play. No waiting in line on a full server and no waiting for someone to join an empty server ever again. In a dedicated environment, if someone is hacking or totally owning on your favorite server, there isn’t anything you can do but wait until he leaves or is kicked.

Less grenade spam overall

Grenade spam has been greatly reduced from CoD4 thanks to the absence of the 3x Frag perk and the much smaller throw trajectory. You don’t see people getting UAVs with only grenades much (if ever) anymore. That said, the game does allow for some abuses.

The One Man Army and Scavenger perks both let people restock their explosives — grenades, claymores, noob tubes, etc. In a douchebag’s hand this can cause serious trouble. However, it’s generally only one guy abusing it versus everyone in CoD4 spamming three grenades as soon as they spawn. It’s probably easier to deal with the MW2 guys, especially given the infinite “servers” available to you.

Pew-pew city

MW2 has more guns and many more ways to set up said guns than CoD4. As expected many of them are unbalanced. The number of guns and whatnot is nice and all but it makes the fact that you still only get five custom class slots all the more annoying. You get new slots as you prestige but who has time to level through the game multiple times?

My favorite gun setup right now is probably the FAMAS with a silencer. The M4A1 and SCAR-H are also quite nice. In a recent match I was going 3-9 with the UMP on Afghan, and after I switched to my FAMAS class I wound up going 13-10. Pretty good for a guy who hasn’t played a console since Halo.

Knife abuse is the worst part of MW2

Running the Marathon, Lightweight, and Commando perks whilst wielding an SMG is the most annoying part about MW2. It allows people to sprint an infinite distance faster than anyone else and do a magical knife warp from ten feet out. Sometimes people use the tactical knife with a handgun to increase the speed of multiple knife slashes. It’s all about cheap kills as this setup will easily overpower even SMGs with Stopping Power.

You’ll find at least one of these idiots in every game — someone who has dedicated his MW2 experience to running around extra quickly and knifing people. It’s pretty obvious they’re terrible at the game and this is the only way they can get passable scores. Sadly, there’s not much you can do about it except try and stay away from them. This can be difficult enough on its own, but if they switch out Commando for Ninja and thus don’t make any noise while they’re running around full speed, good luck.

As I seem to die an equal amount from guns as from these untalented knife bitches, I sincerely hope Infinity Ward aren’t too stupid to see the problems with so many people abusing this setup. It would be less of a problem with a mouse in hand; on a console it’s too much. Since I encounter these guys much more frequently than good players abusing air support, I’m calling this the most broken part of the game right now. In theory the air support system is worse but in practice the knife abusing seems to rule.

Internets buddies

If you have a PS3 you can friend me. My “gamer tag” or whatever it’s called is kylegetsspam. For now at least. Maybe I’ll change it later. But maybe not; I am pretty lazy.

I am now the owner of a PS3 and have been so for more than three weeks now. I only started playing just over a week ago, however, given a slew of problems I encountered along the way. Join me as I relive my annoying quest to play my first console since the original Xbox.

I got the PS3 for Christmas. My mom, who likes buying me things and always hooks me up at Christmastime, was wondering what she could possibly get me. I’d been thinking about getting a PS3 for awhile but before I told her about it she mentioned she’d seen it in some store and thought it looked interesting. I said, “Sure, why not?” and thus ended up with a PS3 on Christmas morning.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t play it until I had an HDMI-capable TV or monitor. I took a couple days tossing ideas around — TVs are fucking expensive and I didn’t want to spend that much money. I also have no speakers for a good TV setup. I settled on a monitor instead and wound up purchasing a 24″ Samsung T240HD. The idea was that I could hook both my computer and PS3 up to it and switch between them at will. Then, once I had the proper type of adapter, I could also switch my speakers between the two.

It sounded like a plan, so I finally committed to a purchase on the 30th of December. I could have done it sooner, and looking back I definitely should have. Due to my order date I inadvertently ensured the delivery of my monitor would take the longest time possible. My order wasn’t processed until the next day, there was a holiday that Friday (the New Year), and then no one ships over the weekend. My monitor sat in Maryland for days on end while I amused myself with CoD4 and L4D the best I could.

The next Tuesday was its slated arrival date. Since I’d thought it might come sooner I had told NewEgg to ship it to my apartment rather than my office, and now it was going to arrive when I wasn’t there to sign for it. Luckily, my roommate’s friend was to be hanging around the apartment all day and he said he’d sign for it. Just in case, I left a note saying a neighbor could sign for it if no one was home. Everything was peachy. Wrong! When I got home there was a UPS slip on the door saying no one had been there to sign. The driver wrote his own note: “CANNOT LEAVE PACKAGE.” They’d try again the next day.

Why my roommate’s friend hadn’t been there to sign for it I’m not sure. He even said later that he had indeed been there all day. Whatever. Wednesday I hatched a plan and my bosses went with it. Since the new delivery time was set to be between 10:30 and 2:00, I could leave work after an hour, work from home during that time slot, and return to work after finally getting my monitor. I did just that and the UPS driver showed up at a punctual 1:58. The wait had started to cause me anxiety due to what my roommate’s friend had said — what if I somehow missed them again? If I missed UPS three times they’d ship it back to NewEgg and I’d have to buy the damn thing and start the process all over again.

Now I was set. Or so I thought; it couldn’t be that easy. For some reason I had majorly brainfarted and hadn’t gotten an HDMI cable. On NewEgg the product images showed a bunch of cables and for some reason my dumb brain assumed HDMI would be one of them. Thus, I needed one as soon as possible, but faced with overpaying three to ten times more than necessary in a retail store, I decided to try online first. I’d waited this long; what was another two days? Well, turned out that the cable I wanted was backordered until Friday, so even if I paid the $4 for one-day shipping (Amazon Prime kicks ass) it would arrive Monday at the earliest. It was whatever at that point so I went ahead and ordered it.

I then tried my hand at hooking up the PS3 with the AV cables that come with it. Well, that was fucking terrible. For whatever reason the picture came through as black and white, so I was getting a blotchy, grayscale picture at 480i stretched to 1920×1080. It was fucking beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that I couldn’t even get through the second Spec Ops section of MW2 on the easy difficulty because I couldn’t make out the enemies from the background. Sigh.

Come Friday, which is when my HDMI cable order was finally processed (but not shipped), I was tired of waiting around. I bit the bullet and headed to Walmart. Surely Walmart of all places wouldn’t try to gouge me with overpriced cables — it’s Radioshack and Best Buy who are famous for their $130 HDMI cables. Walmart didn’t have cables quite that expensive but my options were limited to a $19 3′ cable or a $30 6′ one. I went with the latter even though it was still at least three times what a good HDMI cable is worth. When I returned home I attempted to cancel my Amazon order for the other one but was unable to do so. The window for canceling is pretty small apparently.

No matter. My PS3 was finally playable a full two weeks after I’d gotten it. I played the MW2 campaign for a little while and admired it for all its ridiculousness. Seriously, that game is so far beyond ridiculous that it wraps around lame and ends up back at awesome. The HDMI cable I’d ordered previously arrived Monday and I’ve hooked that one up instead. If I ever make it back to Walmart I’ll return the $30 one. Then again maybe I should keep it for the next time I brainfart and leave myself cableless for no good reason.