What’s the highlight of your gaming career?

Because it totally does matter. *half sarcasm* 

Although I don’t play nearly as much as I used to, I still consider myself a serious gamer. And like many serious gamers, I think of gaming as a sport of some sorts. Not like how some people consider those EVO-tournament-type-let’s-watch-strangers-play-fighting-games-surrounded-by-other-strangers players as athletes, but in the sense that just like athletes, we spend a certain amount of time in our lives as gamers and just like athletes, we accumulate our achievements and great moments and these are what defines our gaming careers.

Gamers usually associate with one of two archetypes— casual or competitive, which draws parallels to playing sports for recreational or professional purposes.

Sure, we could play video games our whole lives— much longer than an athlete stays in competition, but speaking personally, I reached a point in my life where I didn’t care anymore about how well I did in a game, just as an athlete retires after they know that although they still have love for the game, they cannot stay in that competitive state of mind forever.

I know it may be a bit insulting to compare playing a video game to playing a physical game where real dangers are present, but for the sake of this blog, I’m only pointing out the similarities between the two.

While I considered myself as the gamer equivalent of “retired,” I’ve been getting back into Modern Warfare 2 (I know it’s an old game but it’s the best CoD game in my opinion) lately, and I guess you can call me Brett Favre because I’m back and honestly better than I have ever been. So in spirit of my doing so surprisingly well in a game that is almost five years old, I’ve reflected on my gaming career thus far and I’ve decided what my highlight is so far.

I don’t know how many CoD players there are on this site, but in all CoD games after the first Modern Warfare game, when you gets a certain amount of kills consecutively without dying, you get killstreak rewards (I’ll refer to them as KSRs) and there are different KSRs for however many kills you get— for example, if you can get seven kills in a row, one of the KSRs you can choose is an Attack Helicopter or whatever.

Like a championship ring is the highest achievement an NBA athlete can hope to obtain in his respective career, in the world of video games and more specifically in the world of Modern Warfare 2, the equivalent of that is the Tactical Nuke KSR, which is attainable after getting 25 consecutive kills. That in itself is a challenge, considering how competitive the game could get. Staying alive isn’t the hard part— it’s carefully taking into account your opponents’ moves and making sure you keep having the drop on them, for once you get killed, your streak ends, just like the fourth quarter of a playoff game.

Taking all of the above into account, the highlight of my career is obviously my getting a total of FIVE Nukes so far in my gaming career. I know, I know— It’s amazing but please hold your applause. When MW2 first came out, getting a Nuke was rare and whoever got one cemented themselves as damn near godlike.

What’s more is that if you take into account how old the game is (it came out in 2009), to achieve such a feat is extra special because as games come out, you notice that the noobs usually move on to the newer games while those who realize that the older ones are better usually stay (there’s a reason why people still play the first Modern Warfare). So with that in mind, you have that idea that you’re playing among people who share the same idea that you do— that you’re so good at and so accustomed to this game that you’d rather play this than play the newer ones.

You can tell I’m very happy and passionate about this. I am and I know it’s only a game but when you’re good at something you love, you love and appreciate it more and it doesn’t matter to me that it’s an old game. I’m sure people are still trying to beat the Pacman high score so why not let it fly?

Sure there are people better than I am, just as there are always athletes better than others. I’m sure there’s a bunch of Michael Jordans and Kobe Bryants in the CoD world but I’d like to consider myself as someone not too below them— a Magic Johnson, perhaps. After all, he does have five NBA titles.

So that’s my highlight. I have five Nukes. What’s yours?