So how may I join?

Join the True Achievements site....  www.trueachievements.com and PM me your Gamertag.  You will get a friend request from VGChartz2009 that you have to accept on Live.

Neo, even the best players in the world have to follow a set of events to kill an enemy.

Assess the situation, take aim, shoot. This takes, depending on skill, different amounts of time but usually about a second or so.

The A.I. follows none of these rules and just instantly, perfectly kills you. Usually in half the time it takes you to even realize they are there.

I was like you I kept getting SO close only to pop out of cover or peek around a corner and BAM, dead, start all over. To make things worst some of the checkpoints wouldn't keep and regardless of advancing to a certain point it would throw me back a couple check points. It did the same thing if I quit and then loaded it back up, suddenly I had to repeat these hair pulling moments I had already slaved through the previous session.

I just wish developers would boost the difficulty by making the enemies smarter, not just making them crackshot insta-killers. That's probably the key reason I find myself enjoying multiplayer games much more now days. People make mistakes, its usually much more balanced online. Even the shittiest player can take down the best player given a chance. Or a good player can have an off day, etc. etc. With computer A.I. on its difficult level its just not fair. I'm not a computer, I can't react quicker than a computer. I ask for one simple, lousy thing: Just give me a chance to react to the game going on around me. If I can't have a chance to react I don't feel like I'm even playing, just controlling a dying character, helpless to do anything about it.

And like you said Treyarch did seem to force way too many times where you just had to do it a specific way, and I really didn't like the linear bottle neck paths they constantly forced on you. At least in Battlefield Bad Company 2 you had choices of how to approach a situation. So yeah, it was tough but there was always another way to try.

Pinball Hall of Fame kicks ass! Although oddly enough, as someone who went in a lot of arcades, the only one I remember is Pinbot though. edit: nevermind, I take it back. I love how old pinball designers thought it would be cool if a good 10 to 20 percent of the time you lose your ball down the gutter right off the plunge. Sometimes multiple times in the same game. I don't know what it is but if I play one more game that seems to delight in killing me, regardless of my actions as the player... I'm two steps away from selling my Xbox and quitting gaming completely. Games are supposed to be fun, what am I missing here?

It is a lot of fun...  But, definately, pinball machines are designed to eat quarters.  You learn quickly how "not" to plunge the ball.

Neo, I know! But I guess I wont learn how not to plunge the ball because I put it back in the mail to gamefly. Although I still contend that a majority of the time me being robbed had absolutely nothing to do with my plunge and more to do with unlucky physics.

That whole quarter muncher thing though.. it holds no place in modern gaming. Game Room falls prey to it as well.

And I'm sorry for bringing my bitching here, I just needed to vent. I come home for lunch, great mood, beautiful day, think I'll enjoy a game or two of pinball. Next thing I know I'm cussing and screaming and my whole mood is ruined for the rest of the day. Thanks hobby!

Actually I think I just need very badly to get laid, my nerves and mood in general are pretty negative lately and these games are only making it worst. I guess I could always join facebook and just play Farmville. Heh. Or buy a Wii.

I love pinball! Did a daypass gaming at my local golfland arcade, did pinball teams and played for 3-4 hours of pinball @_@. I keep tilting the machine though ;(

Graham, then I would recommed the Hall of Fame game to you definately. Maybe it wont piss you off like it did me. There are some really fun tables when you aren't being robbed.

I actually never cared much for pinball back in the day, seemed second rate to the other arcade machines. At some point though I realized how much fun it can be.

Also, FX pinball for the XBLA is pretty cool with a few extra tables you can download. Like the more modern machines it at least gives you a free kick back on either side gutter. Which is a devlopment, I guess, that came about when people realized how skeezy and cheap it is without them.

I wasted a lot of quarters playing pinball in arcades when I was a kid, but for some reason I can't remember any names of the machines.  I had Pinbot on the NES, but video game pinball just doesn't feel the same as a real table.  I always thought it'd be cool to own a legit pinball machine.  Then I found out a good one starts around $4000.

Btw we need to play some conviction co-op.  I'm nearly done with the single player on realistic and have unlocked around 40% of the challenges so most of my equipment is upgraded.  Although I don't think you need more than the Five-SeveN and the M468.  Disappointed that there were only 5 gadgets in the game.

Oh I agree most of the pinball tables I played felt like highway robbery. There were 5 machines at the arcade, we would only do tournament play on the Pirate of Carribean/Simpsons machine, the rest were just practice while waiting for our turn (the practice machines were quarter munchers!). Eventually I broke the simpsons machine by tilting the shit out of it while my ball was rolling straight through the middle, good part is my tilt worked, the ball went to the side and onto a flipper and than the machine powered down ;(. I didn't care much for pinball until that day at golfland actually, always considered it an old man's game, I guess that's saying something about me :/.