I took a break from beating games to play the ever loving hell out of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat (PS2) online. There are a number of PS2 games with small communities dedicated to playing their online versions (gonna play some OG Killzone in a bit here...) and there was an achievement set added to BF2MC, so I felt the call of the completionist as I tend to do with competitive multiplayer FPS games. Yesterday I wrapped that up, earning the final achievement I needed for 100% completion.
The whole thing took around 90 hours to do, which honestly is actually less than I expected. The existing player base is insanely highly skilled at the game, and I ended up rank 21 upon completion, so I believe we can now consider me to be insanely highly skilled at the game. There was a pretty significant early game hurdle to get over, the people playing are not very welcoming in their gameplay style; sure they'll greet you nicely enough on Discord, but in-game you're gonna get fuckin' stomped. I had to really suck it up and git gud quickly before it got too frustrating, and while I still go "ugh, this guy - may as well just turn the game off" when I see certain people hop into the game, I got there in the end; there may even be a person or two now who see me login and go "ah shit I'm fucked".
Anyway, that's my annual dose of bragging. That out of my system, I can get back to playing normal human games.