Turns out Bad Company ain’t bad company.

I don’t play online games. I cannot think of anything worse than coming home from a day spent with people I don’t like, to enjoying a favourite pastime of mine with people I don’t like. It may not be becoming of a human being to admit not being a fan of humanity, but that’s the truth and I’m sticking with it.

So while online games have come and gone, they’ve completely passed me by. I was more upset by the decline and fall of Microsoft Comic Chat than the end of Star Wars Galaxies, and more inconsolable when Encarta kicked the bucket than when Tabula Rasa sank into the great below. I have zero relationship with games as an online phenomenon and that’s the way I like it.

Well, almost zero. Because there was about a month there in 2010 where Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on the trusty PlayStation 3 was the Sandy to my Danny Zuko. It was the one that I wanted to play day and night, dawn to dusk, twilight to starlight.

I’m not sure why, though. I’m not a massive fan of gun-to-gun combat, nor do I care about any type of modern combat, short of it having a healthy dose of either frivolity or fiction. But something about the online in Bad Company 2 rose the tent, as it were. The shootie-shootie-bang-bang felt good, sounded good, and the game looked spectacular for console-exclusive plebians like me.

It probably also helped that I was playing online, without a headset, with similarly-minded headset‑less people from other parts of Asia. With someone who has a friends list totalling zero on any console, that made all the difference. No Oohrah star-spangled banner gun-toting ‘Merica cats squealing into my ears telling me the guns aren’t accurate, that I’m shooting wrong, or that I’d have died on the real battlefield. I have never held a gun, barely seen a gun, and video games are a way to escape idiocy, not embrace it. And Bad Company 2 for a brief period there was a great escape.

Which is why it’s a weird experience to know I’ll never go back and relive that bottle-o-magic ever again. Every other game I’ve ever loved – or even loathed for that matter – are still sitting somewhere on a shelf just waiting for the day I choose to dive back in and have another go. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is and will likely forever stay my one and only. And for a total of what will likely be a day, I’ll be a bit sad about it. As they say life goes on, it was fun while it lasted, and live fast die young.

In any case, I was never really going to play Bad Company 2 again anyway, so that fleeting dalliance was only likely to ever be that. Fleeting.