As much as I'd like to think of Modern Warfare 2 as a mouse-and-keyboard shooter best played on the PC - which it is - it's pretty discouraging to find out that Infinity Ward's refusal to provide dedicated servers as a way to prevent hacking has come to naught. Above is a screenshot of an online hack that highlights the position of enemy players no matter where they are on the map. It's called a wallhack, and it's fairly common in online shooters for the PC.

Activision had a video pulled that was posted to YouTube showing the hack in action and advertising the URL to download it. I'm not going to post the link, as you can find it yourself on Google if you're interested in that sort of thing. It's available for a monthly subscription fee. The site seems to do good business, selling a wide range of hacking options for the most popular online games. Since their products only works on the PC, I'll continue playing Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360 where I know that every time I died it was because the other guy shot me fair and square.

Of course, maybe if there were some dedicated servers I could trust to monitor that sort of thing, I might be inclined to take up the mouse-and-keyboard...

Up next: with a little help from my friend

(Click here for the previous Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer game diary.)