John Zeitler

Another new feature on the ol’ blog, folks. Rather than just report when a game’s done, I’m going to do a little writeup on what I thought about the game a day or so after the Clear notice. That way, I have something to write about, and you all are spared the horror of more inane cats-doing-something-cute Youtube bailout. So, let’s get this rolling.

There’s something to be said, I think, for being a couple years behind on one’s gaming.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was, in 2007, the first-person shooter. Other titles like Left 4 Dead and Resistance, were out, but the entire gaming world seemed fixated on COD4, mostly for the multiplayer. And I’ll be honest, I was interested. I had been planning to pick the game up in early 2008, before rumblings of misdeeds at Activision turned me off the company entirely for a couple of years. When I finished up Modern Warfare 2 last month, I figured it was time to let bygones be bygones and give the game a fair shot, particularly because– shock of shocks– MW2 was actually good.

As it turns out, the hype for Modern Warfare was entirely justified. The game certainly lost a little bit of its luster owing to the fact that I played its sequel first, but in all honesty it made me appreciate MW2 a little bit more as well. The improvements between the games proved that Infinity Ward really puts a lot of effort into the games each year or so, and isn’t just dumping the same code out over and over again. The thing is, though, those improvements are remarkably subtle. Someone not terribly versed in the tropes of FPS gaming might not quite appreciate the differences in the waypoint tracker, the aim-assister, or the enemy AI.

One of the biggest knocks against COD4 was the overarching importance of grenades. It even earned the game the memetic nickname “Grenade of Grenade 4: Grenade Grenade”. I have nothing to dispute this claim. Enemies seemed to chuck the little bombs at me with alarming accuracy, and it seemed like I needed to be practically on top of one in order to throw it back have it blow my arm off. More to the point, grenades weren’t terribly useful when I used them: tossing one into an enemy’s nest did nothing to thin their forces, and it sure as hell didn’t force them to break cover and become exposed. The only saving grace is that, unlike Halo, these grenades don’t stick to you.

Here’s the other thing, though: MW2 had one important advantage over its predecessor, and that’s the elimination of the infinite-enemy spawns. In certain choke points, enemy troops would relentlessly charge back into positions where I or the AI squadmates had just exterminated them, sometimes not even moments afterwards. It made advancing through these areas ridiculously difficult, as compared to MW2′s difficult-but-doable points. I can see where Inifnity Ward would have wanted to emphasize the death-or-glory valor of an SAS trooper or US Marine, but it introduces an element of inconsistency that’s really jarring. For 90% of the game, you’re taught not to go charging off on your own– your squad is there to back you up for a very good reason. For the other 10%, you’re expected to do exactly that, racing through stupidly-accurate enemy fire to get to the next unintuitively-laid out save-state checkpoint.

Now, it’s not all bad. The game has a reputation for being laden with awesome moments, and in all honesty that reputation is well-deserved. Storming a freighter in the opening mission is only the start; acting as the gunner in an AC-130 makes for an extremely cathartic experience as well. But the moment that is probably one of the most striking in the game is one that’s a bit of a mixed blessing: the mission “The Aftermath”, which takes place immediately after the detonation of a nuclear device in a Middle-Eastern city. In this mission, the player takes on the role of a US soldier whose evac helicopter was caught in the blast; you, as the soldier, watched the mushroom cloud blossom over the city not three minutes of real-time before (an acceptable break from reality, as anyone that close to a nuke going off would probably be blinded in the explosion). The player sees the burning wreckage of the city around him and crawls around, trying to move or escape. The problem is, though, that there is no escape. The character is basically the walking dead. After a few minutes of horrifyingly slow and lurching movement, the character collapses and the mission ends.

It’s hard to say whether Infinity Ward meant to make such a chilling statement with the mission. Certainly they intended to say something; the fact that they added the controversial “No Russian” mission into the sequel pretty much proves that they had something to say with that one. But there’s a difference, I think, between a game being recognized as a piece of art– hell, even a brief portion of a game– and developing a game specifically to be art. It puts the aphorism “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” in stark relief. Art, when it exists, is acclaimed by someone other than the creator. Declaring your own product to be “art” before anyone else has looked at it, I think, highly prejudices people against the product at the outset. It’s good to have goals, but keeping your expectations of how it’s going to be received to yourself is, in most if not all cases, a pretty good idea. Do I think “Aftermath” and “No Russian” are art? They’re artistic, they’re art-oid, but it’s hard for me to tell what’s art and what’s not. I don’t know art. I just know what I like.

I’ve been at this for far longer than I anticipated, so I’ll just sum up by saying that I liked Modern Warfare and MW2. MW2′s active multiplayer community and persistent-character level progression are fairly big draws as well, but I’ve never been terribly big on multiplayer, particularly in FPSes (the only genre I’m worse at in a “live-fire” situation is real-time strategy). I may go back to MW2 and play that on Regular (I had to drop down to Recruit owing to severe rustiness in FPSing; MW1 was played through entirely in Regular), but that’s a ways off. I have a ton more games to get through before that point, so we’ll see what’s next on the list.