Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2

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Summary: This game sucks, do not buy it. Play the single player campaign if someone gives you the game. The multiplayer totally sucks.

How does a game with a solid franchise, good customer loyalty, and a massive marketing budget crank out a game with horrible on line experiences? Simple, they can. The publishers are probably still riding the whole Pitfall wave they started out with on the Atari, and figure that we would buy this game happily for $60 and be satisfied.

Like all mainstream and first person shooters released to a mass market audience in the last few years, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2 has the single player/multiplayer dichotomy. The gaps between the two in this case however, are staggering.

Single Player Play

The first person production values are awesome. I mean you have the voice talent for the Secret Service Guy for Life dude from 24, the protagonist from the Rome series on HBO, and the voice of the latest military recruiting ad campaigns whose name I cannot remember, but he is a good actor as well as a shill for the military industrial complex. I mean, this is some serious voice talent recruitment. Usually you get one or two known voices, but these guys have three. There are probably some I cannot recognize, but the talent in the voice over is good.

The plot in the single player campaign is excellent. The writers took some chances with one of the missions, and you will know which one I am talking about when you play this game.

The weapons in this game make sense too. And it makes a difference which one you pick unlike in some first person shooters where there is basically just four weapons: the pistol; automatic rifle, sniper rifle, and bazooka. In CODMW2, the selection of the rifle you use can make the game quite difficult or quite enjoyable depending on your selection. Pay attention to the sights on the weapon which are indicated when you position yourself to select it. The authors tempered the ammo supply well too, so you actually need to pay attention to how much you use and not just fire blindly into the action.

Vehicle play in this game is immaterial as there are only a few missions where you get in a vehicle, and half the time you do it, it is to go fast in one direction for a few minutes because you are chasing an objective, or being chased. You are a passenger in the other half of the vehicle trips, and I do not believe you can die while in them, rendering your decisions moot.

The AI in this game is quite advanced too. The enemy is not predictable, and not terribly dumb. I never found myself anticipating a computer bad guy, and their use of weapons is intuitive, just as if someone finally said, “Hey, how about we spend some time writing some subroutines into the AI for this game.”

The plot got confusing at times, but you generally understand that you are saving the world, and I believe there were one or two different protagonists throughout the game so you didn’t play one lone wolf who single handedly saved the entire fucking world with a gun, which was refreshing. Here, two individuals saved the entire fucking world with a gun. But overall, I really enjoyed the single player game, which is unusual. Normally, the single player mode in the games I play are just warm ups for the multiplayer. Which leads me to the next section, which if you are still reading this, will be an exercise in how to keep calm while excoriating a multiplayer game.

Multiplayer Sucks Ass

Big hairy blistered ass. Wow did this suck. How did a game team write and produce such a beautiful single player experience and have next to none of it translate to the multiplayer? How? I mean, I am not a computer programmer and could never even begin to write games, so to the extent that makes my judgment hypocricial, it is. But come on!!

I was at an 80’s dance night at a local establishment last week and the difference between the videos produced back then and those using today’s technology are just as different as the single player and multiplayer experience in CODMW2. Juxtapose the video for “I ran” by the Flock of Seagulls with, oh I don’t actually watch music television anymore, but I cannot imagine that the videos of today suck as much as those produced with 1980’s technology.

The controls for entering the multiplayer game should be an early indicator. You do not actually enter the multiplayer mode from the main game. You have to exit the single player campaign and start up the entirely separate multiplayer mode. I would like to think this is because there were two separate development teams for each mode, and the single player team did not want to be tainted by the multiplayer mode.

The gameplay is not visibly or experientially different from the last CODMW multiplayer, which I thought totally sucked too.

I played the multiplayer in the last version about 4 times. I played this one about 8 times to see if it got better. It didn’t.

First, the maps are incredibly small and not intiuitive. The game play takes place in a world where there are an incredibly high number of corners. It is an urban planning nightmare where there is absolutely no traffic flow, and you cannot climb up to the top of the buildings.

Vehicles are non-existent, which makes sense because the psychopath who designed the environments didn’t allow for roads and you couldn’t drive more than 10 feet on any map. Actually there are vehicles, but you do not get to climb into them, and they seem to be linked to some sort of bizarre reward system. You can shoot these vehicles with your bazookas and they disappear.

Aimbots. Hello, did you ever hear of Punk Buster? Cheating is too easy, and it is quite obvious when you enter into a game and a player is using a hack. The problem is, you get punished for leaving a game so you either get whacked by a kid using a pistol to place three head shots in you with a tight spread at 150 yards while he is running, or you leave and lose points. Argh.

I did not play this game long enough to understand the leveling, but it seemed to make sense, and you have to earn the level ups. Small golf clap for that.

I didn’t even bother to look this up, but I assume this PC version was probably a port from the X Box or whatever gaming system the chronically undereducated and unemployed are playing today, which would explain a lot of the suckness in this multiplayer game, but not all of it. There are a lot of good ported games out there, so that doesn’t explain the suckfest that is CODMW2 multiplayer.

As I write this, Activision is running a paid media campaign to tout its expansion pack for the multiplayer game which is an indicator that a lot of people enjoy this part of MWCOD2, but if you have tastes similar to the Geezers, you will avoid this game unless someone gives it to you for free. Even then, you won’t waste much time on the multiplayer, because you have far better options out there. The single player will entertain you, but only for a short while.

This game sucks. Do not buy it.

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