I present a completely arbitrary, subjective, and biased opinion of the game I enjoyed the most in the year of twenty and eleven. I do this because every gamer does this and I’m a sucker for fitting in and fostering a detached sense of belonging.
[Lost content, image. Alt-text “Duty Calls”]
For me, the Call of Duty franchise has been both bane and boon. In my year at Vancouver Film School I heartily railed against its success, as futile an exercise as any, puzzled by the amount of money that gamers were spending to shoot the crap out of each other.
Stupid, really. The answer is that it’s tremendous fun, and the team(s) that have toiled on this franchise over the years have done an exemplary job of crafting as visceral a man-shoot as you could want.
Certainly, certainly! DICE has pushed the technical envelope further with their penultimate team-based shooter Battlefield 3. You’ll never get me to argue against the digital glory that experience provides, both visually and sonically. However, the damn thing won’t run properly on my machine, whereas Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 boots in a handful of seconds and without complaint.
The graphics of MW3 might be a little dated, if you care about such things. What I care about is getting heads under crosshairs and watching bodies hit the ground when I squeeze the trigger. That’s the core loop for me, and MW3 has that locked down to a science.
Unlike the majority of folks that outright dislike and criticize the franchise, I was capable of following the plot of the series. While the ultimate conclusion left a little to be desired, it had to end somewhere and as far as endings to video games go it was utilitarian. But it did end the narrative, and that’s worth noting.
As a somewhat intelligent middle-aged guy, I enjoyed Modern Warfare’s story for two main reasons. First, at every turn it provided reason for the violence. Not everyone requires rationale to deal death in video games, and to be honest I don’t usually go looking for excuses either, but when a game is presenting reasons, and trying to inform the player of the world beyond the scope and bang-bang of the core game loop, I think that it’s important that those reasons make sense.
Second, despite carrying the stigma of being a formulaic, uninnovative, yearly cash-grab, Modern Warfare has always taken chances with its single-player campaign narrative. From the protagonist switching and killing, to the plays on time (done exceptionally well in the mission that uses post-modern devices to show the player the future and then take them back 20 minutes), to the morality juggling mission decisions. Yes, it’s heavily scripted, and yes you are led by the nose for much of the story, but the scripting is some of the best ever produced for a video game, and the action is consistently intense and engaging.
So, yeah. I liked Modern Warfare, and I liked the third iteration the best. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the people who have taken up opposition against it without even trying it would enjoy it as well, if only they could get over themselves long enough to pull the trigger.
#KEEPCALM. (This linked to a wallpaper I’d made that riffed on “Keep Calm and Carry On”, only instead of a crown it was the Dark Acre tractor, and it read “Keep Calm and Game On”. I was rather proud of that, though it was derivative, and I’m miffed it’s vanished from the Internet. —Ed.)
2012.01.01 – 2012.01.31