Infinity Ward have been teasing us with er teasers over the past couple of weeks, and the now the full trailer is finally here. Modern Warfare 2 a first person shooter videogame, featuring the misadventures of unpleasant terrorists and the Men Of Action who intend to stop them. The footage is heaving with clues as to the kinds of scenes we can expect to see in the game – a street full of fleeing civilians particularly caught my eye, along with that zip-line to helicopter moment towards the end. Go take a look. The game is out on November 10th.
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Whatever the Wifebeater is, it sounds delicious. I think I’ll have one or five of those. It’s gotta be better for me than gin, which turns me into Jack Dempsey, only I don’t remember any of it.
Edit: dang, one place says a Wifebeater is simply Stella Artois, another place says 1.0 OZ. Cola 3.0 OZ. Jack Daniels Directions: Mix with ice and get shitty! Here I was thinking it would be exotic.
Anyway, back to racial stereotyping and its presence in video games (Skurmedel, I’m looking at you): Wow, so video games should be some freaking utopia where terrorists aren’t anti-western fanatics and psychopaths with thick, villainous accents (and also happen to be Yemenis, Chechens, Iranians, or whatever)? Maybe a nice college-educated white woman named Martha from Omaha would more believably portray a suicide bomber? It’s stereotyping to assume that Pakistanis would infiltrate and commit terrorist acts in India, but it’s also true. Oscar Wilde was right on with “only shallow people don’t judge by appearances” (and by God, just to be clear, I am not calling anyone, anyone at all, ’shallow’). Cliche but true. More cliches: I like my art to imitate life. At least in the case of video games, where the immersion factor tends to ebb when Martha from Omaha shows up with her derringer, trying to slay Soap in the name of the Knights of Columbus Women’s Auxilliary.
Wifebeater is simply Stella Artois.
And yeah, Russian-Middle Eastern tensions escalating through fanaticism to explode in the US, UK and Europe’s faces is not far-fetched, is the point.
Neither is the US Army making an arse of itself or grey ops people being shady amoral characters.
Forget not gentlemen that life is a subjective experience and we are all limited to our subjective perceptions of it.
That said, CoD4 rocked my effing socks. It does fall apart at higher difficulties because the gears and guts of the game start to become exposed, but I had a hella awesome time first playing through on HarderThanNormal
I think I played this game when it was called Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield.
@Jim: “SPIE rigging” if you don’t want to type it all out.
Something about their graphics and framerate makes this trailer look really sharp and smooth, I dunno, hard to put my finger on it just from watching a few quick cuts.
Digit Infinity Ward have a 60fps policy for their games when running on consoles unlike most others which race to the bottom of 30-25 fps sludge.
“There’s the inherent dehumanising aspect of mowing down wave after wave of rowdy coloureds, which is inevitable in this genre,”
It actually isn’t but great (forced) cutscenes and staged wave-after-wave fights seem enough for the big shooter crowd who buy the same thing everytime. Pretty appalling stuff if you think about it from a game design point of view since the ‘cinematic’ linearity and endless respawns are incredibly moronic and lazy, it’s about time they started doing something about it after all those years. It gets completely ridiculous when you have other shooters pretending to be “something more” even though they offer the same archaic design flaws (Bioshock and vanilla Half-Life² for example).
I still think the success of CoD4 is mainly due to the fact we haven’t had a decent modern life shooter since SoF2 or BF2. People like the modern military guns stuff in an accessible way. There simply isn’t any decent competition for CoD4 or its sequel. It’s undeniable EA/Dice have missed a chance to cope with the huge CoD success. Bad Company, other Battlefield spinoffs, a battered Medal of Honor franchise… all pathetic attempts, they really just should have focused on one big game that would still sell by its name alone: Battlefield 3.
Personally, I rate games against their counterparts, rather than some vivid ideal I have in my head. If I could make a better game, I would. So instead, I opt for “is this game better than the last few games of the same genre?”, and at the time, COD4 beat a whole bunch of games out of the water. If not for the action-movie-feel, then for the fast-paced storyline. I didn’t think COD4 aspired to be anything beyond intense linear action. Granted, there will always be critics of the popular things, but not everyone’s out to make a game that incorporates the storyline of “Sideways” over “Diehard”
It’s actually called rappelling lol
FEAR’s basic combat beat CoD4 into a fine red mist. I think it’s a good sign when you turn up a game’s difficulty that the game doesn’t turn frustrating and rather makes you work harder to progress. There’s a fine balance there, and very few first person games have really pulled that off. FEAR gives you and the AI enough complex options at any moment in terms of weapons and navigation that if you can’t outgun someone, working your way to a more beneficial vantage point to regain the upper hand is a viable option. COD4 plunks you in a hallway; there are other dudes at the end of the hallway. They are shooting. Sometimes they pause. When they do, you shoot at them. If you time it wrong, you die. Start over.
But this is really whining on my behalf, because FEAR did one thing with small arms combat in tight confines against few powerful enemies, and CoD4 is trying to do large scale combat with big guns against a ton of dudes. It’s about the intensity of a scene, rather than the intensity of individual relationships. Does that make sense?
For my money, FEAR was a better game. It gave me more gameplay and individual experiences. We can all agree that scene X of COD4 was awesome, but i had moments of FEAR where i’d luck the hell out against an ambush of 3 dudes and pull off a series of mad stunt melee/pistol kills that felt so awesome to do i reloaded *to see if i could do that again* rather than just because i died. From what i read, a lot of people did not play FEAR on a high enough difficulty to fully appreciate the pressure that AI put on you, and that’s a stone cold shame.
This “score attack” kind of feeling, where you try again to do better, rather than try again to simply succeed, is my #1 reason to go back to a game. Mere success is not what games should be about.
This is not to say that COD4 *IS* a worse game, since that’s totally subjective. Just that i feel like it only gives out what it sets out to do, and as such i’ve never felt the urge to go back to it. For comparison, i think there’s a reason COD4 is remembered most fondly for its multiplayer, where your opponents aren’t necessarily faceless nobodies who will rush at you or go through predefined motions.
Sunjammer, play Halo 3. You will be pleased.
Anyway guys, scans of the Game Informer article have surfaced. They’re talking co-op play in its own mode, increased destructibility, larger and more branching levels, working around infinite spawns (read the mountaintop assault in the first few pages to see what they’re going for), the use of civilians in showdowns against indiscernible militia men and a lot more.
And still these guys know exactly that they want to make and how to do it. You’ve got to give them credit for at least that, even if you don’t approve of the final product.
Hey its really unfair to link to the scans.
The poor moes that make that magazine need the sales.
But saying that…
The first page of that article coupled with a scene from the trailer = RIP Soap??? N00000OOoooo!
The price of working in a highly competitive trade, Radiant!
But yeah, I’m taking a guess that if that piece of footage indeed shows Soap being riddled with bullets, it’s likely because you didn’t detonate the charges on time or something. Or something else entirely!
I just hope he has a Scottish accent. And that Captain Price hasn’t faded into obscurity.
@Radiant: Remember Metal Gear Solid on Ye Olden Playstation, where whenever Snake died, some handler back in Quantico would say, “Snake? Snake?? SNAAAAAKE!!!?!?!?!?”
I just ran that through my mind with Soap and it sounded a lot better.
Noooooooo!!! SOOOOOOOAPPP!!!!!
COD4 was excellent, I played it around the same time as HL EP2 came out and I loved both for their fantastic pacing and great set pieces. Two of the most fun FPS experiences I have had in recent years. I am quite surprised at the *hate* that some readers seem to have for it.
Okay, so I heard a rumor the some Weapons from the game are going to disapear from Modern warfare 2 that were in COD4. Is this true? i liked cod4s weapons besides the M16. Are there Shotguns????
i like shotguns in cod4 and if their gone then it just wont be that fun?