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I just ran that through my mind with Soap and it sounded a lot better.

Noooooooo!!! SOOOOOOOAPPP!!!!!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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