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2 months ago
Feature: Learn the ropes
The last ten years have brought us many joys. We've already celebrated the best games of the past decade, but with such scattergun nomination comes neglect. Only three of the fifty games we picked had grappling hooks, so clearly the entire endeavour was pointless and you will need an alternative resource. Here's my definitive guide to the swinging tenties. I haven't mentioned Worms, because they…
1 year ago
Michael Condrey, who co-founded Call Of Duty crew Sledgehammer Games after being a big cheese at EA's Visceral Games on games including Dead Space, has now joined 2K as president of a mysterious new studio. Continuing his tour of big American publishers, 2K say Condrey "will build and lead a new development team to work on an unannounced project." It is weird to see 2K…
3 years ago
Feature: "War is a fun hell"
“Those who do not learn from from history, are doomed to make another World War II videogame.” A famous saying, and one we all know well. So when Activision hosted a live presentation for the reveal trailer of their latest shooter, Call of Duty: WWII [official site], I watched and felt nothing but a tired wave of low-burning resentment for everyone involved. During this presentation…
Feature: Call of Duty doing a bad Crysis impression
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. You are Kevin Spacey's surrogate son. Look at those eyes, focused with paternalistic concern. He is placing a hand warmly upon your robot arm, the robot arm he gave you along with robot legs and probably robot other things. It's a shame, really.…
4 years ago
Feature: Get your five-a-day here
This morning I have been documenting a fruit and vegetable market in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. I think I was supposed to be rescuing a president or something but the shiny fruit looked more interesting. I don't mean that as a sick burn or anything. I just got distracted by some nice fruit.
5 years ago
Tweets from developers dumping details are a bit like bubble gum wrapper trivia facts, aren't they? You won't be fascinated and enthralled, you won't learn the deepest secrets of the darkest beings, but you might raise your eyebrows a little, but approvingly, and at the back of your mouth grind out an approving throaty vocalisation like "Mmh!" or "Hhhoh!" or "Hmm!" or "Hrmmm!" Now we've…
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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare [official site] has introduced Master Prestige ranks which are another way to earn elite weapon drops and culminate in a Grand Master Prestige gear set which kind of makes you look like your character has been mistaken for a couch and upholstered.
Activision have started vaguely muttering about this year's Call of Duty, which is the first from Cod Blops folks Treyarch on the series' new three-year development cycle. We knew that was happening, and all Activision had to say in an earnings conference call yesterday is that it'll be "loaded with innovation". Right-o. The FPS is now a decade into annual sequels and quite set on…
Feature: A completely reasonable reaction
Over the holidays I started playing Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare multiplayer. After initially mistaking it for a "shooting people in the back" simulator wherein I had accidentally signed up to play the exciting role of "sole target" I started to pick into it a bit further, upping my KD ratio and experimenting with a bunch of the loadout perks and options. I think an…
Feature: Between The Game Of Life
It's a pleasant fantasy to think that holidays mean long weeks of playing games, but in reality there's trains and planes to be boarded, family to be visited, lives to be unavoidably lived. Gaming during holidays is therefore similar to gaming at any other time, about stealing moments to sneak away to a quiet corner and catch up on backlogs or curl up with comforts.…
More than any Call of Duty in a long time, I fancy a crack at Advanced Warfare. I want to see how those exosuits and zany futuristic weapons shake up what was already a pretty fast for a modern FPS, but I'm not curious enough to splash out - strewth! - £40. Thankfully, the multiplayer side is free to play on Steam this weekend, so…
Feature: Dad Warfare
The Call of Duty games are often best understood not as first-person shooters in the lineage of Half-Life 2 and Halo, but as extensions of light-gun rail shooters. They're games set in strictly scripted corridors, with one button to pop in and out of cover, one to shoot, and another to reload. That you can move your legs around a bit hardly matters, and taken…
It's a good year for videogame trailer one-liners, but who would have guessed at the start of the year that the best of them would be delivered by Kevin Spacey? The poster-boy of this year's Call of Duty installment and for Evil Capitalism actually says the name of the game in the launch trailer. That's bold - and I've never smiled so hard at something so…
Call of Duty games aren't any more stupid than most action games, but there's an adopted seriousness to its bombast that makes me want to prick its balloon at every opportunity. In this latest Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare trailer for example, they throw up the quote "TRANSCENDS THE LINE BETWEEN GAME AND FILM", then a few seconds later cut to Kevin Spacey's uncanny, screaming,…
How do you keep a multiplayer game interesting, or even alive, over years and successive instalments? I hugely admire how Magic: The Gathering has, a few missteps aside, kept revitalising itself with expansions for over twenty years. New card types, abilities, and stories come and go, but the core game is still there and quite splendid. Call of Duty is now almost eleven years old…
6 years ago
Heya, Call of Duty, buddy, how are you doing? Breakups are hard, aren't they? Ex-friends Respawn are off doing their own thing and that big bully Battlefield's still swanning about, making your life difficult. You wanna look cool and hip, so at Gamescom yesterday you showed off your hottest new clothes, spruced up versions of the last-season garbage those losers are wearing. Double-jumps and cloaking,…
All That Power: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Story Trailer
FADE IN INT. SKYSCRAPER - NIGHT JONATHAN IRONS is hanging from a window ledge. We can see shards of broken glass, but the camera pushes in on his face. He looks like Kevin Spacey. Or a sort of facsimile of Kevin Spacey's head, smooshed on to a Vince McMahon wrestling figure. This scene doesn't appear in the new Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare story trailer,…
Ahhh, don't hurt me, okay? Hear me out. Up until now the twenty-three-game Call of Duty franchise has been running its yearly main sequels (which make up 'just' eleven of those) through a two-year development cycle. Releases have alternated between original developers Infinity Ward, who were basically decapitated after the release of Modern Warfare 2, and Treyarch. But this year's offering isn't from either of…
Finally! A new Call of Duty game! What has it been? Five years? Ten years? One whole minute? Never mind the agonizing wait. All that matters now is this perfect moment, this sweet embrace. Activision were planning to take the wraps off Call of Duty: Ominous, Obvious, Or Utterly Meaningless Subtitle (aka, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare) this weekend, but a couple of leaks have prompted them…
