Modern Warfare 3 is a lot of fun, but it’s not somewher you expect multi-levelled metagaming psychological constructions. It’s more a sort of “run and shoot people in the face kind of feel.” The series hasn’t changed since the first modern warfare servers, probably because they were brilliant, and it won’t change until there’s a new world war. And even then not because a new war would give us a different model of conflict, but because nuclear weapons are the only thing which might be possible enough to stop the series.

Which is why it’s already using them against us

Which makes the meta-game in the latest incarnation so surprising. Modern Warfare 3 upgrades the series with dozens of new items and perks, because that’s all Modern Warfare sequels are for*, but it also features a massive fake-out. A gigantic bluff. Because it’s the only game in the world where most of the weapons are decoys. We’re not talking about that stupid explosive supply crate you can drop on the enemy…

*We’ve heard tell of some kind of “single” player mode, but don’t understand what the point would be.

Hmm, an enemy crate on our side of the map, with no enemy going for it, surrounded by dead bodies. Sure I’ll open that!

…which wastes a killstreak reward on the most obvious trap since the Greeks started turning trees into animals. We’re talking about how every gun except one is a suicidal trap which will get you killed. Here are why the other four types of weapon are more useless than imposing import taxes on an invading army.

Sniper Rifles

We can hear lots of of people whining that snipers are useful already, because we hear them every time we play on a public MW3 server. It doesn’t matter how dominated the map, how far away the bomb is, or how Kill Confirmed was built specifically to stop people from crouching in one corner of the map for fifteen minutes — they will swear blind, and at you, that sniping is critical. And you know they swore blind because they’re usually the worst shots in the entire world.

How to be extremely useful (and stabbed in the back)

If you have more than one dedicated sniper on your team you are effectively outnumbered, and are going to lose.

Light Machine Guns

Light machine guns are a bizarre reverse-killstreak: they act as single-person inverted-UAV, advertising your position to the entire enemy team, and instead of using it after killing a bunch of people a bunch of people kill you after you use it. The problem is the false “balance” between having a hundred rounds, damage, and fire rate. In theory the ability to hose an area means your bullets should be slower and less effective than burst-fire weapons. In practice this means that your bullets are just (vigorously) tapping enemies on the shoulder and giving them plenty of time to turn and burst-fire into your face.

You’d be better off with the throwing knife

It doesn’t matter if you have a good position, a clear field of fire, are covering a vital approach and the enemy stagger in backwards. If they’re above Level 1 they will turn and shoot you dead before your nagging bullets get round to bothering their health too much. And that’s if you’ve gotten into a good position. If you meet someone while moving you’re deader than the Dodos of Landmine Island.

Assault Rifles

Anywhere but an MW3 server assault rifles have serious advantages over sub machine guns. Greater range and greater accuracy add up to “everyone else dies”, but in the universe of Modern Sub Machine Gun Warfare 3 they have less function than an open-top Hummvee. Most of the maps are broken up into areas where the submachine gun dominates (especially since it’ll be indiscriminately raking across your body as you tighten aim between two bursts), and in the few long sightlines the sniper rifle is far more less-useless.

Riot Shield

This one’s the punchline, the item which purposefully takes things too far to make sure even the slowest player understands the rest were a parody. They offer the riot shield as a real weapon, even though it’s more humiliating than running straight at the enemy without firing. At least then they might think it’s just your keyboard that’s broken, not your brain.

Notice how he’s “shooting at me” while I’m “doing nothing and already bleeding”

Grenades destroy you, sidestepping destroys you, and even if you get up to a (presumably comatose) opponent, this is the only weapon where melee doesn’t kill them. It’s clearly intended for teamwork with one player shielding another, but
1) Random players will never teamwork this well
2) There’s nothing two pro players can do with a riot shield and SMG that they can’t do better with two SMGs. In fact, there are very few things an angry god can do that two pro players with SMGs can’t do.

That’s why there’s only one gun: the submachine gun. And the way weapons now level up on MW3 servers means that there’s only really one. Newly unlocked SMGs are just advanced options for customizing the single ur-SMG you’ve got — unlock them all, bring them to maximum, and keep killing anyone dumb enough not to. As long as you remember that Modern Warfare 3 is incredible fun. And anyone using anything else is incredibly funny.

Where in the world is Adrian Shephard? Chell recently escaped into the surface world (and a thousand fan-fictions), Gordon Freeman’s return is more anticipated than Christ’s because gravity guns are more useful than divine grace, and Alyx Vance has now appeared in more internet fanart than the color purple, but Opposing Force’s marine hasn’t been seen since the G-Man stored him away like a half-eaten lunch. Despite a dozen years on the bench, he has a lot to teach these modern shooting whippersnappers. Starring in one of the best expansion packs ever made gives you authority. Even over men whose sole definition is “Has a gun and uses it.”

For a man with no voice, or face, he has a lot to say

Outsource the Expansequels

Valve make fantastic games because they know when not to do so. They handed Half-Life over to Gearbox Software and told them “Make an expansion pack for that.” Why? Because they were busy upgrading official versions of Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike. Oh, and making Half-Life 2. It turns out that when a company can make breakthrough games, they should make breakthrough games instead of sitting around milking past successes like a nostalgic farmer. So they let someone else make the guaranteed expansion while they got on with revolutionizing the genre.

Which took a very, very long time but was worth it

This may be the most important strategy in gaming development, so it’s a pity that other companies pretend it didn’t happen. Companies like Bungie are rewarded for brilliant games like Halo by being forced to make expansequels forever. Inventive geniuses restricted to “new” games which would barely count as DLC for the original. Protip: when your second sequel’s biggest selling point is five new abilities for the exact same game, that’s barely a new level. But it could be worse: with Modern Warfare Infinity Ward made most incredible war shooter in existence, twice, and got fired, sued, and sued again.

Tough Guys Can Shut Up

Alan Shephard continued the Valve trend of utterly silent protagonists, and it’s brilliant. Bespectacled physicist Gordon Freeman was a reaction against the blood-soaked marine stereotype, Chell keeps quiet because GlaDOS and Wheatley are busy being the best voice-work in any game ever, but Shephard is simply a guy with a gun out to kill things. A marine deployed in a fubared situation full of alien horrors? Back then he couldn’t have been more stereotypical of shooters if he was a bullet.

Nowadays he’d need steroids and a dose of gamma radiation to even count as average

Which made his silence golden. Because we would actually pay gold in order to shut some modern “heroes” up. Halo let its characters speak, and in Halo 3 it ended up literally interrupting the game with stupid annoying bursts of dialogue, reminding you that hey, maybe you as the tough man were meant to save the naked woman held hostage by the bad guys. In case that complicated motivation was beyond your understanding. Gears of War’s Dom redefined whining as more painful than being chainsawed in half, because that part of the game happens in multiplayer, is fun, and doesn’t make you wish for the death of spoken communication.

The head:neck ratio of unity really contributes to his emotional range

Shephard doesn’t feel the need to shout Plot Motivation For Dummies at us. He’s alive, he’s in a base which will change that, so he kills his way out. Done! In fact, anyone who doesn’t get that without the characters explaining it probably shouldn’t be allowed even pretend guns.

Love The Original

We really shouldn’t have to explain this one. Gearbox understood, embraced, and enjoyed everything that was good about the original. Even the changes were those of true fans instead of employed hirelings. They removed the Xen sections, because anyone who played the first game would do that, but included a cheeky corridor long section where you teleport to the horrible alien jumpy-world of infinite enemies, thinking “Damn,” then teleport right back to the complex!

Proof that even the best make mistakes, and First Person Jumping doesn’t work

The other change was one of respect to the Half-Life universe: the ill-fated Race X. Gearbox wanted to add new enemies without messing up the Valve continuity, and it turns out there’s a really easy way to do that in a plot about dimensional rifts. The extra enemies teleported in for a single sequel and were utterly defeated by Mr Shephard. So never mind gamers - Gordon Freeman could learn something from this guy. Thirteen years later and he’s still trying to clean up his own mess.

Then again, the Combine weren’t considerate enough to teleport in between twin emplaced machine gun nests

So let’s hear it for the smartest marine in shooter history. The only one smart enough to find himself in a hellish science-base and decide “I should try to get OUT of here.”

Finding new reasons to want to shoot people in the face gets harder every year. In a world where revenge against everything from family-killers to nightmare corporations has become cliche, developers are forced into stupider definitions of “Extreme self-defense” every year. And while single-player story can be stupid, multiplayer plotting is outright madness. Your only character motivation is “I want to kill those guys.” Forcing story on top of that is like forcing a dog into clothes - some people with great dogs think it’s a good idea despite the results being hideous and usually getting in the way, but every once in a while it turns out awesomely.

This dog looks cooler than you ever will

Some games awesomely integrate story into the shooting. By redefining “integration” as “keeping it the hell out of the way” (warning: only works with videogames, this strategy is pretty much the worst thing ever when applied to people)

1. TF2

Trust us, there’s a story here. (For one thing 2Fort is a masterpiece on the futility of war)

Team Fortress 2 is a masterpiece of multiplayer mechanics and features better writing than most movies. And books. The classic “Red vs Blue” mechanic makes racism okay as long as it’s primarily-colored and removes the need for even the most basic story by wiring into our oldest, most horrible instincts instead: those guys are look different to me so I hate them.

Unreal Tournament 3 took that approach to the next level

Which is why we love Valve, because they gave this color conflict more excellent stories than most real cities full of people. The “Meet The” videos are masterpieces of machinima, the comics give the characters more flesh than the average Gear of War (and that’s more flesh than a herd of cattle), and even the blog is brilliantly in character. All of which is only a side-effect of a universe built around the manliest character since Adam.

He’d have whipped thatsnake to death with its own tail!

2. Brink

Brink took a lot of stick for separating story from the single player campaign, but that’s because it realized something much more important about single player campaign: it’s just a tutorial for multiplayer. It uses exactly the same maps as Brink servers, so as soon as you arrive in multiplayer matches you know exactly what you’re doing, instead of being shot in the head repeatedly as you learn the map like the world’s most suicidal explorer. As a bonus, it means you don’t have to stop in the middle of the action for a voice actor to read badly scripted dialog for the thirtieth time.

Can’t talk, killing.

Safely isolated in loading screens and text files (for the sort of person who likes it) is one of the best FPS stories ever written. Starting the game you choose between the forces of law and order or a group of rebels resisting oppression, and for the first time in videogaming history the people who want to smash the system really are terrorist scumbags. At last! It turns out that a group whose strategies consist of shooting people and setting fire to things aren’t very nice , while the police officers really are trying to save humanity’s last remnants.

SPOILERS:
Playing through either plot quickly reveals that the “rebels” are into biological weapons, tower-collapsing terrorism (the most infamous kind of terrorism), and the final What-If? mission reveals that their attempts to ’save’ the Ark with the outside world would lead to its merciless and literal cannibalization by an endless horde of savages. After thousands of games where wining teens connected to a computer system, an electrical system and able to afford both because of an economic system whining about “smashing the system”, we finally find a world where the forces of law and justice aren’t slightly-differently-uniformed Nazis.

END SPOILERS

3. Modern Warfare 2

Modern Warfare 2 did an incredible number of things wrong, like looking at Modern Warfare servers - some of the finest shooting ever committed on silicon - and deciding “Nope, we don’t want any of that.” They screwed over the players, and just to show they weren’t biased they screwed over their developers too - pretty much the only people who benefited from MW2 were lawyers and accountants. And a few rogue writers who snuck in to be brilliant during the madness!

Modern Warfare 2’s story was amazing. It was a gloriously lunatic piece of apocalyptic soap opera masquerading as a serious story, proving that just because you’re using realistic graphics and realistic guns and real countries it doesn’t mean your story has to be in the same universe as reality.

Take this, verisimilitude!

Long dead characters turning up in the literal last place on Earth anyone would look, backstabbing each other with nuclear warheads, triple-crossers jumping out of helicopters - it was like someone crossed the set of Home and Away with a military supply base. It was wonderfully, joyously insane and a high-detail rendering of a middle finger to the current plague of ultra-grittiness, while pretending to be exactly that.

PC pistols don’t stand for Politically Correct whining weapons, assuring their targets that they would have projected fair-trade chunks of lead through them no matter what race they were (despite the fact they’re now all Russian.) While console games like Halo need aim-assisted assault rifles to even glance a moving enemy, the pistol has been the workhorse of the mouse-marksman since the first nazi was shot in the face.

The last Nazi was also shot in the face. Several hundred times!

We pay tribute to the best of those handguns which have saved our pretend lives thousands of times, by ending millions of others.

5. Glock 17 (Half Life, Half Life 2)

The Half-Life series has unusual casting for a first-person shooter. Its first person is a silent scientist instead of a linebacker who thinks he’s a stand-up comic, and its most famous weapons don’t actually shoot. The gravity gun can throw everything except bullets, while the original’s crowbar remains a symbol of PC gaming. And a reminder of the horror we felt in 1998 when an army of Doom players booted up Half Life and realized “My god, they’re really making me start this game without a gun!”

Which is why the Glock is such a relief.

Oh god yes, a weapon which doesn’t require me to be right next to them, WHICH WAS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT I WANTED TO BE

There’s a rush of genuinely psychotic pleasure when you pick up the gun, and the distinctive clickety-click-clack equipment sound is probably Gordon buckling it to his wrist with five separate straps so he’ll never be without a gun again. It’s ridiculously useful due to having far more range than the enemies (despite the alien’s entire deal being “Able to hit you from another dimension”) and because it uses the machine gun’s ammo it’ll never run it.

4. Dual Pistols (Strangehold)

The only cyborg item on this list, because twinned pistols are a more essential part of Chow Yun Fat than his hands (and he uses them more often.) The criminally underappreciated Strangehold wrote action-movie logic into the game engine and the pistols’ mechanics, because they don’t need to be reloaded unless it looks cool.

If he has a hundred bullets left, they’re fed down his arms and straight into the guns because reloading would mean not shooting. He only reloads when you trigger the “Barrage” special move which makes them even faster and more powerful. This is a game where the main character not shooting for a second means you’re really dead.

This game loves guns so much a one-on-one standoff becomes a pistol threesome

3. USP (Call of Duty 4)

The pistol mechanic in Modern Warfare was so vital (as in “to do with staying alive”) that they included it in the tutorial. The game’s realism extended to reload times, with some guns so slow it would be quicker to build a new weapon around a fresh ammo pack. Which, in the case of the RPD, seems to be what you’re doing.

Stop the war, I’ll be ready in a minute!

This is the first game where the weapon switch is more than reload. It needs to be right next to grenades under your thumb, and if it isn’t, buy a mouse with more buttons. Spinning the scroll-wheel on a CoD serverwhen your gun’s empty is like defending yourself from a tiger by knitting a distraction. It also gives that wonderfully psychopathic feel of emptying your gun at someone, then switching weapons, then emptying that one too.

The USP wins over the Desert Eagle because it’s still pointing at the same hemisphere after five shots.

2. Lugermorph (TF2)

Team Fortress 2’s pistol is one of the most satisfying weapons, despite technically being the only 3rd-rank firearm in the game (it’s the Engy’s secondary weapon, and his primary is other people’s secondary.) It isn’t fun because of its damage, or craziness, or murderous efficiency, but because whenever you’re using it you really, really want that guy dead. Either a Scout finishing off a scattergunned enemy, or picking of a sentry gun, or an Engy chasing down that expletive-hatefulword-ed Spy who’s trying to get away: no weapon has been so charged with psychic hatred outside of Dungeons and Dragons.

And the Lugermorph makes it even cooler.

A cute little thing held by an angry little thing

TF2 with Sam & Max is a more impossible combination of awesome than ice cream and napalm, and even more lethal. If you’d told someone you could win an electronic gun from a comic character twenty years ago, you’d have been locked up. And awesomely right!

1. Deagle (Counter-Strike)

A fan-made buffet of death

The deagle is the most lethal thing up to and including old-age, which can only kill something once. The Desert Eagle is one of the most powerful guns even in the real world, and that fact is one of the few nasty realities about guns that makes it into videogames. While the Modern Warfare version recoils like an 18th century cannon which just saw goatse, the CS version could drop Superman.

Bulletstorm is out tomorrow and we’re welcoming it like Mubarak would a return to the Pharoah system: a crazy, unbalanced and classic solution to an increasingly violent set of problems. It’s being released after a bigger blaze of publicity than Hindenburg Airlines, but it won’t matter if the game disc is a pink DVD of kitten movies. It’s already summarized modern shooters better than the sentence “Shoot people in the face in a sequel,” and if we’re not careful, it’ll be worse for first person shooting than a ban on imaginary bullets. Here’s how it represents the future of fake firearms (and how it’s a future which will send naked, violent men back in time to prevent itself.)

A Warning From The Future. And Hairstylists.

Anti-Videogame Insanity

If you thought anti-videogame scare stories would fade away now that even senior citizens care about high scores (thanks Nintendo!), then thinking was your mistake. You’ll never understand the media by doing something like that! Instead of accepting that maybe the existence of the human race proves how children don’t do things which end civilization, or admitting that a total lack of evidence might be a reason not to say something, FOX instead learned a lesson from their videogame enemies: if your real life is boring, make something up instead!

FOX’s new head of creative scaremongering/”opinion”

Carol Lieberman broke that last, lonely link with reason when she directly blamed videogames for an increase in rapes, despite rapes

1. not happening in the videogames she’s talking about
2. not increasing in the real world either.

The hordes of sexual aggressors exist only in her head, which technically makes her the most dangerous person involved in the discussion. The Lord of the Rings is a better news story, because sometimes people really do kill each other for jewelry. She held forth on the hundreds of studies backing her up but when asked to mention even one claimed she couldn’t remember any. Other psychologists, who base their statements on facts and will therefore never be famous, don’t either. Because they don’t exist.

It’s proof that videogame scare stories are going senile. A functioning brain stops shouting when every single person and fact is against them. Now that they’ve gotten away with utterly making things up, we can look forward to ever-increasing allegations – and we should be scared, if only because they’ll have to invent brand new and more horrible crimes to beat the “rape” card they’ve already played. Our only consolation will be how we’ve already won. Because old people have consoles now too – the Wii is the most popular technology with senior citizens, because it’s much more fun than the dialysis machine – so what used to be “These devilboxes are satanic, just like every other new thing any generation has ever done!” is now “No no, our console is great, but all the other consoles are terrible.” Which means they’re already videogamers. And we’ve won.

Shooting Things Monopoly

Shooting things Monopoly isn’t an attempt to fix the worst game in the world, or the natural result of having a family activity based on relentless sadism and the right bear arms in the same country. It’s the death of imagination. We’re looking forward to BulletStorm because it’s a chunky, fun shooter made the guys behind Unreal Tournament (which is more chunky fun than a LEGO set). It’s such a relief from the endless series of Call of Duty games, but it would be more so if they weren’t actively counting on that.

The viral “Duty Calls” game mocked everything wrong with the CoD games while admitting that they’ve utterly won. Make no mistake: Modern Warfare is one of the best shooters ever made. It should be bought (we did) and played (we still do), but it’s “Have fun” good. It’s not “reshape the entire industry around it like a Sumo Wrestler in your bouncy castle” good, which is exactly what it’s done – become a huge immovable problem which stops anyone smaller getting into the arena.

When the only shooter options are “That Game” and “We’re Not That Game”, That Game has won. It’s not just crippling shooter imagination, it’s reaching out and destroying the hopes of other genres new – EA recently cancelled all work on Mirror’s Edge 2 (though then countered that reveal with a powerful “We’re actually not saying anything either way” statement) to focus on Battlefield 3. Because what players really, desperately need now is another squad-based war shooter.

Activision’s sequilitis so brutal even Jason Voorhees would think it was a bit much. Call of Duty is always fairly fun, and Modern Warfare servers remain home to some of the sharpest shooting online, but the yearly sequels have become more predictable and considerably less original than birthday parties.

Consoles As King

First off, every article claiming that the PC is dying has been written by an idiot who cares more about hits than making sense. You couldn’t kill the PC with EMP warheads, and as long as Valve continue to create the best games ever we’ve nothing to worry about. But while we haven’t been mortally injured, we have been badly annoyed by consoles.

Because they make a lot more money, consoles are the target market for most of the big-name titles. Which means that they’re programmed to be played with a joypad instead of a mouse, which is like training someone to perform surgery with a spiked baseball bat instead of a scalpel, and switching from one to the other is a painful and frequently fatal process. You can’t just install mouse drivers over the thumbstick software. The game has been programmed to account for a central dead zone, wild swings, and characters who grindingly rotate their arms like tank barrels. It changes the dynamic of the entire game – and when youre entire concept is “Kill With Skill” (as opposed to the Halo-style “Kill by grinding their shields down over time so as not to draw attention to how joypads are terrible at accuracy”) it’s a bit worrying.

Especially when the makers insult your intelligence. Epic assured us that the PC version would be perfect, truly engineered for the magic mouse, but there was no demo for the PC when the XBox got one. Meaning “We have the game pretty much finished and are ready to show it off, but we haven’t programmed the PC controls yet.” Which means they’re going to be welding mouse controls in over joypad programming, and sticking to wildly unrelated things together for combat purposes only works if you’re Chuck Greene.

But then it works better than everything ever!

Past adaptations like this ended up with worse Axis control than the 1940’s Reichstag, with a similar-level of killing-people-atrocity in result.

We’re Going to Play It Anyway

Despite being a worse indicator of your future than bear’s stomach rumbling inside your caravan, we’re going to buy this on Day 1 and play it until Day Power Cut. It’s Epic cutting loose and their “serious” game was an interplanetary reality television tournament starring men and women the approximate size, texture and attitude of a mass extinction asteroid. A UT server’s idea of secondary fire was fitting a rocket launcher with a Triple Spiraling Rocket Death, to this day the main reason we need a Nobel Prize for Explosives.

That’ll do, explosive multi-death machine, that’ll do

Any game where you can shoot someone, pull them, wrap grenade-bolas around their throat, kick them and turn them into a firework, twice, has got to be fun. They had us at “grenade-bolas”, a return to the sheer spectacle fun we’ve been missing. Gaming’s attempts to go Hollywood range from Halo’s horrifically intrusive Cortana whining in Halo 3, through the ridiculously expendable Noble squad of Reach, to Mason whining about numbers like an insecure accountant (and slightly less thrilling to listen to.)

The second is how it’s a spiritual sequel to a game we’d given up on ever seeing again. We’re going back to The Club! The score attack and spirit of “More points for killing people in stupid ways” couldn’t be clearer – the only difference is that instead of racing through a killing spree in a building, we’re doing it in a building that’s collapsed, still falling over, and equal parts on fire and full of mutants.

We can’t wait. We just hope the most “creative” shooter this year isn’t a brown-and-grey unofficial sequel starring the Gears of War crew without their shoulderpads.

Grenades! The exclamation mark is part of the proper spelling, because no noun has ever deserved one as much. This single usually-shouted word contains more warnings about the fragility of life, the urgent need for immediate action, pure excitement and sheer explosive force than ten self-help books and a thousand philosophy courses. It’s also much more useful, whether you’re faced with zombies or just trying not to waste your damn time in general. They’ve been essential part of blowing things up for centuries. Ever since man first thought “I really want to kill all those guys but they know that and won’t let me come over.”

They lead to far more arguments online than in the real world, because a real grenade’s entire function is to render the target incapable of discussion. We’ve looked over some of the most popular first person shooters to see how they deal with this most urgent of action-items.

Halo

Halo revolutionized first person shooting with three things. The first was the beautiful Warthog.

The first time suspension was sexier than suspenders.

The second was making grenades effective, which sounds like making steak delicious but had been screwed up by every other game in history. Even the incredible GoldenEye (which you can now replay on Half–Life servers!) included grenades as one of the regular weapons. Which was the problem. It meant you had to cycle through the weapons to get them and a situation where you have time to idly flick through your armory is the exact opposite of the time you need a grenade. Halo servers attached grenades two an always–on button, and – along with the regenerative shield – revolutionized console shooting combat forever.

Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4 embraced grenades like a noble soldier in a crowded trench, and did far better out of the deal. It certainly lasted longer. Modern Warfare’s emphasis on realism unfortunately includes how grenades are utterly, utterly lethal. Every CoD expert has inbuilt reactions because of them – if you want to kill a Modern Warfare player, just sneak up behind them on the sidewalk and make that “tinkling” noise. They’ll automatically sprint into traffic.

Counter–Strike

The most contentious because Counter–Strike servers are the most popular, the most competitive, and more unlikely to change than Commandments carved in solid diamond and frozen in Carbonite.

Camper

The problem is that CS uses status–changing grenades, the annoying smoke and the appallingly annoying flashbang. It may be a real tool used against terrorists but that’s because we hate terrorists and don’t want them to have fun. Blindness breaks one of the fundamental rules of fun game design: removing control from the player and/or scrambling their input so their ability makes no difference.

Not fun, especially when you know there’s someone trying to shoot you in the head.

Team Fortress Classic

The genesis of truly classic class–based combat. The makers of Team Fortress Classic knew that variety was the spice of life. Unfortunately they didn’t know that “making up a bunch of different things” is to “game design” as “blowing up a quarry” is to “constructing a building.” Team Fortress Classic servers are fun, but about as balanced as Muhammad Ali versus Tom Thumb on a seesaw.

Worse interpersonal relationships than a Tila Tequila show

The grenades are a greater collection of flaws and cliches than American Idol auditions. The concussion and plague grenades annoy the target more than outright death, which at least doesn’t scramble their controls, while the worst offender is the Engineer’s EMP grenade. The damage done is proportional to the metal carried by the target, which sounds cool and involved the very first time you see it. The second time you realise “Doesn’t that mean Engies could one–hit kill Heavies at long range from any direction? And isn’t that more broken than Atlantis’s levees?”

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 is the greatest upgrade in history. They took all the potential of TFC and made it actually happen, and the most important part was taking out all the unbalanced grenades…

… and turning them into part of the Dustbowl ecosystem.

A psychocycloptic part

The Demoman means all the great grenade tactics still work – indirect fire, anticipating enemy paths, targeting groups – without breaking the balance because the Demoman has a longer reload time and less close–range combat skill than a pregnant woman. Which doesn’t stop idiots who think “Charge forward screaming” is an acceptable tactic from complaining that he’s too powerful.

Left 4 Dead

You could discover a call–center full of Neo Nazis and it still wouldn’t be a more perfect place for grenades than a Left 4 Dead server. Most of the thrown weapons on L4D servers aren’t regular grenades, with the bile jar and the brilliantly Tankicidal molotov, but sometimes nothing but a beeping cylinder of explosive pipe–bomb death will do.

Explosive ex-zombie excellence

It’s also the most perfect world for these grenade-a-likes: huge hordes of enemies swarming without tactics, you need to blow a hole and advance instead of killing everything, and in a reversal of the real world your enemies are attracted to the noise explosives make.

Call of Duty’s exciting story has backstabbing, betrayals, takeovers, breakaway factions, a determination to succeed no matter what the cost - and that’s just the developers. The series has earned over three billion dollars in seven years, which is more money-for-killing than every hitman in the world. And some of the smaller armies. Lets look over the highs and lows of one the best-selling series in the history of shooting other countries in the face.

We’ll start with a Metacritic roundup of all the games.

You may notice a slight up-down trend. Let’s look closer.

Call of Duty (2003) 91%

For younger gamers: that thing in the lower right is called a “health bar”, and we hated it.

The original and not-best, because that’s the way series should be: starting with a good idea and then getting better instead of running it into the ground. Built on the Quake III engine, the first Call of Duty was a huge success, and you’ll still find people playing CoD servers despite seven games and nine years between then and now. It won Infinity Ward multiple Game of the Year awards, and set the course of the company for the rest of the decade.

Call of Duty: United Offensive (2004) 87%

Now we have textures as well as polygons!

If the popularity of Call of Duty defined Infinity Ward’s approach to making great games, United Offensive defined Activision’s determination to milk it- even if that meant getting someone else to make a less-great game. United Offensive servers are certainly fun, an assortment of extra levels for enemies, multiple, for the shooting of, but by bringing in other companies (Gray Matter Interaction and Pi Studios) Activision proved early on that they cared nothing for IW’s ownership of the series. The reduced score showed the effects, but the continued sales meant Activision didn’t care.

Call of Duty 2 (2005) 86%

A brave soldier, a rifle, and no health bar! Regenerative health will win this war!

Back with Infinity Ward for a true sequel, but Call of Duty 2 was the first to show signs of a major new factor in PC game design: the fact that it was really XBox game design.  CoD2 was a spectacularly successful Xbox launch title, and this early on the console-cannibalization of the series the PC version didn’t suffer. The review scores did, dropping by 5% from the first game, but that’s probably due to World War II fatigue - by now videogamers had spent far longer in that conflict than everyone who actually fought it put together, and as a setting it was becoming played out. A lesson Infinity Ward would learn, but Activision wouldn’t.

Call of Duty 3 (2006) 0%

So how are we meant to aim these things with a thumbstick, sarge?

Treyarch’s first main entry in the series, and one which showed their complete and total contempt for PC gamers. Call of Duty 3 was released for every games console in the world except the PC (that silly machine where the series began, the one with the “mouse” - you know, the best controller for shooting games.) This gives it an effective PC metacritic score of sweet Frag All. Treyarch made the game based on their experience, and that experience was making “Call of Duty 2: Big Red One” for the consoles. AKA “Copying Infinity Ward’s stuff for money because Activision told us to.” Call of Duty 3 showed the same level of innovation, in the same way the Sahara shows the same sea level as the Gobi desert, keeping the series stuck firmly in the mud of the war.

These extras were brought in because Infinity Ward had all these crazy awkward ideas like “You can’t make anything more than a level pack in a year” and “We’d like to release appreciably better games, not the same game for more money.”

Modern Warfare (2007) 94%

What it felt like to be a rival shooter at the time

Back with the real developers and the real series: great success! Call of Duty 4 invigorated the series like three lightning bolts turbocharging an espresso machine, giving the series a fresh setting, an engrossing story, and creating a multiplayer mode that’s as near as possible to an MMOFPS. Modern Warfare servers are still busy, always, and the ModWar mode allows private servers to customize their playstyle.

The closest anyone could come to insulting the game was the idiotic XBox World 360 complaining that it didn’t revolutionize the genre. Which was like complaining that the fountain of youth serves crappy drinks because you still have to drink with your mouth.

World At War (2008) 83%

When a game’s addition is “TANKS!”, that game is good

Let’s be clear: World at War servers are some of the best World War II shooting you’ll find - there are weapons from all the major factions, you get to level up your skills and perks (Treyarch copying from IW’s work example number five hundred), and it’s a lot of fun. But we’re still back in the bloody war, again, despite Infinity Ward demonstrating that everyone loved not being there. One of the few aspects of warfare players share with actual veterans. Treyarch are great programmers, but they’re about as imaginative as vanilla-flavored ice-cream knock-knocking on a chicken crossing the road. The aggregate score fell over ten percent, proving IW right in getting out of the World War business.

Modern Warfare 2 (2009) 85%

The clue is in the title - instead of another innovative upgrade to the series, IW pumped out a sequel to the previous game. One so obvious (and so demanded) that they didn’t even bother with a new name, just sticking a 2 on the end of the title. Which is as close as the authors of a series can come to being sarcastic since they’ve basically called their own game “Call of Duty 4, 2.” They couldn’t be admitting it was any more unoriginal if they found it in Treyarch’s photocopier.

This is where the real problems set in, with Activision basically firing Infinity Ward after making one of the best-selling games in either company’s history so that they wouldn’t have to share the money. For more information on that, please refer to any gaming website ever. For more evidence of the growing problems with the series, note how Modern Warfare 2 doesn’t allow private servers. Which is basically the company saying “Don’t get any ideas about playing this for long - we’ll have another game next year.”

Black Ops (2010) 82%

We’re back with Treyarch, back with dropping scores, and back with treating PC players like foul-smelling hobos. This game featured the the amazing piss-take that was restricted private servers: the ludicrous idea that while you could rent “private” servers, you could only rent them from the one company allowed by Activision. Which proves that as well as photocopies of every scribble the good IW employees made while they were in the building, Activision also have a a radically different dictionary from the rest of the English-speaking world. This company then gives more of your money to Activision, pumping up the price for less than no extra service, and keeping strict controls on what you were allowed to do on “Your” server. It did at least feature Treyarch finally moving on to a new setting, albeit only after Infinity Ward did it. So, standard Treyarch, then.

As if to counter this daring departure from the norm, they kept to their main norm twice as hard. The norm of “releasing a giant paycheck, sorry, ‘game’, every year no matter what the cost.” The cost in this case was game-breaking multiplayer lag on the PC (call us finicky, but if we were going to restrict our entire game to one set of servers we’d at least make sure those servers worked), broken graphics on some PS3-TV combinations, and generally a sense that if the release date had arrived any earlier they’d have sold the game boxes for $60 with an “IOU one game” note inside. The game has been brutalized on user-review sites like amazon, despite scoring 82% on metacritic. But it’s not like a series now built on immense hype and gigantic advertising budgets would ever do anything to affect official reviewers.

Summary

Short form: Call of Duty games good, Infinity Ward ones great, and the best bit is how games stay good as long as people want to play them. From the die-hards on original Call of Duty servers to the series’ apex of Modern Warfare, it’s all still online for you to jump in and play. While we all wait to see what Infinity Ward are legally allowed to make next, and whether the next CoD will even be playable.

Making a gun game sequel should be simplicity itself: if shooting something works, shooting it twice should be even better - double-tapping is something you actually do with real guns, after all.  But just like lots of (in fact, almost ALL) other things you do with guns, they’re a lot less fun in real life.   While they should be the best thing ever - instead of aching in the uncertainty of an experimental project, the development team know people love their game - the problem is that franchises attract marketing like fruit attracts flies.

Bioshock wasn’t just brilliant: any game which allows you to read Atlas Shrugged by shooting killer genetic bees at people could revolutionize the educational system.  But while the first was a nightmarish journey through a sinking Art Deco dream, the second felt like you’d forgotten your keys: an annoying return which should never have happened.

Modern Warfare 2 was the worst kind of sequel, retreading the same ground only to extract extra money and abuse the popularity of the previous game, not as a basis for improvement, but as bait to ram through horrifically bad features.  The loss of dedicated servers crippled the gaming experience, while the focus on Xboxers instead of proper PC controls damaged even regular gameplay.

How To Do It

Last year Microsoft made exciting noises about the ultimate PC vs Xbox battle.  This sounded great, and not just because it would give the idiotic Live For Windows platform a reason to exist (”So I have to run another layer of Microsoft over my Microsoft operating system so that my system can operate this Microsoft game?“)  The software had more layers a stack of metaphysical pancakes, but the chance to play Xbox-owning friends would have made it worthwhile.  But then the whole project was quietly killed.

Because the PC players loudly murdered the console gamers.

This is actually the first time anyone’s played conkers since videogames were invented

The Xbox has an excellent controller for arcade games, a good controller for third person movement, a decent controller for racing, a terrible controller for fighting games and a downright atrocious skill-amputator for First Person Shooters.  Everyone knows this, especially the programmers, which is why so many Xbox games come with lock-on.  Shooting with a thumbstick is like performing heart surgery on a unicycle - you can certainly learn to get good at this ridiculous skill, if you don’t mind a lot of deaths, but there’s absolutely no advantage.

Even mediocre PC players were able to crush the console masters, in the same way a decent college team could destroy the Saints if you amputated the experts’ hands.  Sure, some of the more spectacularly sporty Saints could learn to catch the ball between their stumps or maybe hold it in their mouth, but you just can’t compete with someone who’s able to spin 180 instantly instead of over the course of three seconds.

An Xbox player turns like a tired tank and all their games have changed to account for that: the average Gear of War can absorb more incoming fire than an artillery testing range to give him time to at least see his attacker.  Even expert players - pouncing from cover and flanking like pros - turn into a spastic shotgun-flailing competition when enemies get within three meters of each other.  The thumbstick does its best to compensate (allowing adjustable sensitivity and scaling the response as you bend the stick) but it’s like programming a supercomputer to translate dog barks back into English so they can work customer service - no matter how much you tweak the software, it won’t work because that’s not what it does.

There are mountain ranges which can take less damage.  And act better.  And honestly?   Better looking.

A mouse doesn’t turn like a construction crane - you can instantly aim at any point on the screen, enabling far faster responses, actual accuracy (a concept rendered almost unnecessary by Halo’s shields and Battle Rifles), and murderously fast games like Counter Strike and the original Modern Warfare.

Unfortunately, the Xbox is winning.  You can see the coding for consoles creeping through into cross-platform releases.  Horrifically underrated score-attack gun-racer The Club features mouse response more sensitive than a screaming Jerry Springer guest with covered in salt instead of skin, and an “instant turn” button.  That’s not for cool kills: it’s because turning with a thumbstick doesn’t just give enemies time to shoot you in the spine, but to romance it into running away with them.  And Mass Effect 2, where you have to turn the mouse response down to “novocaine” levels to stop spinning like a tazmanian devil on a gyroscope.

Despite its own controls this game was a ludicrous amount of fun

That these adaptations are inflicted on mouse-users is horrifying.  It’s like carving the wings off a Golden Eagle to better fit a kit to its back.

Even our ancient records remember this problem.  In the mists of time, Doom and Quake masters remember the ancient idiots of the “keyboard players,” lumbering targets doomed providing free points to anyone who bothered to fire at them.

So PC vs Xbox isn’t going to happen again - this embarrassing experiment in annihilation escaped into the wild only once.  Luckily it was Shadowrun, so no-one played it.

Let us never speak of this again.

There are two types of gamers in the world: those who know Valve are the best, and those who haven’t played Portal (also known as “fools”). Obviously we’re enjoying Team Fortress 2, excited about the upgraded Counter-Strike, and looking forward to Episode 3 (and its inevitable inclusion of a Portal gun), but which other games should be given to Valve?

5. Final Fantasy

Square Enix have defined what it means to be a JRPG, selling almost a hundred million units, but that definition is seriously skewed. They’ve perfected the apparently important fields of androgyny, pointless minigames, and playing dress-up with electronic Barbies, but they’re worse writers than Stephanie Meyer after headbutting Dan Brown. Which is odd, because:

- If you want us to Play a Role in a Game, ideally you would make the characters engaging/not retarded

- Every Final Fantasy game contains more text than a special edition of War and Peace with an insurance warranty.

The only place a row of dots have in videogaming is Pac-Man’s maze.

Just imagine: a Final Fantasy game where the text was entertaining and relevant, where the cut-scenes were as good as “Meet The Spy“, and where equipping a hat could actually made your character better at things!

+2 to resist fire, -1 to mmhhmm-hmm

4. Starcraft: Ghost

If you haven’t heard of Ghost, you aren’t Korean or someone who really cares about FPSes.

Claiming to like cool games but not knowing about this armor is a blatant contradiction.

It was to be a third-person shooter set in the StarCraft universe, which has absorbed more man-hours and energy than most of the real actual universe. It’s also more delayed than “Christ 2: The Return.” First announced in 2002, it’s been through around more development companies and release dates than most videogame journalists, and is currently listed as “cancelled” by anyone even pretending to pay attention to reality.

So give it to Valve! They’re rather good at this whole shooter thing, they’re great at giving female characters actual character instead of skintight lycra, and with them the eight-year delay will look normal!

Ghost is currently suffering a fate worse than death: a book-of-the-not-even-game

3. Kid Icarus

We don’t care who makes it now as long as somebody does.  And since Nintendo seem to be really really busy with, er, both of the other massively popular franchises they still actually develop, why not let Valve have a crack?

Give him a double-jump, tell him to kill vegetables and we’re golden.

2. Modern Warfare

Did you know that Valve release multi-million selling award-winning games, and then

- People can actually play those games online, and it works?

- Valve don’t publicly cheat and fire people responsible for making the games?

- The rest of their staff don’t then jump ship like freed slaves?

- Valve’s games only feature the standard number of online cheating scumbags, not a scumbag wrath as unto Moses unleashing an electronic plague of hackers on some kind of online gaming Pharaoh?

- They release new levels for free, instead of charging $15 for levels (including levels you already paid for in previous games)?

Because Activision don’t! And they (used to employ the people who) make amazing games like Modern Warfare!

1. Every EA Sports Game