de_dust and de_dust2.  Without question the most popular maps of all time, of all kind, anywhere.  Fewer people know their own homes as intimately as many do these middle-east-istan villages.  Oh, sure, they know how to get to the bathroom from the kitchen - but do they know all the blind corners?  Do they know how long it takes to run from one to the other, in microseconds, and the optimum point to toss a flashbang on the way?


Over one hundred and fifty thousand players log onto Counter Strike servers every day, and most of them are playing something dusty.  Five percent of ALL gamers at any given time are rushing A or defending the middle section.  For many, if you aren’t playing dust you aren’t playing Counter-Strike, viewing other locations like cs_italy and de_nuke the same way you’d view someone putting ketchup in their coffee.

De_Dust2 on a COD4 Server?

But the opposite is no longer true: playing de_dust2 doesn’t mean you must be playing Counter-Strike.  Dedicated modders have come up with a dust map for Call of Duty 4 servers, and it’s a work to bring joy to the heart of the most jaded gamer.  You might know those archways like the back of your hand, but you’ve never seen that hand in such gloriously high resolution and with such modern graphical effects.

Of course, logging on to a Modern Warfare server running mp_dust2_classic is a completely different game.  It’s like meeting an old friend who’s changed since you last met, possibly by exchanging brains with an adrenaline junkie mercenary.  While it is possible to run dust-new-and-improved in Search and Destroy, effectively recreating the old days, you’re bound to come across it in Team Deathmatch.  Or, heaven help you, free-for-all.  And it’s brilliantly, utterly, incredibly insane.

The keys to CS strategy are simultaneous spawning and one-life per round.  Both teams start together, fan out, there’s some second-guessing and reaction regarding where the terrorists are going, then there’s the clash and mop up.  Add people constantly reappearing all around the place and the almost utter lack of cover across most of the map becomes a big deal.

The underpass (aka the counter-terrorist spawn) goes from being “highly dodgy” to “instant death”.  In a round with multiple martyrs and frag grenades flung left right and center, that low down pit is death in architectural form.  Even if you survive explosive destruction, as you come through there’ll be someone outside with better elevation.  And a gun.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. For about seven seconds until respawn.

You know your customized sniper class?  Well you can forget it.  While the all-dominating AWP might straddle the lands of dust like an eagle-eyed god, there simply aren’t any places for a CoD sniper to perch without being murdered.  The only remotely reasonable place is the blind-alley ramp facing Bomb Site A, but while there’s a little bit of grass along that no-mans-land of a wide alley now you’ll still stick out like the Elephant Man’s sore thumb.

It’s completely different, and after almost a decade that’s no bad thing.  It’s fun, which is kind of the point.  And it’s very nice to play a version of dust where an overpowered pistol isn’t king.

Shipment, aka “The lunatic flesh blender in green and gray.” It looks like this:




though you’ll more often see it as this:




The worst map since a sheet of blank white paper with the word “Antarctica” written in crayon. How this abomination has stayed on CoD4 servers is a mystery, but likely connected to people who somehow feel good about skill-free high scores. For those unfamiliar the Small Square of Screwup, we’ve made the following helpful guide.

Shipment is to Call of Duty 4 as a bar-room brawl is to ice hockey - it may use some of the skills involved, but they’re all the bad ones and it’s nothing but pain for everyone involved. It’s as if after years of crafting one of of the best FPS games ever made, it was “opposite day” at Infinity Ward and they made a map to highlight every single flaw in the experience. The crates are unquestionably placed to provide sheltered niches for spawncampers, those bottom-feeding scum that hide behind your arrival point and machine gun people as they appear. Please not that the only reason spawncampers still exist is because we haven’t worked out a way to electrocute people over the internet yet.

The Containeryard of Crap also accommodates the game-ruining sports of the Three Frag Fling (using the 3x frag perk and throwing them all as soon as you appear) and the ever-terrible Martyr (drop a grenade when you die). You might notice that both of those perks reward people who don’t bother to “aim” or “hit things they’re shooting at”, traditionally regarded as important abilities in a shooting game. Imagine a basketball court that encourages people to hit each other and kick the ball. And where every match lasts three seconds.

The lack of cover and a target density slightly higher than lead bars falling into a black hole, Shipment is also the worst offender in the “Helicopter-helicopter-helicopter” loophole. If someone can stay alive long enough to call down the Chopper of Death (through luck, pacts with the devil, or being a scummy spawncamper), the high turnover of the map ensures that they’ll die, respawn, and have enough airborne murder-machine kills to call down another - certainly no-one can risk taking their eyes off the ground long enough to bring the thing down.

Some insist that Shipment is just a different but equally valid test of ability. Their grenade-spamming-”skill” may give them more points than anyone else, but this preference for “winning” over “the entire actual spirit of the game” makes them the kind of petty failure who’d knock over a Monopoly board, storm out of the room, and then insist they didn’t lose “because we never finished.”

If you do arrive on a Call of Duty 4 server running the Green Death, your best bet is to whip out the SAW and get all those LMG achievements: bullet-unproof walls and a crosshair that changes when you’re killing someone turns this 2007 gaming masterpiece into a child’s motor skills game - keep moving the cross till it changes shape and you win!

Except you’re playing Shipment. So you, along with everyone else on the map, lose.

I like to think that I’ve been playing PC games for a long time. I’m still quite young, sure, but even so I’ve been around. A couple of years after I learned to read using a video game (Reader Rabbit 2!), I played my first FPS with Wolfenstein 3D. Following quickly after that was the classic Star Wars: Dark Forces, and I’ve been playing video games, mostly shooters, ever since.

I mention this because, despite what any teammates unlucky enough to have me say, I am no noob. I want that made pretty clear. I’m not new to the shooter genre.

So imagine my surprise when I load my first game of Modern Warfare and completely lose my mind. Without doubt, Call of Duty 4 is the most chaotic war simulation I have ever played. I might have heeded the warnings of another writer on this site, but surely such words as “You will die, and you will die immediately, and you die not knowing why” were for mere other people. You know, the mere mortals.

Sure, it might have been a mistake on my part to go for a 50-person team deathmatch COD4 Server as my first game. But hey, I told myself in a fit of self-delusion, go big or go home! Right? Sure.

Compounding this probably poor choice was the server’s selection of map. Given that I was already in way over my head, the choosing of Shipment as my first map is clearly evidence of some higher power screwing with me. For the unaware, Shipment is the dockyard-style map in which players battle in an area approximately the size of a matchbox. There’s no hiding, and the whole map is meant to encourage run-and-gun.

I was installed, updated and patched. I had my custom class armed with the trusty M16 and was about to enter a slugfest with 50 people slugging it out over real estate that could fit in my backyard. And I had no idea what was about to happen. The map loads. I’m autoassigned, select my class, and the round begins.

Fear. Pain. Horror. I’m cut down so often and from so many angles that I begin to get a mild form of vertigo. My world seems to have become one giant grenade. After dying four times, I decide to just start pulling my trigger randomly. I die several more times. Somehow, probably through sheer pity, the CoD system awards me enough experience to earn a promotion. I must have bumped someone into the path of a grenade, Inspector Clouseau style, because I certainly don’t remember shooting anyone.

There’s a gap in my memory about here, but the experience is vaguely shrapnel-shaped.

Soon after, the game ended. My right index finger twitched listlessly. Holy crap. Somehow I had gained a level and even killed a few enemies. And I was DEFINITELY going to find a nice 20-man game and hunker down for a while. As least until my ears quit ringing.

The latest patch might have added some beautifully free maps (thanks nVidia, it’s nice to get 1% of the money I’ve given you over the years back in trade!). The new kill cam might let 360 players know what it’s like to be nothing but a helpless human grenade that only kills people by dying (though with Martyr, most of them know that already). But a number of urgent PC flaws remain unaddressed:

1. Lack of “Get out of the damn way!” button

He’s killed us all, on every Call of Duty server we’ve ever played on. You know him - he’s found the perfect spot with a half-millimeter gap to a doorway on the other side of the map. Any day now somebody’s going to come through it, and this time he won’t miss, then he’ll get a WHOLE KILL to himself and until that point he will NEVER MOVE. Especially when you and two other players are desperately trying to get indoors before a little thing called an “Airstrike” immolates the entire team.

This guy is proof that there is no such thing as latent mental powers, because if there were, his stupid immobile face would have been punched into paste by rage-fueled psychic blows by now.

2. Spawncampers on Shipment are still not teleported directly to hell

Ah, the great game of skill that is Shipment. Appear, get shot in the back, die. That might be a wonderfully bleak cinematic vignette on the futility of war, but a fun CoD4 server level it isn’t. The enemies ability to ambush you as you teleport into the theater of combat doesn’t do the game’s claims of realism any good, and the fact that some syphilitic skill-lepers camp in those angled gaps behind the spawn point adds cheap, sportsmanshipless fuel to the terrible design fire.

Luckily this is only a problem on Shipment, so it’s not like it damages a real, non-”utter dogs breakfast of a flesh-blender” map.

3. Martyrdom still a perk

In a shocking oversight which at this point can only be attributed to a psychotic blind spot afflicting the entirety of Infinity Ward, the abortion of anti-skill that is Martyrdom remains a perk. This despite the numerous suggestions I’ve sent them, including
a) Remove Martyrdom from game
b) Players who select martyrdom are sent directly to the singleplayer training mission; not allowed to rejoin multiplayer until they learn to shoot
c) Team with most Martyrs loses instantly
d) Every time you get a Martyr kill you lose XP, as it is the exact opposite of the normal “gain XP by improving skills” idea

4. Frag x 3 kill weighting

Watching the Killcam on CoD4 servers that allow it can be very educational - you can learn from your mistakes, or from the skill of the player who bested you on the field of digital combat. Which makes it all the more galling when your 15-kill streak is ended by some idiot on the other side of the map with the Frag x 3 perk, unable to see a damn thing and just flinging the things out like incredibly-less-festive confetti before somebody who actually knows how to aim a rifle puts him out of his misery.

A simple script would fix this problem - if a player gets kills after flinging out three grenades immediately on spawning, he only gets half points. If he hasn’t actually killed anyone with his gun he gets no points, and a small insulting message pops up on the screen. Or if Activision doesn’t want to insult him directly, I’ll be happy to do it for them: “You are a cheap scumbag who fails even at pretending to succeed in a game.”

People have praised Call of Duty 4 for being one of the finest multiplayer experiences ever made, for being set somewhere other than World War II, and for its incredible realism. But that verisimilitude isn’t limited to how prettily your video card renders a desert-camo MP5 - here are five ways Call of Duty 4 servers emulate a real battlefield:

1. The FNG is dead meat

Your first CoD4 multiplayer game will be a short, brutal experience. You will die, and you will die immediately, and you die not knowing why. The reason, of course, is that you are a #@$ing new guy dropped into an expert killing field (especially since the CoD4 server browser sadistically defaults to Free-For-All when first launched). Imagine a ballet dancer in a bright orange tutu dropped into jungle with ten Predators. Not “tooth and claw” predators, I mean “Can turn invisible and attack Arnold Schwarzenegger ” Predators. That’s an FNG in Free-For-All, that is.

2. A bad player is a liability for everyone

Just like the real world, a bad player won’t just get himself killed - he’ll sink the whole team. On an Unreal Tournament 3 server “teammates” are just people you don’t shoot at (much). But Team Deathmatch is based on score, not total kills, so every time you charge into enemy fire like Nooby McRambo (wondering why circle-strafing doesn’t seem to work) you’re helping the enemy win. In Search & Destroy a bad player means one team is effectively outnumbered, because instead of a trained SAS agent they’ve got a guy running into walls. THAT’S why everybody hates you.

If your kill ratio is less than 1:1 the team would honestly be better off without you. Start holding back, following your team-mates, and if at all possible try to stop catching bullets with your face.

3. Air beats infantry

Most war games have a very strong Rock-Paper-Scissors vibe with air, sea and land units – and in CoD4 there’s no Paper. Air will kick the hell out of infantry whenever and wherever it turns up because - in case you haven’t noticed - the long term handicaps of refueling, budgetary support and vulnerable airfields don’t actually turn up in your CoD4 “Press the Air strike button to convert the enemy to pink mist” first person experience.

The air support is a great incentive for something that shouldn’t really have to be taught - the point in combat is to not die. You need to stay alive a full seven kills to call in the helicopter (aka “The Righteous Wrath of an Angry Machine-Gunning god”) against the enemy. Do so.

4. You learn what kind of man (or woman) you are

If there’s one thing war movies have taught us, it’s that people find themselves on the battlefield. Boys become men, learning what it truly is to live and die (possibly while orchestral music swells in the background). In a less Hollywood interpretation, veterans seem to have a much better grasp of priorities - you don’t see people who used to be shot at for a living losing their temper over half-fat soy in their caramel macchiatos.

Likewise, in CoD4 your character grows and changes as you unlock weapons and perks. You’ll find the style that suits you best: the Schwarzzenegers can tear off with Juggernaut and Steady Aim, the Solid Snakes wreak havoc with silenced weapons and a UAV Jammer, and the filthy, cheap, no honor curs who know nothing of skill take Martyrdom, pansy wimps every one, because they know the only way they can help their team is to get killed.

5. Teammates are great bullet detectors

You depend on your teammates. They’re your cover, your backup, your friends - and it’s really great when they get shot instead of you. You’ve got to watch that radar and head to where you can best help the other green arrows. When one falls over after rounding a corner, you’re in a perfect position to avenge him with a grenade and some fast shooting - possibly while shouting “He was two days from retirement, NOOOOOOOOOO!”

Plus it increases your chances of getting that consolation +2 when the guy behind you takes out whoever puts you down. That isn’t just revenge, it’s good tactics - if you let your killer get away there’s a greater chance he’ll be able to call down airborne fury on your buddies. “CoD Blue Balls”, being killed JUST as you unlock air support but before calling it, is one of the best punishments you can inflict on your enemy.