- In pictures: Autumn in Genoa #VadaOnTour - 8 October, 2016
- Sexy Cosplay Hotness Part 4 - 29 March, 2016
- Sweet Chilli and Lime Veggie Burgers - 20 March, 2016
Well, it’s good to be balanced. I could just sit here and play video games that I know I’ll like but damn it, I’m trying to be professional. So with that in mind I come to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 which for the rest of this article I shall refer to as Ugh. There are two reasons for this, firstly I can’t be bothered to type out Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 the umpteen times I will have to do it and secondly to express the noise I make when anyone mentions this series in general. Ugh.
I started this with an open mind. I used to love first-person shooters. I fondly remember playing Duke Nukem 3D as a child, Goldeneye/Perfect Dark as a teenager and BioShock as an adult. The thing with Duke Nukem was his inbuilt masculinity, he was so hyper-masculine that he could get away with shooting the police and still make time to play with someone’s tits, wear sunglasses in the dark and churn out lines like ‘Die you son of a bitch!’. This hyper masculinity was part of Duke’s charm. What I’m trying to highlight though is that this was a game from 1997, so you can let this kind of behaviour off. However, gaming has moved on since 1997.
Apparently no one let the people at Infinity Ward know about this change though, and so Ugh is filled with Twat after Twat who sounds like he belongs on the front row of a really sleazy lap dance club. In fact Infinity Ward sounds like a good name for a strip club. It’s a bit jarring to play with these people in your platoon because essentially I don’t like any of them, so I honestly don’t care if they live or die. In fact several times I shot them just for the hell of it (that’s when I wasn’t accidentally shooting them because I couldn’t tell who the baddies were in the middle of all the frantic nonsense going on in front of me). This problem really struck home when I was meant to be saving civilians but couldn’t tell which they actually were and kept killing them.
I’d like to talk about the plot of Ugh for a short while. It will be a short while because I’ve no idea what the hell is going on, I needed a glossary to understand it. What I did get after finishing Ugh however, is that after putting a special agent in a terrorist ring who then goes on to massacre an entire Russian airport’s worth of civilians, Russia decides that this isn’t really acceptable and somehow manages a mass invasion of America two days later. This was one of my first problems with Ugh. I felt as though I was on the wrong side.
Later we took a trip to Rio de Janeiro and the only thing that happened came when we shot up a load of the locals for no reason and then caught a helicopter. That was literally it. It’s no wonder foreign powers are invading America when they act like this. There may have been more, but a lot of the story is told to you buy your commanding officers during the mission. There’s so much going on and so much gunfire filling each scene that I never really heard or understood what they were on about. During some of the later missions entire conversations just passed me by and I’d be left stood on a roof wondering what I was meant to be doing. One mission sticks in my mind where if you don’t immediately run to the houses located on your right you will die. It took me about 9 instant deaths to figure this out.
Basically, I’ve come to realise that the whole Ugh series is purely built for playing online. If like me you just don’t care about online gaming all that much, then you are going to find it very boring. The whole game took about 6 or 7 hours and made no sense. If I’d had to pay to play Ugh I’d be very angry. Luckily I didn’t, but I’m still annoyed that I wasted these hours of my life when I could have done something productive, like re-arrange all of the cutlery in my drawers or sort tubs of lego into colour and size. You know, something useful.
One last grumble before I spoil the ending for you. Who the hell was the man I rescued in the Gulag? Everyone was very excited to see him and later we went for a nice stroll in the countryside but I have no idea who he is or why I got passed over for promotion for him?
Twist ending: your commander set the whole thing up. His name’s Shepard, look out for him.
Ugh, that’s quiet enough of that, next week Fallout.
