It’s Warfare and it’s Modern…

…or is it?

I’ve realised something this morning… I do so love to write.  A post here on OMS has been long overdue simply because, of late, I’ve found that time is the rarest of commodities.  I would, however, like to make an earnest effort to post (here on OMS in particular) at much more regular intervals…

…and so it begins.

Video Games Journalism is a term which I find contentious (thus the angular typosgraphy).  At best, it’s a collectivised term for individuals who’s writing is engaging and who’s research is exhastive but ultimately who’s source material is viewed as puerile and far removed from the gritty stories which drive the mainstream media.  This, I’d imagine, is probably a direct result of the flipside of the coin.  At worst, Video Games Journalism tends to be the folical scrapings from the underbelly of the world wide web; a compilation of commentaries from the inhabitants of the inner city of the internet.  This is a postal code inhabited by forum trolls and serial bloggers who list their address as Azeroth, who’s vocabulary doesn’t stretch beyond four letter expletives and sexually stransmitted diseases and who derive hits by posting a seemingly unending torrent of youtube videos  (belonging to the offensive humour genre) about every game they are incensed with.

I generalise somewhat… After-all and truth be told, Journalism as a whole is a profession with which I am becoming somewhat disillusioned.  When nearly 300 die in a Chilean natural disater and yet all you hear about in the British news are the debaucherous affairs of national footballers, one can’t help but despair.  In general, low-brow reporting, once damned to ever-walk the covers of loathsome tabloids, is now the staple opiate of the masses.  Even those outlets of Journalsim which I respect the most can’t help but frequent a popular interest story; publishing a biographical column detailing the sordid lifestyle of some Z-List celebrity just to pander to a different market.

Maybe this, therefore, is the underlying problem.  Maybe it’s once again the business and the corporation being ensconced amidst traditional values and ultimately overpowering them to a proftieering end.  As a good friend of mine said over XBOX Live meer nights ago in reference to Games Journalism; “Games reviews are bought and paid for…”  This is the road towards a bleak, post-apocalypic wasteland for Games Journalism.  In fact, I can’t help but be reminded of Mutant Chroicles, where a fallen earth becomes a wasteland in which megacorporations vie for control.  In this metaphor, however, the brutal generals of the armies are the editors for our beloved Games Journalist infantry; both ultimately nothing more than puppets to the illuminati of the grand corporations.  If you criticise the corporation, you will be shot by your general as an example of or by some other infantry man in a desperate bid to curry favour with his corporate taskmasters: You dare not disagree with the masses lest you be purged for having a contrary view-point.  And us?  The readers; the audience to which they deliver their service?  Clearly, we’re the mutants… the shambling, mindless drones whose hive mind tells us nothing more than to be content with being a part of the machine.

It’s one thing which has annoyed me greatly over the last couple of days.  Today, March 5th, marks the release of the newest chapter in one of my most beloved games franchises.  The problem I have, however, is that every review I have read of DICE‘s newest game not only compares it to InfinityWard‘s winter smash-hit but describes it as an inferior game…

This, I just can’t fathom.

One review I read talked about the campaign in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 [hereafter B:BC2] being “short and linear… and not on a par with Call of Duty.”  Let me be clear: I’ve played the campaign in Battlefield: Bad Company [1] and it was nothing to write home about.  Similarly, I’ve played the campaign in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 [hereafter MW2] and found it to be average at best.  At the same time, I’d cut MW2 some slack.  Most of the folks who bought that game aren’t doing so for the single player and I expect that most want to kind of just switch off and blow some stuff up in a cinematic introduction to their multiplayer experience.  Two words, however, that I would almost categorically associate with MW2,  are short and linear.  To comparatively call DICE out on this, therefore, is a moot point.

Another review, this time discussing B:BC2′s multiplayer, described it as “lacking exhileration and… less memorable than MW2″…  To that I say rubbish!  My Call of Duty [hereafter CoD] career (if you will) started in CoD 2 and progressed through CoD 3 and 4, skipping out World at War and ending, most recently with MW2.  CoD4 was probably the one game in the series I played more than the rest.  My buddies and I oft looked forward to an evening in with a cup of tea nesteld below the tv screen, the satisfying visual of an M16 with an ACOG scope centred in front of us and a delectable round of Overgrown just about to kick off.  In saying that, I can’t think of any memorable moments we ever had in that game. Correction… I can think of one memorable round where we verbally abused some teenagers who were making derogatory comments about our respective Mother’s… Welcome to the CoD community…  By contrast, sweeping my minds eye back over the  games I’ve played in the Battlefield franchise, I can almost feel my toes start to tingle and my head brims with excitement at the recollation of memorable Battlefield Moments…   Who can forget the first time they threw dynamite at the base of a flag only to detonate it remotely when said flag was being captured.  How about the time you finally figured out that to effectively launch a mortar strike in Battlefield: 1942 DC  you needed to get one of your friendly snipers to call out co-ordinates from his rangefinder.  Remember the enemy team wetting themselves at the LAN tournament where you used the shovel in Battlefield: Vietnam to create a spawn point in a tent in their base and steal their helicopters?  Recently, I’ll bet you’ve taken to recreating High Altitude, Low Opening parachute jumps to storm a point in Battlefield: 1943.  Just a matter of weeks ago, in fact, some friends and I were forging new Battlefeild Moments in the demo for B:BC2, providing remote UAV overwatch for the rest of the squad who were capturing a point.  Heck, even last night in a pre-B:BC2 warm up game of it’s predecessor, a good friend and I coined the lasting phrase Arborial Tomfoolery – used to describe a moment when distraction caused by destructable trees leads to a violent death.  Two nights ago, when circumnavigating an enemy base, I passed the remark “That sounds like the familiar sound of a 22 caliber rifle” which led to a brief 5 minute window when we became the Tommy Lee Jones to our adversary’s Benicio del Torro.  That’s what makes a great multiplayer experience… Moments…

In MW2, you tend to just kill and be killed… Don’t get me wrong, you kill and are killed with impressively animated guns and gadgets (some of the best in the video games industry) but that’s it.  There’s little depth.  For me, it’s an easy phenomenon to explain – the Call of Duty franchise is antiquated.  Fraggy death matches on small maps have been around for decades and I just think it’s time to move on.  Nearly 10 years ago now the first Halo game out and was aptly titled Combat Evolved.  Who could forget that moment in the single plyer campaign when you move from the tight interior corridors; the a-typical almost on the rails, linear sections that shooters had in those days, into a vast, wide open, sand-boxy world full of vehicles and tactical topography.  Now compare this to the CoD fanchise 9 years on.  Halo was combat evolved and CoD still remains just combat…

This is a contentious topic to post on OMS as my counterpart, the wonderful Mr. Ian has been oddly bewitched by MW2 (no build-related pun intended).  He seems to express a love for it rivalled only by, I’d imagine, Captain America’s love for Old Glory and that’s ok – To each, their own.  In many ways, in fact, I’m in the minority compared to him.  When discussing this topic, it was hard to argue with statistics.  When a game sells over 7 million copies in one day alone, one wonders how it could’nt be good… a point noted by Mr. Ian who argued “If it wasn’t awesome, it wouldn’t be this popular,”  to which a cynical friend, with grace, replied “self-harm, it’s popular to.”

It’s a debate I’m unlikely to win in the long run.  For the foreseable future, the CoD franchise will probably continue to dominate and the Games Journalists of the world will likely follow the beckon call of it’s fanboys with 9-10 scores aplently; after-all, how can you negatively review a game which the majority of the gaming community is in love with?  I just wish, however, that these same reviewers would give Battlefield it’s dues.  There’s no need to review B:BC2 as a poor-mans CoD; as some shoddy knock-off sold only by bearded men in back alleys.  Battlefield was doing multiplayer games and doing them well when the first Call of Duty game was still on the drawing board.  It’s not some new IP which has to prove itself; much to the contrary, in fact, it’s well established and well loved as it is. I doubt, however, that even with it’s following, it will ever outsell Activisions behemoth.

Me?  Unless something comes along which drastically shakes up the CoD franchise, I think I’ll sit the next few games out. In its current state of morphosis it has little more to offer me.  It’s nothing more than a big budget, overly cinematic, linear, on-the-rails rollercoaster which is good fun the first while but has little lasting impression…

…If Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 were a movie, it’d be directed by Michael Bay.

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