Andy Laub they call me "The Solution"

You may have heard some fuss about a new game that came out recently. I think it had something to do with warfare that takes place during modern times, but I’m not quite sure. There are apparently snowmobiles in it?

Indeed, Activision’s Modern Warfare 2 has touched all of our hearts and souls since its release earlier this month. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you wouldn’t know it from their pushing it as “MOST ANTICIPATED GAME EVAR (until the next one)”. And I suppose they’re right – MW2 gives you a lot to be excited about.

For one, it’s a direct sequel to 2007’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Yes, there was another CoD game last year: World at War. No, that one took place in World War 2 and doesn’t fit into this chronology. And it was developed by somebody else.

Wait. Yes, that is confusing. Recall this post, if you will, about my dislike for the two-developer system (specifically one of the two developers) that Activision uses to push CoD games out the door on a yearly basis, quality notwithstanding. In that article I wrote:

What if Infinity Ward stopped making COD games, leaving the franchise to Treyarch, and instead used the technology they’ve already developed to create a new, self-owned franchise with similar content? Presumably it would continue in the modern warfare vein and would play the same.

Interestingly, that’s sort of what’s happening here. I don’t know what the plans are for the seventh installment in the CoD franchise, but presumably it will be a Treyarch effort once again. But in the meantime, notice that the “Call of Duty” label on MW2 was extremely downplayed. Initially they had planned not to include it on the marketing at all, but I suppose it’s helpful in that most people are totally clueless and wouldn’t make the connection. So in a sense, Modern Warfare is very much poised to be its own franchise at this point (or already is, I suppose).

With all of that said, I hadn’t picked up a CoD game since the first Modern Warfare. World at War and its return to the WW2 setting didn’t entice me enough to buy or even rent; only when one of my CoD-addicted friends finally replaced his WaW disc with a shiny new one with the words “Modern Warfare 2″ on it did I ask to borrow the old one to give it a try.

Call of Duty: World at War

In a few words, I found World at War to be very, very good. As is typical of the series, you’ll frequently be switching between two protagonists (in this case an American and a Russian) as they embark on their distinct tours of duty (plan on visiting the Pacific and traveling from Russia to Germany). The characters are likable enough, with excellent voice acting. Your immediate superiors are voiced by Kiefer Sutherland and Gary Oldman, respectively (wow!), as are the narrations between missions.

Speaking of “between missions”… holy shit. Even if you have zero interest in the game whatsoever, you NEED to see these cutscenes. They are simply gorgeous examples of motion graphics:

Seriously, this game has no right to have graphics this nice. I think that’s a compliment. Other than that, it’s pretty much all standard Call of Duty fare. I enjoyed playing through it even thought the missions were not without their frustrations, but I can only handle so much trench warfare before wanting to move on to something else.

Modern Warfare 2

Enter “something else”. With all the ruckus about the newest member of the family, I knew I had to give it a try. I managed to find a lone copy available for rental yesterday and figured I could hammer through it by the end of the weekend. Well, I was right, but change “end of the weekend” to “one sitting” and you’ll find my single-player experience to be comparable to that of anyone else who’s enjoyed the game.

I think we’re almost at that point where the single player campaign is becoming token addition in Call of Duty games. You don’t buy this game to play it alone. Well, you can, but that would be a waste of $60 (this coming from someone who has wasted $60 several times). Single player is good for about a week of entertainment at best, which is why it’s fine rental fodder for folks like me who are adverse to shooting strangers online. And by “shooting strangers online” I mean “getting shot by strangers online”.

And in this case, the campaign is not only short but somewhat disheveled. As I mentioned before, MW2 is a direct sequel to the first game, in that you see the return of some of the original characters. I think this is great, because it’s already a huge divergence from the traditional Call of Duty “slice of life” model where you see a little bit of everything.

I don’t know that they take advantage of this as much as they could, though. As with World at War you’ll be switching between protagonists constantly, each of whom has missions that feel quite different. I understand the reasoning for this mechanically, but it also seemed a little unbalanced. Then again, that’s easy to forget because I spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what was going on.

I think that in writing the “story” for the game, Infinity Ward had a meeting and said “okay, we want to have missions that take place in A, B, and C, with combat that features X, Y, and Z” and then they wrote some scripts that vaguely made that possible. That’s not to say the game isn’t a lot of fun to play; it’s just more disjointed than usual. The fact that MW isn’t tied down by a factual background and has gobs of technology at its disposal means that you can cover a much larger variety of terrain in a much smaller amount of time.

Epilogue

You’ll notice that I didn’t really go into any detail about graphics or sound, but if you’ve played any of the CoD games on the new generation of consoles, you know what to expect. They’re both great, and they remain great year after year.

Even though I’m not interested in what is really the focal point of the games (multiplayer), I’m still interested to see where the series (plural?) heads after this. Treyarch really pulled a 180 with World at War, and Infinity Ward can do pretty much anything they please with a title as vague as “Modern Warfare”.

After what seems like decades, Abe and I finally have a week where we don’t have extracurricular activities eating up every evening. Thanks to a Target gift card and some smooth talking on my part, we decided to spend some of that time with New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

We played through the first world last night, and looking back I think I enjoyed it. The game looks great, and we did a decent job of remaining alive (a definite plus) and so I hope that trend continues. Similar to 2006’s New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS, this game is a spiritual successor Super Mario Bros. 3 from the NES days. A prime choice; I consider SMB3 to be the pinnacle of Mario side-scrollers. So all is great, right? Well… no. While the game in and of itself has a lot of potential, there were also some attributes that really felt detrimental to the whole experience.

The big news in NSMBW is that you can play with up to four people simultaneously – no waiting for your turn; everybody’s on the screen, all the time. Except when they’re not. Unfortunately, it is possible for players to find themselves scrolled right off the screen, which can be overcome but may also result in death if they’re beyond the threshold of what the game decides is “safe”. Fortunately, the deceased player will quickly return in a bubble that you need to pop to get them back into the action (imagine Baby Mario in the Yoshi’s Island series).

Player interaction is another iffy item. For better or worse, your characters cannot all occupy the same space at the same time. This becomes problematic when two overzealous teammates decide to tackle the same obstacle simultaneously and instead end up as obstacles themselves. You can overcome this by constantly trying to call out your plans (”okay, now I’m going to jump on this Koopa”) but that seems like a strange thing to need to do for what should be a relatively casual experience. At the same time, it really does add to the atmosphere of the game and make it more interesting.

The biggest problem with this game, though, is where it is. My opinion is and always will be that the Wii platform is a hinderance to “normal” games. The controllers suck, not only in a physical sense but in an “it takes me 5-10 minutes to even get them to work” sense. By the time I’ve gotten the console to function I’m already beginning a game with a feeling of disappointment. Maybe it’s a repetitive fluke (oxymoron?), but how can Nintendo expect the console to appeal to non-techy casual gaming types when they can’t reliably sync their controllers to their consoles?

And while I realize that motion control is the Wii’s bread and butter at the moment, I think it’s ridiculous that they feel obligated to tack it on to every game just because it’s there. Making the game rely on motion control means that we are stuck with the basic Wiimote turned sideways (ugh, just like Super Paper Mario) instead of being able to use a Gamecube controller, the Wiimote/nunchuk combo, or the classic controller.

And that interface! Still so terrible.