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Call of Duty 4
Remember the days when playing video games would make you nerdy and unpopular. In those days, when a girl asked her friends what she should get her boyfriend, her friends would sarcastically suggest a football or a knife or something equally overly macho. Now its just “Call of duty 4’ cause pretending you’re Special Forces is the manly way to spend your time, and in the same way GI Joes aren’t dolls, CoD is apparently not a video game apparently. Call of Duty, for those of you who have been frozen for years and recently unearthed, is a video game series until recently about World War II. In contrast to its rival series, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty has pretentious to realism, and tries to avoid American jingoism, traditionally having you play as the allies during the WWII games, since Russia really won the war. But I digress. Call of Duty 4 is a departure from their normal format, and is about modern warfare. Now of course, this is a departure from pretentious to fact into near fiction, but you know what, that’s alright, they are trying something new. One of the reason why most video games like to show WWII however is because it avoids controversy, nobody objects to killing Nazis because they went so far out of their way to make themselves evil that even the Soviets come off as good guys. Not to say that the allies didn’t do horrible things in the war, its just easier to get away by showing the conflict in black and white terms, which is harder with modern warfare, because modern wars tend to not be far. America tends to have the best weapons, best training and most advanced tactics, while their enemies are people in small third war countries using outdated rifles and machetes and guns given to them by us, which isn’t good drama. You can’t exactly have a game where you walk around in an Iraqi city for weeks trying to figure out which civilian secretly wants to kill you before being killed by a car bomb. Also modern warfare is sticky, its full of awkwardness, like if invading a sovereign nation to install a puppet government is morally justified, or the tricky issue of civilians causalities. One of the advantages of video game warfare that your enemies have the good nature to never surrender and all of their bases/cities are fun by robots rather than people so you never have the problem of accidentally shooting a innocent laborer or dramatically breaking down a door to find a group of children looking at you with terrified expressions. Also, your enemies die in a very dignified manner, falling down babbling in some foreign language that only a few people playing the game could understanding. You never have to deal with men lying on the ground, crying out for their mothers, sobbing for mercy, and lamenting there families who will suffer without them. Modern Warfare makes this even more awkward because the Special Forces are renown for having a very loose understanding of morals. CoD4 tries to address some of these issues, by not having you fight in any wars but instead fighting rebels in Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Call of Duty 4 is a good game. The graphics are astounding, the guns are all accurate, the fighting is clever and the combat gives me the wonderful feeling of being awesome. But it doesn’t really invent anything, it just re-masters the First Person Shoot format (the games where you are basically a walking gun). I still can get shot three times, hid behind a table, and then be totally fine, I can still use my comrades as human shields and avoid any actual death, I can still use a machine gun without any throwback while running down a cliff. I’ll admit, this game does it better than most, people die fairly easily, and charging a tank or machine gun will cause you to die, but I’m still able to kill at least twenty guys with guns with a pistol, and I can shoot a man in the stomach only stuns him, so there still is a lot of silliness. Also my comrades make things too easy for me, at no point do I have any real feeling of “ok what do I do now” and have to use my own initiative. Now some of you are asking, “Um, why do you want such realism” and I respond, firstly it is so much more challenging. There is a level where I have to defend a village form a bunch of Eastern Europeans because they are...Russian and stuff, and I thought it would be cool, like the last scene from Saving Private Ryan, I’d have to be clever. But instead, my comrades essentially just escort me from house to house, preventing me from being hurt but also from actually feeling like I’m making a difference and the lack of actual dying makes it very unsatisfying. And secondly, realistic combat is what actual Special Forces have to go through.
Now the final issue of CoD4, what is it trying to say? You play as the US Marines fighting some generic Arab rebels, and the British SAS fighting generic Russian rebels, but both allies are show doing so many horrible things that I wonder if the game is trying to make a statement about our foreign policy. When you die in this game, little quotes appear about your death, and almost half of them are anti war quotes. So is it trying to make as statement about the irony of preventing war with guns? There are some pretty cool moments like when (Spoiler that has already been spoiled to you a million times) the American team is totally wiped out by a nuke that goes off, and you play your character as you crawl around in the ruble of a destroyed city before dying alone and forgotten (oh and Snap kills Mr. D). But despite that, at no point do I really feel like I’m fighting a real modern war and I have to face the consequences of that. Like you know, the actual implication of ordering an air strike on a city full of civilians? Or why these guys are rebelling other than “Duh, evil foreign people”. In short, it’s a good game, but doesn’t bring anything new to the industry.
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