Hitmas the Second: Modern Warfare Part 3

By Josh Posted Sunday Aug 12, 2012

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 225 comments


Link (YouTube)

And now for the elusive Sunday episode. Of course it wasn’t planned this way, but we recorded these right before I moved with the intention of posting them when I could. On the upside, I’m now completely moved in to my new house, which is better than your house, and we’ll finally be doing Mass Effect 3 this week.

Naturally, as this is the last episode of our unplanned look at Modern Warfare 3, we spend most of the episode talking about unrelated things and end by complaining about Borderlands 2. We’re awesome like that.

 


From The Archives:
 

225 thoughts on “Hitmas the Second: Modern Warfare Part 3

  1. SoldierGeek says:

    Shoot … you just posted this as I was leaving all my insightful commentary at the end of the Part 2 thread!

    Anyway … this segment certainly reveals one of the major failings of the CoD:MW series beyond the rails — the jumping between multiple characters that leaves you with no idea what is going on. Instead of one crappy incomplete story, we get three. Maybe that’s a feature, not a bug …

    It’s nice that the airliners are made of bulletproof skin so they don’t decompress when thousands of rounds of small arms are discharged inside. Though after the crash I was disappointed you twice passed up the chance to pick up an AA-12. It’s a real weapon that is the closest thing to a fantasy game cartoon weapon that exists in the real world — fully automatic shotgun FTW!

    1. False Prophet says:

      Yeah, I saw FPS Russia’s video on the AA-12–that gun was kind of scary.

      1. psivamp says:

        Very nice, I hadn’t seen that. I liked the backyard water-testing. I’d seen the FutureWeapons episode. I didn’t watch this version so I don’t know if it includes the vehicle-mounted control system that they plugged two AA-12’s into, but it does have the grenades!

      2. MediocreMan says:

        The guy using the weapon was scary: absolutely no respect that what he’s using is a gun not a game. He’s doing it soo wrong.

    2. Ryan says:

      This is probably reading too much into it, but the Russian terrorist’s use of AA-12s over Saigas might count as cultural posturing. Potentially. Maybe.

    3. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Didnt mythbusters tackle the decompression thing?

      Also,seeing the pressures a plane needs to endure,Id guess it would withstand non armor piercing bullets.

      1. decius says:

        A plane never needs to have even a full atmosphere of pressure inside of it. I could understand why Air Force Oneski might be better equipped. But not why it would be filled with that many armed people.

        1. Nimas says:

          That is what I was wondering that entire first section. HOW THE HELL DID SO MANY HIJACKERS GET ON BOARD?

          1. Ateius says:

            Yes, let’s go over this, the hijackers thing. As Josh mentioned, they had an airplane fight in MW1, sort of a bonus epilogue after the credits.

            In the MW1 airplane level, the airplane was clearly a commercial passenger liner, it just happened to have an (unspecified) VIP onboard. Being a commercial flight, hijackers could infiltrate via any of the normal ways (how they get guns on board is another matter, but let’s gloss that over). In addition, the level was short and there were actually fairly few hijackers – I think a dozen in total – armed with SMGs and such. The danger came from the tight quarters and crossfire, not the threat of being overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

            Now here we are in MW3. This is not a commercial airliner. This is Air Force Oneski. How did what appears to be FIFTY heavily-armed men in full combat gear get on board this plane to hijack it? “Nyet, I am catering staff. This is novelty gun-shaped salt and pepper shaker.” Either the Russian President has the most inept security staff in all of human history or every single one of them was bought off.

            Oh, and apparently Russia is now declaring war on all of Europe. Because being at war with America alone isn’t enough to deal with, they need to attack their neighbours, whose militaries are just as advanced as the U.S. and undoubtedly already on high alert due to the whole invading America thing. And for good measure, let’s use nuclear warheads, so we can both deny ourselves any sort of material gain from this war and also ensure France, the U.K. and probably also America return fire and reduce our population centres to glass craters.

            what is going on in this plot i dont even

            1. Nyctef says:

              Russia just wanted to invade ALL THE THINGS \o/

            2. Jakob says:

              To be fair, Russia invasion of the US would properly mean that all NATO nations would declare war on the invading party.

              1. Ateius says:

                You’d think so, but if the NATO powers declared war in defense of the U.S., then how did the Russian air force and navy reach the East Coast without having nine kinds of heck beaten out of it on the way?

                Leaving aside the fact that Russia doesn’t actually possess the power projection capability to invade North America in the first place, mind. Maybe Alaska.

                1. Zombie says:

                  And we would probably just give them Alaska. Then we could take parts of Canada or something.

                  1. LunaticFringe says:

                    Yeah…no thanks. Canadians like myself would not approve of that.

                2. Phantom Hoover says:

                  My hours of playing DEFCON have taught me that Russia is screwed when it comes to fleet deployment. Also America are fucked when it gets to DEFCON 1, the Russians will have bombers all up in their shit.

            3. Guy says:

              Don’t forget they had a mechanized force only minuites from the crash site, even though the wild maneuvers of the pilot would have taken it tens of miles off course. And they hijacked the rescue copter without alerting whomever the commander was talking to, unless that guy was also in on the plot.

              Oh, and they want the nuke launch codes. That implys they intend to either take over a lot of silos or subs or strategic bombers, or seize the communication infrastructure used to authorize launches. They might actually need to do the latter; I don’t know about modern Russia, but the USSR kept a pretty tight leash on the nuke infrastructure, to the point where nuke subs required not only the agreement of the three top officers but also a signal from the Kremlin.

              Oh, and I think they’d need additional codes from high ministers to launch. Not sure about that, though.

              1. 4th Dimension says:

                Actually from what I know Russians have a similar device to American nuclear briefcase that gives the Russian president the ability to lunch missiles at his discretion.

          2. Deadfast says:

            Just to clarify, SO MANY HIJACKERS would in this case be 24. And that’s just the people we could see from Chris’ perspective. I understand the game is trying to be cool and stuff, but this goes beyond suspension of disbelief, it requires me to disable any kind of critical thinking whatsoever. My first thought wasn’t to protect the president, it was to disable the teleportation device that was clearly smuggled onboard. The fact the game doesn’t even try to justify how these hijackers got here (probably because it’s far too exploding stuff everywhere) doesn’t help. And it would have been so simple, half of the FSO turns on the president, no teleportation involved. You might still want to explain why they turned, but even if you don’t it’s still less of a plot hole than dozens of terrorists materializing on a plane ten thousand feet in the air.

            1. Daemian Lucifer says:

              That level really just shows how formulaic the game is.We cannot have a small firefight in one room between just a dozen people,only half of which are defectors.No,we have to have a huge brawl through the corridors of the whole plane between dozens of security guards and dozens of hijackers.

  2. Superlamaen says:

    NOOO The Giant Death Robot was made to help mankind not destroy it!

    1. LunaticFringe says:

      The robot helps humanity by crushing those damn Aztecs and their warmongering ways.

      1. Zombie says:

        Or those damn Egyptians who keep stealing all my wonders and declaring war on me every other turn.

    2. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

      I must now get this game exclusively so that I may name it Liberty Prime

    3. Rutskarn says:

      My thought exactly.

    4. Entropy says:

      Does it shoot helpful bullets?

    5. Siythe says:

      Well played that Mitchell and Webb fan.

  3. Spammy says:

    Oh good. Glad someone else said that Far Cry 2 was not good. One of the hosts even! I feel some validation.

    1. Klay F. says:

      My only real problem with Far Cry 2 were the checkpoints you had to drive through that spawned new guards every time you got more than like half a kilometer away.

      Killing the guards at the same checkpoint you just cleared not 2 minutes prior got unbelievably tedious really quickly. I mean they could have set the respawn on a twenty-four hour timer and it would have increased my enjoyment of the game tremendously, enough that I actually would have finished it. I mean, I WANTED to finish it, but the thought of driving through another checkpoint sandwiched between sheer cliffs makes me want to tear my eyes out…with a bear-trap.

      1. Sagretti says:

        What made it even worse was the high lethality of combat. If I could mow down the entire guard post in a few seconds and keep moving, respawns wouldn’t be so bad, or if I received some benefit, like extra currency, at least there would be a point to it. But since every… single… encounter could result in your horrible demise, it became a chore really quickly with no payoff.

      2. Pattom says:

        And this problem was exacerbated by the game’s complete lack of indicators for how stealthy you were being except for the music, which made it close to impossible to sneak past enemies unless you were on the other side of a hill. Once you heard the tinkling bells segue into vaguely-threatening drums, you hoofed it out of there before you got a faceful of buckshot.

  4. JPH says:

    “Why are we in Africa?”

    “Because Yuri and Soap and McTavish dude is like, I’m gonna shoot some guys.”

    I laughed hard at that.

    1. Chris says:

      At this point we were closing in on 1 AM and I was le tired. :(

      1. JPH says:

        Don’t worry, I’ve streamed myself playing games before and I know exactly how you feel.

      2. newdarkcloud says:

        Does not negate the humor of that line.

      3. Minty says:

        Well zen, take a nap… And zen launch ze missiles!

        1. Jarenth says:

          ‘Bout that time, eh chaps?

    2. Deadfast says:

      Speaking of Soap, did anyone bother to explain how he goes from a gaping chest wound and coughing up his lungs one minute to crawling around in the mud of Africa the next?

      1. Zombie says:

        Ummmmmmmmmm, EXPLOSIONS!

        1. ehlijen says:

          Yes, an explosion catapulted him there, and the flames neatly cauterised the chest wound, leaving him able to fight on without bloodloss!

          1. Deadfast says:

            Ah, EXPLOSIONS would also explain how they managed to fly to Africa in a helicopter with a range of 430 km/267 miles. So cool.

      2. anaphysik says:

        I was going to note all sorts of ridiculous-nesses of the previous types, but apparently the mission in Africa takes place nearly two months after the India thing (according to the MW wikia, which I am now ashamed to have actually read). So bleh, we’ll just have to settle for more in-level nonsense.

        Presumably they chose not to show the month of planning and recuperation and whatnot because that involves not shooting.

        1. Deadfast says:

          Do they actually say that in-game? Perhaps somewhere deep within the cinematic Chris skipped? Again, it would have been so simple…


          Sgt. McCool
          Task Force 123 – DISAVOWED!!!
          Central Africa
          2 Months Later

          But they’re not even trying, are they?

  5. Ryan says:

    The really egregious thing about the exploding barrel is that the lighting in that scene means the barrel appears to be the same shade of gunmetal grey as the rest of the cover.

    1. Paul Spooner says:

      And since you (the casters) asked, yes, they do make them in red: http://www.mcmaster.com/#4319T36

  6. JPH says:

    But, but Borderlands 2… :(

    I got the game for about $45 with a Steam 4-pack.

    And it’s gonna be a lot better than the first.

    1. Ysen says:

      In Australia, Borderlands 2 is actually relatively cheap – it’s selling for $69 at launch when MW3 is still being sold at $89.

    2. Forumrabbit says:

      $70 from Steam for Borderlands 2.

      $60 everywhere else where Valve don’t encourage regional pricing.

      $38-40 on special from Green Man Gaming for the past month.

    3. Alphadrop says:

      Wonder why the prices are so expensive in America. Borderlands 2 + pre order shizzles is going for £25 on Amazon or £30 on Steam.

      1. TheAngryMongoose says:

        I was thinking that. I had always thought of American games as far cheaper. Used to be around 2:1 exchange rate and I’d wonder why they were complaining about $50 console games.

        But yeah, $40 for the PC version, $56 for the console, because playing on a restricted platform is worth $20.

  7. False Prophet says:

    I didn’t catch the end of Shamus’ line at 9:16–“War. War is the hell that separates heroes from (inaudible).” Anyone make it out?

    Also, Toto did “Hold the Line”, which if you listen to any classic rock radio, you’ve heard. And the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Dune.

    1. Tse says:

      I think he said “noobs”. I may be wrong on that, though.

      1. GM says:

        Nah he Said Noob´s.

      2. Shamus says:

        Yes, it was “Noobs”. Or perhaps “Noobz”. I can’t remember now.

        1. ehlijen says:

          As long as it wasn’t Nobz. Deys is da heroes!

        2. Matthias says:

          Huh! I heard it as “news”, which could actually be considered to say something of substance.
          Like if you do something in a war that makes the news, you screwed up.

          Look, I never said it was a great quote…

        3. anaphysik says:

          N3wbz

  8. newdarkcloud says:

    Military experts, correct me if I am wrong, but doesn’t the military avoid killing people as much as possible when on missions to both avoid an international incident and to possibly get information out of prisoners? Isn’t not doing that considered a war crime?

    Holy shit. Price and his squad are complete monsters!

    1. topazwolf says:

      Obviously, they are a rouge cell.

      1. Irridium says:

        Funnily enough, they are a rouge cell. Due to their many war crimes, they’ve essentially been labeled, well, war criminals and rouge agents and are wanted men in every western country.

        Of course the game paints this as a bad thing. Not bad like “sad to see good soldiers go rouge”, bad like “those dudes make it harder for us to do stuff, totally not fair to us,” but hey.

        1. Adam P says:

          Well color me pink, that sounds like the most reasonable thing about the game so far!

          1. Kalil says:

            I see what you did there.

            1. Bryan says:

              Well, at least they’re not a *rogue* cell. That would just be bad. At least if they’re a rouge cell, they stay reasonable.

              Er.

              (Too obvious? Yeah, probably. Oh well.)

    2. Chris says:

      I hate to belabor the point, but: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=CCHFSWqkxq0#t=13s

      Price has been a war criminal since the first game.

      1. LunaticFringe says:

        But he’s clearly not. Because he’s a good guy, and good guys’ war crimes are justified and/or really cool. But those damn Russians using chemical weapons on children? That’s just evil.

        1. Jace911 says:

          If they ever make a Modern Warfare 4 I swear the opening cinematic will show Makarov’s zombie clone (They’ll justify it somehow) ordering a nuclear strike on the headquarters of the International Orphaned Puppies and Kittens Association.

          Then they’ll have a level in which you play as a Russian SpecOps soldier, running through a hospital with a flamethrower and setting the maternity ward on fire.

          Because SERIOUSLY INFINITY WARD, HOW ELSE CAN YOU MAKE THESE VILLAINS ANY MORE CARTOONISHLY ONE DIMENSIONAL.

          1. Gruhunchously says:

            Infinity Ward doesn’t do the Modern Warfare games anymore, Sledgehammer does. Just saying.

            1. Klay F. says:

              Yes they did. It was developed jointly by Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer. Raven Software (yes THAT Raven Software did the DLC.

          2. LunaticFringe says:

            I am actually curious to see how they try to out-stupid themselves. My bet is on the next ‘shock’ scene involving babies and a vial of smallpox.

      2. Reifan00 says:

        I think the most interesting aspect of that scene for me, is that the beating (and the implied torture it was part of) do not give price the information he wants. He only gets it via a very coincidental cell phone call. So, on the one hand, it goes ‘yeah, ‘our heroes’ probably do some morally grey stuff’, it also goes ‘and they went there for no point. Torture didn’t work and is ultimately pointless.’

    3. Daemian Lucifer says:

      But this is the british sas,they dont follow they rules because they are so bad ass.

      1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

        I don’t know if SAS just has a lousy PR department, or if they think this makes them look cool, but between this and Ultimate Force, the SAS look like a bunch of ill-adjusted psycopathic baby killers every time I see them. Hell, in Patriot Games where they’re intended to be heroic they are introduced as able to “take that camp, kill everyone there, and be gone before the echo stops” or somesuch.

        Contrast this to the way we treat, say, Navy SEALs, who got their own movie which spent half the time treating them as OK dudes who love their wives and kids.

        On the other point, as a general rule, being under arms or an officer renders you a target. Being asleep or off duty don’t render you a non-combatant. At present, the US prefers to blow up its targets via aerial drone and not think much about anyone else in the blast radius.

        1. decius says:

          Being in uniform, armed, or receiving orders from someone who is in uniform or armed is sufficient to grant you the protections of the Geneva convention as a combatant. Those amount to very little in this case- because the small group can’t take prisoners, they aren’t required to accept even a surrender.

          Also, you don’t even get chewed out for the collateral damage you inflict on unarmed people running around in a panic. I have no problem characterizing the entire squad as war criminals for that- some civilian casualties are unavoidable, but the one that you ran down and stabbed to death? That isn’t one of the ‘unavoidable’ ones.

    4. Even says:

      I don’t know about “as much as possible”. There’s a line where that kind of general policy could affect a unit’s efficiency on a mission. At least I wouldn’t count it a first priority. More often than not it’s about minimizing your own casualties first and foremost, which means avoiding direct conflict where and when applicable. If you look how they’ve been fighting wars for the past few decades, I’d say prevention of enemy casualties is fairly low on any priority list. There may be specific rules of engagement per mission and some may be specifically about capturing prisoners, but in the general sense it’s hard to believe it happening that much. Generally you’re only supposed to shoot enemies who fire at you, but that only works as long as your enemy fights its wars “straight” in uniform and away from civilians. At the end of the day, it depends on who you’re fighting and where.

    5. 4th Dimension says:

      Killing civilians? Yes, if it’s more effective not to kill them. From what I read on wikipedia, most of time the only reason militaries don’t kill civilians (other that they don’t want other side to retaliate and kill their own) is because you don’t gain ANYTHING with it.
      BUT if you have a valuable target in a civilian populated area, you are only required for the military gain to outweigh the civilian suffering.

      In the game that means, destroying a village in pursuit of nuclear lunch codes that can decidedly win the war does NOT constitute a war crime. But purposefully going OUT OF YOUR WAY simply to kill civilians does.

    6. James Pony says:

      The military avoids (on principle, in theory) unnecessary risks. Having to do extra work is an unnecessary risk. Extra work could be eliminating a guard who cannot affect your mission, or extra work could be fighting enemy reinforcements you could’ve avoided by “murdering” an “innocent” guard. In that sense, the well-known Bravo-Two-Zero patrol FAILED by not eliminating the shepherd who gave away their position to the Iraqi forces. It’s funny how certain politically motivated individuals and parties always give militaries no end of shit for any and all civilian casualties (even ones not caused by the specific military in question), regardless of circumstances, but do not have a single word for any of the incidents where a band of “psychopathic babykillers” have put themselves at great risk just because they refused to kill a civilian.

      Besides, those international laws that exist are pretty much a joke anyway. No military or government which actually follows those laws actually NEEDS that law to do the “right” thing, and the others keep breaking those laws no matter what.
      Not to mention the reasons they agreed to those laws in the first place. Why did they agree to ban gas in WW1? Because both sides found weaponized gas far too inefficient. What didn’t get banned? Flamethrowers and shotguns. The Germans wanted shotguns banned, but for some unfathomable reason the Allies, who used the famous “Trench Gun” and found it very effective, refused to ban it!

      Sometimes it’s in your best interest to avoid killing to any rational extremes. Sometimes it’s in your best interest to kill everything that moves, regardless of what it is. Most of the time it’s somewhere in between.
      And generally it’s safe to assume that the people crying “murder” and the like actually have no damn clue about the facts.

  9. Daemian Lucifer says:

    “I dont know what weapons world war 3 will be fought with,but I know that world war 4 will be fought with power fists,and plasma rifles!”

    – The vault dweller

    1. Gruhunchously says:

      World War IV will be fought with the incinerator, and just the incinerator.

      The fight would probably be between Reginald Cuftbert and everyone else. It would be devastating.

      1. Zombie says:

        How will Reginald repopulate the world if he’s the only one living in it?

        1. Gruhunchously says:

          Cloning. The future of humanity is a race of Reginald Cuftberts.

          The bonnet industry will surely thrive.

          1. Chauzuvoy says:

            Bonnets and Flamethrowers. And maybe bricks. Because they’re really heavy, and not worth anything. So naturally they will be the most abundant resource in the World of Cuftbert

          2. newdarkcloud says:

            Cloning? Does that mean that Agent 47 was created with Reginald’s DNA!?

            1. Flavius says:

              This would certainly explain a lot about Rutskarn’s preferred play style.

              1. Jace911 says:

                Calling it his “preferred” playstyle implies he intends to royally screw up in the first five minutes of every mission and end up carving a path of destruction to his target in the least stealthiest way possible.

                1. anaphysik says:

                  He does, he just obviously doesn’t realize it yet.

  10. False Prophet says:

    Black Ops was apparently the nadir of this series, gameplay-wise, since there’s a mission where you can just follow the NPCs and not actually fire your weapon and still complete it.

    Storywise too, as, to paraphrase Yahtzee, the game is called “Black Ops” but you spend the whole game getting into huge run-and-gun battles blowing up airports and buildings just like every other MW game.

    1. Phantom Hoover says:

      I think Tom Francis said it best when he said the player’s role in that mission amounts to a camera dolly.

    2. decius says:

      Didn’t MW2 have the section where you could complete a mission by parental lockout?

      1. Jace911 says:

        If you’re referring to “No Russian”, you were given the option to skip it due to “graphic content”.

  11. Sigilis says:

    Did I miss something, or did it explain where the million soldiers on the plane came from? Did they just open the door and walk in? Were they in the luggage?

    Oh, and the rest of it was dumb. But that part was the one that I thought was dumbest.

    Edit: insufficient points for equivalence, last question redacted.

  12. Daemian Lucifer says:

    I too really dont get the point of single player in these games.Whats wrong with the team fortress model?Heck,even unreal tournament and quake arena did it way back.Just throw in a bunch of bots for practice,and thats your single player.This way you are just throwing money on something that no one wants and everyone will berate.

    As for that barrel,I guess a fuel barrel could explode if it was on fire.However,the problem would be setting it on fire in the first place,especially with bullets.Mythbusters have shown how hard that is to achieve.

    Its a shame you didnt reach the “family dies” scene.It would be a great intro or mass effect 3.Looking forward to the new season though.

    On the subject of death robot in civv,whats the point of that one?If they want a scifi thing in civ,why not make another call to power,or an expansion like in civiv,or something like that.Thats one of the multitude of problems I have with that game.

    1. Tse says:

      In this game you can explode cars with bullets, survive multiple lethal impacts without any lasting injuries, suck up bullets, kill enough people to solve world hunger, even get a power armor equivalent. Exploding red barrels seem expected.

      1. Rariow says:

        See, this is what just baffles me about these games. They’re supposed to be realistic, and they strive for photo realism… but then they’re so full of gameisms that any immertion that might have been created by the graphics is broken. I can forgive the whole “These horrid War Criminals are supposed to be heroes” aspect of the story if at least the gameplay is realistic whilst taking some breaks from reality to remain fun. I could forgive the whole “taking a million bullets to the face and eating rockets for breakfast” part if the story was a gritty and realistic depiction of military life. But CoD and Battlefield both TRY so hard for realism and just fall so flat of it that they’re not engaging in any way. They’re just close enough to realism to avoid being fun, but just far enough to avoid conveying the true “feeling” of the situation and thus manage to remove the two ways a game could be fun or interesting. By trying to have spectacle AND realism, Call of Duty’s trying to have its cake and eat it as well, but gets neither.

    2. Pattom says:

      Giant Death Robots are supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek allusion to future weapons technologies (the in-game encyclopedia explicitly references one being used to fight Godzilla). You need to research what’s essentially the whole tech tree to start building one; they’re significantly stronger than tanks yet cost exactly the same. Near as I can tell, it’s a failsafe in case of the rare event that you get to the end of the game without a clear winner. Whoever reaches the Giant Death Robot first is being given a not-so-subtle hint to start churning them out and (finally) crush the other players.

      1. LunaticFringe says:

        Unless of course you’re the unlucky civilization that isn’t sitting on any uranium deposits. Then you’re out of luck (though you can trade with city states I suppose).

        Though typically I find I have so much money in the end game of Civilization 5 I can typically just build the Pentagon, keep buying nuclear bombs and ICBMs, destroy all their infrastructure, and then just roll through their territory burning cities down (National Socialism doubles your strategic resources, allowing for an INSANE amount of nukes. Combine this with playing as Russia which doubles uranium already and you can effectively out-nuke anyone).

        1. Pattom says:

          The funny thing is that I forgot to mention Giant Death Robots ALSO require uranium to build. By the time you get them, you are way past the point where nuclear war has been considered and explored as an option.

          And I never saw the National Socialism policy, but that combination sounds hilariously imbalanced once you hit the late-game. Here I was afraid of a Cossack rush whenever I found myself sharing a border with Russia.

          1. LunaticFringe says:

            Russia under national socialism coupled with a large amount of territory is basically unbeatable in the late game if you do it right, I’ve had games where my neighbors would declare war on me, send their big armies to their borders, and I’d just drop two or three ICBMs on them (most uranium I ever managed to get was around 45 or something). Eventually there’s just a massive ring of radioactive wasteland around my country. Then I mass produce Death robots/gunships and basically rolled over everything they throw at me.

            1. Pattom says:

              I know which strategy I’m trying in my next game! I haven’t tried for a diplomatic victory yet, but can you still build a bunch of nukes and then vote for a non-proliferation treaty at the UN?

              1. LunaticFringe says:

                Not sure, typically when I try that strategy I disable diplomacy victory because I just want to render most of the world a radioactive husk controlled by Russian fascists. I believe that the nukes you have still exist but you just can’t build anymore.

                1. Pattom says:

                  Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping for. It’s always hilarious to bee-line down the tech tree so you can find uranium, then ban building nukes before anyone else can even start.

    3. kanodin says:

      To be fair reading the comments it seems like a lot of people really enjoyed the single player in these games up through Modern Warfare 1. After the first Modern Warfare is also when they started focusing on a yearly release schedule if I remember right.

      So the problem isn’t that nobody wants the singleplayer, but that Activision wants to release updates to the multiplayer every year to maximize profits and they throw in rushed singleplayer modes with it.

      I imagine both camps would be happy if they just decoupled the two modes and devoted a team to making stronger stories ala Modern Warfare 1 and a much larger team to the yearly multiplayer updates.

      1. John Magnum says:

        Call of Duty – 2003
        Call of Duty 2 – 2005
        Call of Duty 3 – 2006
        Call of Duty 4 – 2007
        Call of Duty: Black Ops – 2008
        etc.

        The yearly release schedule goes back to the beginning of the series.

      2. ps238principal says:

        I think the whole “don’t play the single-player” thing needs to be called “Borderlands Syndrome.”

      3. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Modern warfare 1 didnt expect its multiplayer to be suche a huge hit,so its understandable that it got lots of focus on single player as well.But 2 and 3 have multiplayer as its selling point,and most people have bought them simply because of it.So are they putting the single player in for the sake of tradition?

      4. Thomas says:

        It doesn’t really count as yearly updates, when they’ve got two/three developers making games on a 2/3 year development cycle and just releasing them alternately under different names.

        And as far as I’m aware, they basically have an almost completely seperate dev team do/help with the multiplayer too

  13. Littlefinger says:

    The more exasperated and annoyed the hosts are towards the game’s pathetic attempts to justify its setpieces, the more amused I am. Keep it up!

  14. Pattom says:

    Wait. Wait. I seriously had to pause the video for this. Does that prompt at around 17 minutes in seriously say to press E to take out the guard? As in, not the primary fire key or melee attack key, but the INTERACT key? The game is honestly telling you that killing this sleeping person who poses no threat to you is no bigger a deal ethically than turning on the lights?

    That’s fucked up! I’m not even playing this game, and it’s easily one of the darkest, grossest things I’ve ever seen a game do.

    1. Tse says:

      E is the stab key.

      1. Pattom says:

        Is it? I remember it being F when I used to play CoD4, and haven’t played the subsequent Modern Warfare games.

    2. Phantom Hoover says:

      …it uses the same button, so it’s ethically equivalent?

      1. Pattom says:

        That seems to be what the developers are suggesting. What do you normally use your “use” key to do? Pick up soda cans? Switch on the lights? Open doors? It’s more than a little weird that an execution is being presented as functionally similar as any one of those actions.

        1. Phantom Hoover says:

          OK, and to shoot someone in the head you’d use your index finger to pull the trigger. Does that mean that the design of guns is drawing some sort of equivalence between murder and typing the letter j on your keyboard?

          1. No, because the pressing letter J is different to clicking Mouse1.
            I’m extrapolating from kinaesthetic design here, but by using certain keys for certain things, game designers give information to the player, for instance ‘e’ in half life can pick up/drop items and push buttons, so it has a mental association with using your hands to do something harmless (or at least indirect).
            When you get to some point in a game and it adds another action to a certain button, that new interaction carries around the mental baggage and associations of things that were previously on that button.
            So, yes, it uses the same button so it is mentally/subconsiously percieved as being ethically equivalent.

            EDIT: See pattom’s comment a few rows down.

            1. Pattom says:

              This nailed pretty much everything I was thinking, so thanks very much, Andrew. I’d add that in your scenario, Phantom Hoover, the equivalence isn’t tied to muscle memory but the mechanism of operation. If I had an M16 fixed to my keyboard in such a way that pulling the trigger was necessary to type the letter J, then yeah, that would suggest equivalence between typing and shooting.

              1. Phantom Hoover says:

                All right, I stretched the analogy. You’re still reading an absolutely ridiculous message into a minor piece of interface design (based on an incorrect idea of the keymap, but whatever). I mean really, the game is excessively brutal but you’re taking it to extremes of pretension.

                1. Pattom says:

                  I understand now that I had the control scheme confused, yes. And for the record, I’m not trying to get on a soapbox and harp about this. That moment genuinely made me sick.

                  1. Phantom Hoover says:

                    I can understand that; it is ridiculously violent, and in an uncomfortably personal way, but were you really sick because the “kill person” button was also the “flip switch” button? That just seems a little outlandish.

            2. decius says:

              “F” is “interact”, while “E” is “Stab”. All of the prompts to interact say “press F to”.

              And yeah, I reckon that killing a sleeping guard is about equivalent to setting a breaching charge on a door, without knowing who is on the other side.

              1. Pattom says:

                Ok, I missed those prompts. I haven’t played the Modern Warfare games past CoD4, and I remember F being “melee attack” and E being “use.” I’ve always used E for that purpose in games, though, so it’s possible I rebound my keys. Oops.

    3. drlemaster says:

      Seeing how this game is cartoonish in other ways, I demand a “Saturday Morning Mode”, where I press E to knock out the guard by breaking a flowerpot over his head, then bind and gag him and put him in a closet. Never mind that the shantytown likely lacks both flowerpots and closets.

  15. Thomas says:

    Screw it, I’m going to rejoin the normal side on this. Not only does MW3 suck in many ways, it sucks because of publishers.

    Modern Warfare 1 took gaming by storm, it had a clever story with huge moments of impactful spectacle (as well as new fast fast fast gameplay) which really put the idea of a modern well equipped squad military into the players mind and showed them a bit of everything ala HL2 but with a wider context that meant it felt a bit more than a sniping section because they give you a sniper rifle here and it’s gameplay variation.

    But then it makes a crud-load of money and publishers want to make more of it. But what can they do? Spectacle is a one-time only thing. A Spec Ops sequel is going to fall flat on it’s face. It worked because it was showing us something new. So they’re forced to up the stakes in a stupid light fluffy empty manner. It still has lots of fans because the gameplay is still fun, the multiplayer is still great and it’s still a pretty spectacle to watch. Most of all there’s nothing else available in the market to fill it’s particular niche but the point of it from the original has gone.

  16. Jjkaybomb says:

    You know… this is probably a silly thing to complain about.
    But is everyone in this stealth section friggin BLIND?! How the heck are the character hiding in that really sparse grass? how come nobody notices these guys moving from point to point?

    1. newdarkcloud says:

      Magic military camouflage.

      Seriously, in real life that would make them harder to see. If the guys were actively searching for Price and his squad, I’m sure they would have been caught no problem. You’d be surprised how much people fail to notice details like that.

  17. Hastur says:

    I like to think that you’re not jumping into different characters, but simply a forgetful person with multiple personalities, a high metabolism, and a bulletproof skull.

    1. Chauzuvoy says:

      Call of Duty plots are really just long drawn-out retellings of the games of “Everyone is John” that the Dev team played.

    2. Jan says:

      I was waiting for Planescape: Torments spiritual successor. Off to the stores!

  18. guy says:

    Okay, where did the literally dozens of hijackers come form? Seriously, how did whatever crazy Russian ultra-nationalist group is apparently responsible for everything get those guys onboard?

    What? They hijacked the rescue helicopter too? Is the reveal going to be that the ultra-nationalists were acknowledged as the legitimate government of Russia while no one was looking and now only a handful of diehards supporting the old regime don’t obey their dictates? Because seriously, they managed to force down Bear Force Oneski and steal the rescue helicopter. That’s getting into territory that would make the Brotherhood of Nod say, “You’re joking. That’s a joke, right?”

    1. anaphysik says:

      I think at this point we need to take the name ribbing one step further to Bear Farce Oneski.

  19. PurePareidolia says:

    Not a $60 game! That’s so expensive compared to the double that price games cost here.

    Your $60 games are the reason I can actually play new games because retail is just so ridiculously expensive.

    Anyway, I’ve been trying to think of how to comment constructively on these games, but there’s really just nothing to add that hasn’t already been said – it’s dull, hyper-linear and the weapons feel like peashooters that can’t shoot straight, despite hitting like bricks.

  20. Astor says:

    a) Toto did LOTS of songs, dude! (Rosanna, Africa, Pamela, I’ll be over you, Hold the line, Can you hear what I’m saying?, A stranger in town and the Dune soundtrack to boot!)
    b) Africa is cool cos now we can kill nazi-commie-african-guerilla-warlords instead of simple nazi-commies. Too bad they were too much of a pussies to have nazi-commie-african-guerilla-child-soldiers, though.
    c) @Pattom lol here I was thinking you thought like me that having the “press E key thing” was bad because it was a “press button to win” that further took agency off of the player. But I guess you are a more moral person than me.

    1. ps238principal says:

      Toto also did the soundtrack to David Lynch’s “Dune.” Even if you dislike the film, the Philistines who slapped together the SyFy monstrosity liked the music enough to ape it every chance they could get.

      My favorite track is Take My Hand, which plays over the end credits and features the guitar riff played during the attack on the Imperial forces by Paul and the Fremen.

  21. Simon says:

    I know the single player campaigns in these games are nonsensical and stupid but for some reason I still like them. I suppose I never had trouble following the plot, and pretty much just enjoyed the set pieces as they came up.

    I think it is the game equivalent of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. They are hilariously silly but I love them anyway.

    1. Klay F. says:

      What pisses many people off about the game (not all, but many, including myself) is that this is a game they should be charging quarters for, not $60. Imagine if they still charged $60 for Time Crisis 2. Time Crisis 2 has gameplay mechanics just about as good as (or better than) the Modern Warfares. Yeah you can move around in MW3, but does that really add to the quality of the single player? Debatable.

      The bottom line is that the single player portion of the game belongs in a arcade eating up quarters, where it would be much better received by gamers.

      1. Minnow says:

        I’ve never seen anyone else claim CoD should be a literal arcade game…clearly this isn’t the thing that pisses off the majority, as you claim.

      2. Paul Spooner says:

        Simon has it right, the single player is there for the set pieces.
        In multi player, everyone needs an equal chance to look awesome. In single player, you can be awesome all by yourself without having to share the glory with the other players.
        Also, set-pieces are great for marketing and trailers. Single-player is where you put them so they are “part of the game play” and therefore ripe for using in advertisements.

  22. 13_cbs says:

    I’m a little confused by the vehement objection against the murder of the sleeping guard in the last part of the video. It was brutal, yes, and the devs almost certainly placed a guard there for the “duuude, it’s visceral!” effect it would have on many players, but I’m assuming that you were ordered to kill the guard so that Yuri could cover Price and Soap unmolested. Bloody and grossly brutal? Yes. Pointless? I’m not so sure about that.

    Or am I missing something?

    1. LunaticFringe says:

      The guard only really exists for the sake of seeing your character perform a bloody kill. In that sense he is entirely pointless.

      1. Rutskarn says:

        That’s exactly it. It wasn’t that it didn’t make any sense to kill the guard in-game, it’s that there was no reason for the developers to put a guard there, any more than there was a reason for them to–for example–put in a switch that lowered a ladder, or a button you have to press to progress in the level, or something. It’s a prompt for its own sake. There’s no actual *challenge* in sneaking up on the guard.

    2. Pattom says:

      My complaint is about the implications of the mechanical dissonance more than anything else. It’s one thing where I’m using a control input that I know correlates directly to shoot/stab/explode somebody, because then I can willingly take responsibility and know that yes, I chose to kill this person who was also trying to kill me. Being presented with a situation where the generic “use” input, one of the rare methods of non-violent interaction, is used to cut someone’s throat in their sleep? That completely negates the idea that killing someone has any kind of weight or responsibility to it. Not that there’s a lot of weight to walking from point A to B on a road paved with bodies. Suffice to say I’m thinking about shooters in a very different way now than I was when the video started.

      Also, the developers arbitrarily crafted a situation in which protecting Soap and Price meant murdering a guard who made the lethal error of napping in the player’s path. As noted in the video, they arbitrarily crafted an entire situation that forces you go to Africa, and this village specifically, in the first place. The first decision serves no purpose other than, I guess, to make you feel like a hardened badass; the second saves them from having to make new assets for the next multiplayer map in the pipeline. As the creators, they’re free to do whatever they like with their fiction, but that doesn’t mean they can force the characters into horrible, nonsensical situations and honestly say it’s necessary. It is absolutely pointless, in so much as the point of each scene is to end with as many people dead as possible.

      1. decius says:

        Napping isn’t what is lethal about the guard’s actions. Being in your path is what killed him- if he was awake but sitting down facing away from you, you would probably have just shot him.

    3. newdarkcloud says:

      The point is that the actual military doesn’t do that. They are far more likely to use non-lethal force to take him down. Killing someone’s buddy tend to piss that person off. A soldier wouldn’t want to deal with that (not the repercussions of actually killing a man when you didn’t have to would take a psychological toll).

      These heinous acts are glorified by the game, which is an awful thing to do.

      1. Phantom Hoover says:

        OK but AI squadmates are bad enough as it is without you having to deal with all of them unconsciously misaiming because they’re not psychologically prepared to kill. All games where killing is a major part of gameplay trivialise it, even bastions of consequence like Deus Ex.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Well,not all games.Spec ops doesnt trivialize it at all.

          But then,that is the main theme of that game.

        2. newdarkcloud says:

          But you don’t get a pretend to be a serious military game and then trivialize death like that. It just doesn’t work that way.

          Either embrace the thrill of killing or acknowledge the pain of death. Don’t try to do both. It comes across as cheap.

          1. Thomas says:

            I’m not really sure if I agree, apart from anything that list really is spec ops and nothing else and I’m not sure if MW3 is pretending to be a serious military shooter. At the very least, if they ever do attempt serious stuff, they delineate between that and the shooting/fun stuff pretty well.

        3. Gruhunchously says:

          He was a good man, what a rotten way to die.

  23. Adam P says:

    I am mildly amused that when Chris asked, “What’s Russian for one?” Rutskarn immediately said, “oneski.” You could just hear his lack of capitalization and the period at the end. It made me laugh.

  24. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

    The quotes for the first MW were pretty good. “Incoming fire has the right of way,” the price of various pieces of hardware, any of the contemporaneous quotes from elected officials. These seemed to reinforce the themes and visuals of the game: glorious, but expensive and hard to justify.

    MW3 seemed to be mailing it in.

  25. kanodin says:

    I know Chris has used multiple types of machine guns in this playthrough, but I cannot for the life of me see any differences in how they all fire, it’s all the same generic rapid fire. So what’s the point of having so much variety in these machine guns, is it just so gun enthusiasts don’t find the game unrealistic? How absurd is that they accurately portray the weapons of both sides but they won’t explain why a Typhoon submarine is parked outside New York or how dozens of terrorists got on the plane.

    1. John Magnum says:

      As far as I know, gun enthusiasts DON’T find CoD’s handling particularly realistic. They futz around with rates of fire, recoil, acoustics, etc. to keep them all in an extremely narrow band of performance with a handful of deliberate outliers that lie elsewhere on a damage/accuracy sliding scale.

      1. SoldierGeek says:

        With regard to absolute performance you’re right … but sometimes a playable game takes precedence.

      2. Deadfast says:

        Accurately portray weapons of both sides? No, not really. In fact not at all. Nobody is using the weapons they should be using (AK-74M for the Russians, M16A4/M4 for the Americans) and bunch of the weapons are modeled wrong. At least it isn’t as bad as it was in CoD: Spec Ops where 90% of the weapons were anachronistic, some by up to 40 years.

        In short, they have a bunch of weapons for you to unlock in multiplayer, might as well throw them in singleplayer. After all, you have a sever case of ADHD and need a need thing that goes boom every 3 minutes.

  26. The Hokey Pokey says:

    I don’t know about Helicopter crashes, but 90+% of people involved in plane crashes survive. That is of course assuming they are in their seats.

    1. OK, but the plane was ripped in half while it was flying. Most plane crashes aren’t that bad.

      1. The Hokey Pokey says:

        Actually, it was on the ground when the tail ripped off. Which in itself is rather unrealistic, as airplanes have a lot of safety measures to ensure that the fuselage remains intact in extreme conditions. Several things should have happened before it got to that point, which goes to show that movies (and this game might as well be a movie) don’t care about reality if it gets in the way of spectacle.

    2. decius says:

      Most “plane crashes” are actually emergency landings where the pilot didn’t just descend seven vertical miles in ten minutes, just like most motor vehicle accidents aren’t really best described as “car crashes”.

      A good landing is one you can walk or swim away from. A fair landing is one where you need someone to take you out of the plane. A bad landing is one where you need someone to take the plane out of you. By the standards of aviation, Bear Force Oneski made a good landing.

      1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

        I got the impression this was less a crash than the pilot’s attempt to break up the attack. It’s like the scene at the beginning of Air Force One where they try to land at the military base because once the plane is on the ground the terrorists will never be able to get it back in the air. That’s why the Russians were able to respond so quickly – to bad they picked a military base Makarov had already subverted.

  27. Duhad says:

    Hold on Josh did a Civ V lets play? Where? Is there a link? Is it online? THE AMERICAN PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO ANSWERS!

      1. Duhad says:

        Thank you very much.

  28. X2Eliah says:

    I’d say for their next game, they should take quotes from the previous games’s official forums (possibly the fan-fic sections?)

    To all the people being righteously inflamed about that slit-neck-of-sitting-guy piece:
    Have you played any recent stealth games? (Idk, MGS / Clancy / something. Did Thief have backstabs?)
    How many people have you executed – heck, lopped their heads off – in Skyrim?
    How many people had their bones mangled, necks snapped, carbotitanium blades added to their diet in DX:HR?
    How many supernatural stealth kils are you planning to do in Dishonoured?
    How many enemy necks & arms were broken the last time you played Batman: Arkham Asylum/City?

    I just don’t see this one instance being any more offensive than the aforementioned ones.

    1. AJ_Wings says:

      All the games you mentioned except Skyrim and recent Clancy games gives you the option to non-lethaly take down your enemy. I think the objection comes from that you’re already a bullet soaking superman, would it be so much to actually choke the guy to unconsciousness instead of jamming your knife to his throat?

      1. X2Eliah says:

        “Choke the guy to unconsciousness”..

        I believe any remark on that is unnecessary ^^

        1. AJ_Wings says:

          care to explain why?

          1. newdarkcloud says:

            Realistically speaking, choking a man unconscious runs the risks of doing serious brain damage. It would be much more preferable to bind and gag them.

            1. AJ_Wings says:

              I agree. But if we go by video-game logic, incredibly screwed up logic, it’s a viable way to take down your opponent non-lethaly. That’s what most video games taught me anyway…

              1. X2Eliah says:

                That’s the point, though. I was amused by such a frankly brutal, unrealistic and permanently harmful method being “the good solution”. Looking at it on its own, you are NEVER the good person if you “choke a guy to uncosciousness”.

                Also, how messed up videogames are, that the default go-to “nonlethal takedown” is choking, as opposed to bind&gag / knock out (which is also damn risky) / use sleep drugs in a cloth / syringe.

                1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

                  1.) There is no such thing as a safe chokehold. Both blood and air chokes can cause brain damage even when done correctly.

                  2.) Nor is there anything as a safe way to knock someone unconcious. If a blow renders someone unconcious for more than a few seconds, it has also likely killed or seriously injured the person.

                  3.) And without measuring the target’s weight (at the very least) and getting the needle in a vein on the first try, there is no safe and quick way to drug someone.

                  4.) As a result, any attempt to “bind and gag” is going to require either the sentry surrender without making a sound, or that you wrestle him to the ground and flex-cuff him without alerting half the village. And that’s not going to happen. This is, incidentally, why it takes five police officers to wrestle someone to the ground safely, why police don’t use chokes and blows to the head (always to the body and limbs), and why they are so interested in TASERs, PHSRS, Dazzlers, and irritants.

                  The sentry had to die. That he never saw it coming is bad luck, but there is nothing wrong with that kill.

                  1. newdarkcloud says:

                    I think he was just pointing out the usual video game absurdity. I played Thief by Blackjacking as many guards as I could. I chuckled to myself knowing this is pretty absurd that they’ll all just wake up and bee fine.

                    I think the only game I played the had realistic non-lethality was Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. The anesthetic only knocked people out for a few seconds. The one thing made me never use it and instead rely on just killing as few people as possible. Sometimes not adhering to reality can be a good thing.

                    It’s just one of those things gamers have learned to take for granted.

                    1. X2Eliah says:

                      Yeah, exactly :)

                    2. Exetera says:

                      Anesthetic could be used to KO for several minutes in Hitman 2, you just had to hold the button down for a while.

                    3. newdarkcloud says:

                      WHAT!? Why didn’t the game tell me that? Son on a…

    2. newdarkcloud says:

      Thief does have backstabs, BTW. It was the recommended way to take care of some of the undead enemies that don’t come back to life.

    3. Sumanai says:

      I think context matters in this case. In a fantasy setting like Skyrim death is cheap, for example. When you take “modern realistic” setting rules may change for people.

      Also it’s not a challenge, like killing an active enemy, it’s just there to create a “visceral moment where you stab a dude in the throat”, which quite understandably puts some people ill at ease.

    4. Pattom says:

      Maybe if you took a second to read all of my comments, you’d see that I mistook the key being used in that scene as “use,” rather than “melee attack.” My complaint was specifically that when you use the proper inputs for performing violent actions, you can take responsibility for those actions, which doesn’t really happen if you bind the action to murder someone to the same button you’d use for inane actions like turning on the lights. That control scheme screams out, “You can kill them without thinking about it because they aren’t really people,” and that, combined with the previous talk about the characters’ war crimes, made me feel really gross about the game.

      1. Ryan says:

        This is part of what sells Arma II’s clunky controls for me: It’s such a concerted effort to ready, aim, and fire a weapon that I understand the gravity of the action.

    5. Rutskarn says:

      The point is not, “Oh, noes, we had to stab a guy in the neck.” The point was, “Why would the devs put in a guy sitting in a chair facing away from us who can’t detect us unless we blow an air horn, then ask us to stab him in the neck, given that this is about as challenging as opening a door and isn’t a lot of fun?”

      There’s no moral outrage. I’m fine shanking the guy, but it’s a pointless boondoggle from a gameplay perspective.

      Backstabbing is actually my favorite way to kill something in a game or RPG. I like the tension and buildup as I get into position, and I like how the actual conflict isn’t a dragged-out war of attrition and balance of resources–it’s just the decisive punctuation mark on my gradual approach. This isn’t that.

      1. X2Eliah says:

        Fair enough. I didn’t mean to say that you were showing moral outrage in the video. It was aimed at a few commenters in this thread.

        1. Thomas says:

          I’ve got some moral outrage about it. The thing is, because it’s gameplay useless, it’s clearly been put there by developers for narrative/context reasons. It’s there so you can feel like you’re a military badass on a stealth mission. But that kinda breaks the gaming contract, that we’ll slaughter a gazillion mooks providing the developers ensure that they are mooks and not people. We’re meant to enjoy the game, not that people are dead and whilst this doesn’t fully cross that line, if you’re just a little non-immersed, critical, today, it does ask you do that

    6. somebodys_kid says:

      My only objection to that scene was how messy that type of kill is. Making pools out of your enemies’ blood is not a very stealthy way to kill people. Choking with a wire is a better way to kill him (though admittedly less dramatic and “cool”)

      1. newdarkcloud says:

        47’s signature weapon.

        “Hello 47, welcome back to Africa.

        Your objective is to kill the head of a known African arms dealer and obtain the drivers for a series of American missiles. The client has also requested that you assassinate a random guard and take his Sniper Rifle.”

    7. newdarkcloud says:

      True. I guess some of the people here (myself included) have become just slightly more sensitive to it after hearing Shamus discuss Spec Ops.

      And a lot of us have a grudge against Modern Warfare for starting a lot of the trends in modern gaming that are really stifling, like the yearly release schedule, heavy reliance on multiplayer, lack of visual contrast, etc. and are looking for anything to criticize.

      This sounds a little sad when you put it in text like that.

      1. JPH says:

        Modern Warfare did not start the heavy reliance on multiplayer, the lack of visual contrast, or the yearly release schedule. All those things had been going on long beforehand.

        1. newdarkcloud says:

          True, though I would argue that they had a hand in popularizing them.

          1. JPH says:

            For the record, the “no visual contrast in shooters omg everything is brown!!” can be seen as far back as Quake 1.

            And I’d say the heavy reliance on multiplayer can probably be traced back to the Unreal Tournament/Quake 3 Arena period.

            1. LunaticFringe says:

              Modern Warfare, however, has the honour of emerging during a period where gaming was just becoming more ‘mainstream’ (for lack of a better word) and its multiplayer actively encouraged ‘casuals’ (again, for lack of a better word). It’s popularity during that time helped to shift design in FPSs. You could easily link Modern Warfare’s emergence during a dramatic shift in the gaming market and its rejection by many gamers to the pseudo-culture war occurring now between ‘casuals’ and ‘hardcore gamers’.

            2. Daemian Lucifer says:

              Ut and q3 were multiplayer only.You didnt have a single player beyond the “bots in the arena”.And thats all fine,nothing wrong with that.If you want your game to be purely for multiplayer,then make it so.Dont slap on some lame single player in just because the prequels had it.

    8. Ryan says:

      They thing is, all of the games listed not only give you non-lethal options, many of them reward you for avoiding him completely. And All of them (Well, maybe all, haven’t played the Arkham games) give you the agency to choose whether or not you kill them. Here it was unavoidable, the only winning state, as proclaimed by the HUD-that-is-God, as predetermined by the designers.

  29. ? says:

    “Red barrels will explode when shot” – Alexander the Great

    1. Syal says:

      So that was how he did it!

  30. Littlefinger says:

    After watching this documentary I’ve come to the conclusion that MW3 is 1000% better with Bulletstorm dialogue

  31. Phantos says:

    Did Rutskarn plug “Sequelitis”, or was he referring to Activision’s phobia of change?

  32. Andrew_C says:

    Actually Africa did have (military) nuclear infrastructure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction and there are still civilian and research reactors in the RSA and Egypt and formerly in the DRC and Libya. Also Southern and Central Africa have huge reserves of Uranium ore.

    So unfortunately I find myself trying to justify the stupidity of that mission.

    1. 4th Dimension says:

      Yeah, but this place they are in doesn’t look like SA or Egypt. It looks more like Kongo or the like. SA certainly wouldn’t tolerate warlords on their turf. And for Egypt, there is too many trees, and people are too dark skinned.

      1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

        They’re not hunting for the manufacturing base, they’re hunting for the arms dealer. This at least has precedent from the prior game, where Makarov smuggled his guns through Brazil. Same deal here. Africa is a major weapons smuggling area, at least in part because it’s the last place on earth with governments too weak to crack down on it.

        1. 4th Dimension says:

          Okay, but they aren’t trying to shut down his gunrunning operation, but interrogate him about something about nukes. Somehow he knows something about Makarov’s nuclear plans. And that’s unbelievable, that a two bit African warlord (let face it, these guys are only big on local level, when they kill noncombatants with pangas) would know about Makarov’s SUPREME PLAN OF DOOOM.

          1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

            I know the plot is stupid, but let’s at least get what we’re mocking right. Makarov is trying to smuggle chemical weapons into Europe, and he is doing it through Africa. This actually does make a certain amount of sense. From central Africa to Libya, smuggled across to Italy and from there spread to the rest of Europe (it’s in fact a major problem in Europe that the open borders and inconsistent customs makes smuggling very easy).

            Nicolai knew that the smugglers were going to assemble the weapons in this village for transport, so Price, Soap, and Yuri go to stop them. They miss, so they track down the warlord to find out about the packages he sent, or where his money came from, and this gets them the reference number on the package sent to London, which they feed to SAS which raids the docks leading to the scene with the kid -which yeah, was horribly done.

  33. Irridium says:

    It’s funny, I never shoot exploding barrels. When I was younger I saw it as the game telling me how to play. And I thought “well screw you game, I play how I want” and so began my quest to never shoot an exploding barrel unless it was absolutely necessary to advance in the game. Still going strong today.

    Screw you game, I do what I want.

    1. LunaticFringe says:

      The game then laughs at your feeble attempt at free will within its gilded cage.

  34. FlashFire344 says:

    I know I know, people know this, but I find it funny how many of these missions and sections are pulling from their vast resources and copy paste functions. I have played all three MW games (plus black ops) I have to say, I am getting bored of knifing the guy from behind while he sits/stands/eats/snoozes/ties his shoes/counts to 100 while he waits for his mandatory death sequence.

    1. FlashFire344 says:

      On that note. thanks spoiler warning team, I now have to go install all my MW and play them…thanks.

      1. somebodys_kid says:

        Really? Given the linearity of the COD shooters, my play through would surely be very nearly identical to what they’re doing (though I wouldn’t get hit and die by a crashing car…honest!) So now I don’t have to play the MW3 single player!

        1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

          Astonishingly, it’s not. Chris plays nothing like I do. I’m more of a cover-to-cover, work with squadmates kind of player.

          1. Deadfast says:

            Work with who? Do the AI squadmates actually do something now? I always thought they were specifically programmed not to.

            1. Zombie says:

              They stand in your way and yell at you if: You’re not going fast enough, you’re not doing what that game tells you to do, and/or you’re not causing enough EXPLOSIONS!

              1. Forumrabbit says:

                Sounds like Red Faction: Guerilla/Red Faction the original.

                Could always do with more explosions.

            2. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

              In my mind, I am part of a squad doing awesomeness. In reality, I’m sure they’re mostly just soaking up bullets.

            3. postinternetsyndrome says:

              Actually, one of the iconic things about the MW series is how it has taken “competent AI companions” a bit too far, letting them have all the coolest moments and relegating you to be generic rifle support for their heroics. Case in point: The video mentioned higher up where a dude completes the first level of Black Ops on the hardest difficulty level without firing a single shot. Apart from the one mandatory scripted event where you automatically fail the game after a timer runs out if you don’t shoot at a particular target. lol.

          2. somebodys_kid says:

            Interesting. I’m watching the video and prioritizing targets and cover spots and Chris and I are mostly in sync. I might linger a bit longer and take in the sights more but for the most part it would be the same.

  35. Dante says:

    Wait wait wait….Ruts has a girlfriend?

    1. MediocreMan says:

      I always shipped him with Chris, myself.

      1. Thomas says:

        No!! You’re only saying that because Rumbles is too true to joke about, don’t scare me like that

    2. JPH says:

      Yeah, a Canadian supermodel girlfriend. He keeps telling us about her but never shows us any pictures.

      1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

        Clearly I’m not up on my memes here. I thought it was Ruts and Mumbles, and Josh had the Canadian girl friend. Or is it Josh and Mumbles… and you know what, I’m just not gonna think about this any more.

      2. Lame Duck says:

        He’s also started to end his streams with things like “accidentally” not muting his mic as he gets a phonecall from his “girlfriend”.

    3. anaphysik says:

      No, Ruts is still too young to have a girlfriend. Obviously “[his] lady” in that anecdote was either his mother dearest or his cat Mrs. Pawtticoat.

  36. Hitch says:

    Chris really does go out of his way to make sure we continue to think of him as “the new guy.”

    “Let’s just talk about a completely different game.” he says mockingly.

    Chris, this is Spoiler Warning. The show that combines gameplay footage with occasional comments about the game being played and far ranging discussion about anything else, most likely games not actually being played on the show. (Although, games coming up in future seasons, or played in previous seasons are quite popular. We’ve probably already heard more about Mass Effect 3 than we will during the actual season devoted to that game.)

    1. Phantos says:

      “Welcome back to our roundtable discussion on Mass Effect 3.

      Now Josh, before you were about to fight that Reaper, I believe you were making a point about the Russian stock exchange, and its’ effects on inner-city drug gangs?”

  37. Airsoft says:

    The most annoying thing about Modern warfares singleplayer is that the devs knew that their character weren’t unique or interesting enough to be remembered. Even the series main villian needs to have his name displayed on screen during his big reveal in the helicopter ‘remember who this guy is everyone, yes, that’s right, it’s Makarov, how could you tell?’

  38. GiantRaven says:

    I like how the one time the player is given the dignity of being allowed to open a door for himself…he gets shot in the face for making the effort.

  39. anaphysik says:

    Did… Did Campster just up and MURDER a chicken? Unprovoked, with no mitigating circumstance of subsequent frying, roasting, or grilling? That’s sufficient for a charge of crimes against gallinity!

    1. X2Eliah says:

      Yeah, that was truly a galling moment.

  40. Tse says:

    Can anyone tell if Makarov is using a Makarov?

  41. Lunok says:

    its an fn five-seven. its designed for piercing body armor

  42. Reach says:

    Wonder what death quotes will come up in the next CoD game…

    “Failure is prohibited, until it is mandatory”
    -Shamus Young

    Better yet, how creepy would it have been if it had come up after you got capped by Makorov?

  43. BenD says:

    I heard that Tiny Tower reference, Chris.

Thanks for joining the discussion. Be nice, don't post angry, and enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be fun. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked*

You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

You can make things italics like this:
Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your <i>father</i>?

You can make things bold like this:
I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

Leave a Reply to JPH Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.