Its that time of year again. Time to find out how much you suck at life from some teenager high on junk food and pop. It is Call of Duty time in the form of Modern Warfare 3. But this time there are two main things that are working against it. COD has competition with the release of Battlefield 3 and the fact that this COD had three different developers working on it. Im going to only be covering the single player part of the game because I’m not very much into multiplayer.

You start right where Modern Warfare 2 ended and of course you are right in the middle of the action from the start. Your mission is to find and stop the Russian super terrorist Vladimir Makarov. That is it. There is not much more you need to know about the story and that is one of the biggest problems with the game. COD has a style that it has followed from the start with over the edge action. This is what made it stand out from the start but now its just over played and over used. You know from the start of every level that shit is going to hit the fan and its aimed right at you. You’re going to kill a lot of people, get yelled at and told what to do, and you can’t save the world without blowing up a few things. COD has become predicable and borderline boring.

What gets me the most is the lack of depth to the game. By that I mean everything that makes you feel like your in the middle of that action. COD does nothing to do that. It just puts you in the middle of a Hollywood action movie and tell you “Do everything this man says!”. To point this out we need to compare it to Battlefield 3.

Sound

This is MW3. Or MW2. Does it really matter?

Other then the visually, sound can make or break a game by itself. There are sounds that you can hear by them self and know what game its from. Take the grenade from Half-Life 2 or the railgun from Quake 3. When your game takes place in modern times along with hundreds of other FPS’s it’s hard to stand out and this is a problem with MW3. It doesn’t even try. While the guns sound different they are all flat and dull. BF3 on the other hand is a thing of audio bliss. All the sounds are clean, crisp, and very different from each other. In the very start of the game you have a sniper trying to shoot you on a rooftop and every time he takes a shot at you it hits you not in the game but in your mind. Its hard to make you understand by just reading this but you feel it and because of that you get pulled into the game more and that always makes for a better game.

Visuals

If you have played MW2 then MW3 is going to look the same. There really is nothing that I can think of that made me stop just to look at because it looked so much better then MW2. If anything the levels are more open with some more detail but over all it is the same as it was two years ago. BF3 in short is stunningly beautiful. Take a look at any gameplay videos in HD and then keep in mind that when playing it that it looks even better.

Story

The funny thing about the story in MW3 is that if you ask anyone that has played it they can’t remember what its all about. They will tell you about hunting down some terrorist thats about it. I don’t even remember the ins and outs of it. Some guy yells at me and I shoot people.

After I got done with the campaign I was so tired of the over the top action I was happy that this is the last Modern Warfare game. And that got me thinking of why I was so tired of it all because I thought the first MW was a great game. MW2 stepped up the game and then MW3 left me feeling empty. What happen between the last two? Then it hit me. The Infinity Ward that made MW3 is not the same Infinity Ward that made the Call of Duty games before it. The key people responsible for bring the COD to the household name that it is walked away. For that reason more then any is why MW3 feels more like MW2.5.

This screenshot sums up every Modern Warfare game.

Now that the Modern Warfare story has played itself out there is only one thing that interest me about Call of Duty. Now What?

I don’t buy that many games because of two reasons. One is that I hate to pay $60 just to play it once since I am not a big multiplayer person. The other is replay value. In order for me to buy a game new it has to have a good amount of replay value and that is one of the biggest reasons I love racing games. But this game, from the footage below, gave me some more reasons that I might buy this new.

First is the damage. Forza 2 had damage but not like this. Wheel flying off, parts going everywhere. Now thats cool. Another, and one I have been waiting for, is you can really roll your car. This something that you can’t do in PGR, Forza or Gran Turismo. Add to that open wheel cars and you got me hooked.

Just watch the video below. You looking forward to this?

So what you do is go to here and bookmark it. You should see a register page to win a trip to Xbox headquarters. When you fill in the info all you need is two characters for the screen name and password and put in some fake email address. Make sure the year in the DOB is before 1994. Now click submit.

On the next page it will ask for a access code. Just click on “I don’t have an access code” and it will give you one. Be sure to copy that somewhere because you will be using it a lot. Go back now and put in the access code it gave you. Below that is the crappy word verification. If you can’t read it just click below the image and get a new one. Once that is done click Lets Play.

On the next page its going to say that your not a winner but you really are. So you don’t go away mad after all that crap you have to type in they give you a 48-hour trial code. Copy it down and go back to the page that you bookmarked. Log out and go back to the bookmarked page again. Now just do it over to get another 48-hour trial code. Just change the user name and email address and keep using the access code from the first time. You can keep doing this over and over.

Ya, we get it Bungie. Halo 3 is about to be released. And like Gears of War it is going to be the best game ever. Problem is that I don’t care anymore. You have Master Chief everywhere. Its just a game. We buy it, we play it and then me more on. Look at BioShock. Pretty good game but I am done with it. Not going to play it again. Now for you multi player people this might just be the game your looking for.

And if your a Halo collecter, man you got your work cut out for you so let me help. You can get the Xbox 360 Limited Edition Halo 3 Wireless Headset. Its green. Maybe the Xbox 360 Limited Edition Halo 3 Wireless Controller Brute or the Xbox 360 Limited Edition Halo 3 Wireless Controller Spartan. By the way they are $20 then the normal wireless controller. Better yet you can your the Limited Edition Halo 3 Wireless Controller on your Special Edition Xbox 360™ Halo 3 Console. Its green too. And when your not using all your special Xbox 360 stuff you can use your Special Edition Halo Zune. Rock out to the sounds of Halo when reading all the Halo news with the Halo 3 RSS Reader and drinking your special Halo Mountain Dew.

Its not that I don’t want to play Halo 3 because I do. My point is that you don’t need to do all this needless ads. This is the Medal Gear Solid for Xbox. You could of cut the ads by 3/4 and still have it be the huge hit its going to be. The thing that I am looking forward to seeing is if its going to be as good as say BioShock. Its been hyped more that anything be is it going to pay off. Let me say this now, just because you sold more copy’s that any other game in no way means that it way a good game.

The part that sucks the most is that I was ready to pay the $60 for the game, something that I never do for a single player game, and nobody has it. I even went into a place I hate (Blockbuster) to see if it was there and of course it wasn’t. But the good part is that since I can’t find it I just saved $60 because now I will just wait till I can rent it for a few days and it will only cost me $5. On the other hand I am still going to spend the $60 when The Orange Box comes out.

But lets say that it didn’t take a clip to kill someone. One or two shots and your dead. Health pack or a medic are nowhere to be seen and there isn’t a wooden crate for hundreds of miles. Now you must use tactics. Run and gun is going to get you killed quick. Thats tactical gaming and the best known for this is the Rainbow Six games (ok maybe not all the Rainbow Six games). But Rainbow Six isn’t the only tactical game out there. The list is huge ranging from First Person Shooters to flight simulators. Some do it better than others and some get it all wrong.

Thats where dslyecxi.com comes in. Dslyecxi has put together what I think is the best overview of tactical games out there. He covers everything from the impact of goggles on your vision to what effects obstructions should have on your weapon handling. Everything is covered here and there are many videos so you can clearly understand the points he is trying to get across. So if your into tactical gaming be sure to read his article Tactical Gaming Done Right and the follow up Best of Tactical Gaming: Infiltration.

From the beginning, Prey was designed multiplayer, user modification, and scalability in mind. Prey even included a C like scripting language, much like Quake and Unreal have. The 3D engine started off as software only, but later added hardware support for 3D cards. Also dynamic lighting was a big feature of the early engine. The online portion included a feature where the player is able to seamlessly jump from one server to another. This might not sound like much today, but in early 1996 this was huge.

If you have played the game or you are thinking about getting it on Steam you will want to read this.

I check out Major Nelson’s podcast last night were he had an interview with Ken Levine, Creative Director of Irrational Games, creators of BioShock. He describes the demo as something of a directors cut were you start at the beginning of the game. You just lived through a plane crash and there just one tall building for you to swim to. From there everything pretty much is trying to kill you but the guy your talking to on a radio. Hes trying to get you to help him save his wife and kid.

The thing that really got me was the level of detail all over. From the 50′s posters and rugs to the music that plays almost everywhere. The architecture fells right. The lighting fells right. To me it just felt like everything comes together just right. The only thing that I didn’t like was the guy on the radio. My 360 is setup with optical out so I have 5.1 but for some reason he was really hard to understand at times. I don’t know if thats the way it is for everyone or just my setup. Other than that I can’t wait to check out more of Rapture.