Also if you are talking about Apple’s line of computers, get this right. iMac are Apple’s desktop PC’s and MacBook’s are Apple’s laptop PC’s. Use the image below for Microsoft’s and Apple’s operating systems.

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?

http://www.youtube.com/v/Se12y9hSOM0?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0

• I can set any song as a ringtone, just by selecting it – for free
• I can control my TV’s, Live
• I can show photos from my phone on my TV just by flicking them on there – for free
• I can get turn-by-turn navigation with Google Maps – for free
• I get visual AND transcribed voicemails with Google Voice – for free
• Those little App icons on the screen, I can put them anywhere I want – top, bottom, right, left – wherever
• AT&T network – not any more
• I can load apps from anywhere – without having to hack my phone

Apple posted another video showing another smartphone, this time the Droid X, losing bars when held in the death grip. Problem is other people can’t recreate this, even Engadget can’t do it. The other thing is Apple made a big deal about the media blowing this “Antennagate” thing up. We know Apple, some smartphones lose bars if held just right. Move on.

I would just like to point out that Bungie hasn’t released a game outside the Halo world since 2001. That is all.

My girlfriend got a Palm Pre when they were first released. While I think the Pre makes a better paper weight then a phone, I really like the OS and the way it does multitasking. If you put it on a more power phone or even better a touch screen tablet, you might have something that can go head to head with the iPad.

It seems more clear now why Google made the Nexus One: it’s hard to get a phone with the default Android OS. It also seems clear that Android’s openness is largely about being open to the carriers’ ability to customize the user experience.

This is one thing that I agree with John on. There should be more phones with stock Android. As much as I like my HTC Evo I wish it had, at least, Android 2.1 and I could install 2.2 later. And its not the the Sense UI is bad, it really is pretty good, I just would like to run what Google released or be able to pick what I want on the phone, Sense or stock Android, at the time I get the phone.

With the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch and can see why location-based data is needed. What I don’t understand is why Apple needs to know where I am when I am using my MacBook. If I am using Chrome and Google wants to know where I am using HTML5, does that info go back to Apple and if so why?

Apple offers location-based services on the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, Iphone 4, iPad WiFi/3G and on older iPhones, iPad WiFi iPod touch and Macs running Snow Leopard, and Windows or Macs running the Safari 5 Web browser, albeit to a more limited extent.

You can read the full document after the break.

apple response to markey-barton http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=34546602&access_key=key-20k2imqpqvs4klgarzp2&page=1&viewMode=list