Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (360)

I have no idea what MW3 is about.

I know what the plot is, such as it is, and who the characters are, such as they are, but I have no idea what it is about.

Following the tremendously successful Modern Warfare and its sequel Modern Warfare 2, MW3 picks up directly where the plot threads of those games have left off. The world is at war, a war created by the machinations of a single man who has manipulated tensions to drive Russia and the United States into open conflict.

The Long Walk: Call of Duty Elite

Finally announced at the CODXP event today, the paid service part of Elite contains all DLC including map-packs and celebrity video content delivered weekly for $50/yr. This comes on top of the previously announced free content which includes a Bungie-net style web interface that allows for stat tracking, heat maps and tweaking loadouts while not in-game. Interfaces with mobile apps will allow players to review their gameplay and loadout's as well. DLC will hit subscribers first then roll out a la carte to the rest of the community.

COD-Blocked: Call of Duty Black Ops (360)

Playing an FPS on a console is one of those things in life I hate, like people who cross the parking lot diagonally, strolling along as if the entire space was theirs alone.A long time PC gamer, I am spoiled by the responsive accuracy of the mouse and keyboard. I generally loathe twin stick shooting, as I ALWAYS disable the aim-assist, preferring to actually try to shoot what I aim at.

I am not often successful and in fact the Halo series are close to the only shooters that feel tight and responsive to me on console. Somehow Bungie's secret sauce of loose responsive vertical movement and I assume some kind of predictive code combined with satisfying spray'n'pray weapons make it feel right.

Call Of Duty:Black Ops does not.

Set during the cold war, with a flashback to the familiar and well-worn territory of World War II, COD:BLOPS follows soldier/special ops/secret agent? Alex Mason. Voiced by Sam Worthington, Mason's most distinguishing feature is his lineage from the little know Australian area of Alaska, as Worthington's accent veers more than a drunk kitten on a lazy susan.

The story opens with an interrogation of the player as Mason, and flashes back to the experiences that lead to this moment. Hopping from Cuba, to Russia, to Vietnam, COD:BLOPS follows the now formulaic COD path of telling the story from multiple viewpoints, in multiple locations, though never straying from the corridor shooting that have long defined this series. Often more like an interactive movie, the player is directed from checkpoint to checkpoint in breathless fashion, interrupted only long enough to show a scripted sequence or a cut scene.It is even possible to complete entire missions without firing a shot, as seen here.

While the previous entry in the franchise flirted with controversy in the "No Russian" mission (an essentially empty exercise in shock rather than meaning), developer Treyarch avoids such potential stumbles by offering nothing new at all. In an early mission, set during the Souyez launches in Russian, the game hands the player reskinned versions of the weapons used in MW2. The anachronism is so blatant that the game's dialogue even addresses it as the player fires a Javelin missile, something not yet invented for 30 years.

COD:BLOPS picks up steam during a series of sequences set in Vietnam. Drenched in cliched atmosphere, wide scale battles rage in and around entrenched defenses as aerial napalm strikes and massive lines of explosive detonate and annihilate scores of enemies, generating real chaos. Eventually, the battle is taken underground in a tunnel rat sequence that while heavily scripted has some truly memorable moments. Unfortunately the game takes a turn for the worse in cribbing whole sequences from movies like The Deer Hunter and Full Metal Jacket, culminating in one of the worst missions in recent history, an on-rails helicopter battle using a Russian Hind.

Funneled up river to the next checkpoint, the player never actually controls the vehicle, with only slight vertical and lateral movement possible. Essentially a light-gun version of a strafing run, the control scheme becomes hideously incompetent when facing enemy helicopters. Unable to maneuver in any reasonable fashion, the dogfight degenerates into literal circle strafing to avoid incoming fire while peppering enemies with missiles. Unfortunate and frustrating, the sequence adds nothing to game but additional playtime.

The Infamous Hind Sequence

As the story progresses it becomes more bombastic and less coherent, eventually morphing into a James Bond style megalomaniacal master plan that abandons all sense of history.While COD:BLOPS does have a far less dense, more linear and clear storyline than the Modern Warfare games, it undercuts itself by never taking the time to develop any of the characters, or even explore the historical context of the time period.

Empty of any meaning or even risk, COD:BLOPS delivers on the promise of a COD game by repurposing tech and design formula without bringing anything new to the equation, save for an after-credits level that is the only inspired and truly entertaining part of the game.

Unsurprisingly it is already a massive success, ensuring this franchise will continue.

An Un-Winnable Battle: Medal of Honor (360)

Full disclosure, this game is short. Like Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 short. Like LOTR Extended Editions short.

At 4-5 hours its hella short. That aside, I liked it a lot more than Modern Warfare 2. Unlike the Bruckheimer-esque bombastic nonsense narrative of MW 2, MOH has a deliberate and specific pace. While it outright steals mechanics and set-pieces from MW 2, the singular vision of the game is to reveal at least some of the reality of modern combat. Weapons and tactics are reasonably realistic and the game has a couple of truly climatic set-pieces that grip the player in a brief unfettered bout of pure tension.

Switching between Tier 1 operators infiltrating Al Qaeda camps in and around the mountains of Afganistan, Army Rangers sent to secure areas "cleared" by the Tier 1's, and in select few sections, in vehicle missions, the most notable of which is as an Apache gunner, MOH never tries to be anything but a MW 2 clone. The creative direction given the team is clear, in the most Kotick way, that this is intended to exploit the COD audience by giving them more of what they already have.

While there are moments of sheer joy and glimmers of originality in the game, such as a sniping sequence that gives the .50 caliber sniper rifle its due, it never delves too deep. You are given a spotter and told about wind speed and distance, but the only real possible impediment to your aim is how long the player forces the character to hold his breath.

Medal of Honor is a franchise that desperately needed a reboot, and moving the setting and gameplay to an ongoing conflict was a brave choice, but the game suffers as that was the only brave choice. Hopefully MOH earns a chance at a sequel, and an opportunity to develop gameplay that matches the bravura of its setting.

Games of the last few months

Since January I have found time to rip through some truly fantastic games, some of which were more of the same, others that tried for something new and many that were plain awesome.

When I look at the amount of time I have invested in many of these experiences it blows my mind. According to tracking on Raptr.com (through Xbox live) I played Assassin's Creed 2 for nearly 40 hours, followed by games like Arkham Asylum and Mass Effect. AC2 literally fought its way into my life, successfully dressing up the repetitive gameplay of the first in new outfits and lending even more conspiracy and confusion to the over-story of Desmond, the Assassins and the Templars. A superior game to the first in almost every way, AC 2 was how I spent most of January.

Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 was literally an afternoon of gamplay, the elusive AAA game that I am thrilled I rented rather than buying new. The single player campaign is a Bruckheimer-esque trip into nonsense overflowing with massive set-pieces and relentless momentum. Watching the online play devolve almost instantly into a hacker's paradise of broken and unbalanced play, racist 12 year old's and an entire lack of fun made me realize the real attraction of this series has become the online, with the single-player a tacked on afterthought that takes the best moments of MW and turns them into bigger and louder sequences, ruining the charm of the original. My disappointment was palpable.

Mass Effect 2 ate my February like a fat kid on a twinkie. Yet another sequel, it fortunately fell into the AC2 camp rather than MW2, with a whopping 40 hours of play. The pop-in and streaming issues of the tech from the first game are alleviated by removing the massive open environments, in exchange for tightly orchestrated corridors backed by unreachable open areas, like matte paintings in a movie. ME2 story is taut and thrilling, marred only by the brutally tedious need to scan and mine minerals from planets. Easily half of the gameplay time is taken up by this numbing task and it would ruin a lesser game.