GAMING: CALL OF DUTY

There was a time in my life where I would go and watch movies on opening weekend and get the latest and greatest games on release. These days, I get to movies usually when they are on pay-per-view or HBO. I’m better about games, and those games that most people like, I usually get to within a year.

I finally got around to purchasing Call of Duty. Let me begin by saying that I am not a giant First Person Shooter (FPS) fan. I enjoy FPS’s, but primarily when I’m playing my friends, as it’s more of the social interaction with them that I enjoy than the game itself.

There has been one notable exception: Half-Life. I remember being completely addicted to Half-Life, and even playing the game in a darkened room with the sound cranked up so that the head crabs jumping out of the ceiling tiles would literally scare me enough to get me to jump.

I don’t want to say that I’m as addicted to Call of Duty as I was to Half-Life, because then I’d have to make an admission about a problem that I don’t want to fix. I love Call of Duty. I have only played a couple of multiplayer games, but the single player campaign is fabulous! The detail, the sheer number of models, the quality of the graphics and sound; all of these add up to more than the sum of their parts.

So far my favorite is the Russian campaign, simply because of how they set the mood. You find yourself rushing a hill, but there’s only a few weapons to be handed out, and lucky me, I get 5 bullets. I guess I can toss them at the Germans. So after you make it through this mess, you are told to charge across Red Square into machine gun fire. If, you decide to turn back, you will be shot. This was brutally brought home as I ran forward, grabbed a weapon on the ground, assumed the prone position and started laying down suppression fire for my comrades. My lack of rushing the machine guns was noticed, and an Russian officer shot me. Rush, means rush. Got it.

If the devil is in the details, then he’s completely intertwined in this game. I highly recommend this game to anyone who has a passing interest in World War II.