The Modern Warfare 2 News Coverage Summarised – Game NewsWritten By JonnieHL
We’d be remiss in our duties as a gaming blog not to do some sort of mention for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. It’s been making more headlines this week than any other game this year (or maybe even longer) some of the headlines have been good, some have been less so. Let’s take a quick look at exactly what all the fuss is about the game and its many attention grabbing headlines.
The Game Itself
The game has received rave reviews for the most part and people are absolutely obsessed with the absorbing single player campaign and the huge online aspect.
That hasn’t stopped the game receiving it’s fair share of criticism though – it costs a fair amount more than your typical console game purely because Activision know they can get away with it, which already stretches your pockets.
The real problem is the single player campaign, which while brilliant is only around 5 hours long. This means if you’re not going to be playing online you’re spending nearly £50 for 5 hours of gameplay, which isn’t a lot of fun for your entertainment pound. With that same amount of money you could buy both Oblivion and Fallout 3 and have 200 hours or more of gameplay, so it’s a short event.
Multiplayer might be the main draw here and to some it would seem crazy to buy a Call of Duty game without wanting to take it online but there’s actually a huge, silent majority that don’t even have an XBOX live account or any interest in playing games online that will feel a bit duped by the release.
The Controversy
There’s a scene that got leaked online several weeks before the launch of the game that involves a massacre of civilians at an airport. For a game, it’s quite a brutal scene and as an undercover agent with the bad guys, you get to see it firsthand.
Of course, despite the general intelligence of the series and the overall impression of the futility of war, the mainstream press took it as another reason why games are evil and making our children into violent murderers… all the usual stuff.
What’s less mentioned is that you can opt out of the scene at the beginning of the game or get a reminder later before the mission starts so there’s no reason to ever play the scene if you don’t feel like seeing the material.
It’s not that amazing for a game to cause this much uproar and it’s probably doing Activision’s sales more good than it is harm. What’s weird is that nobody really complained about the original Modern Warfare in which a nuke went off killing potentially millions of people. We can only guess the context of killing millions of innocent civilians isn’t as bad as the graphical rendering of killing a few.
The PC Version
The PC version is where we have the least sympathy for the game.
Everything works fine and unlike some mutliformat releases the single player is smooth and efficient without PC games having to sit through a month of patching, which is great news.
The multiplayer, however, has been stripped down completely to the bare minimums and there are no dedicated servers at all. This has lead to outcry from the PC community who don’t wish to play using a console style matchmaking system that doesn’t always get them decent speeds and can hang when the ‘host’ leaves the game.
There’s also a lot of cheating going on, and piracy groups have released multiplayer cracks as well, so it’s all a bit of a mess right now. We still don’t understand the rationale behind the move to cripple PC multiplayer.
Whatever news stories the game generates and however many people get frustrated with certain aspects, the games sales figures really speak for themselves: $660 million worth of the game have been sold worldwide in its first week of release. That’s pretty impressive!
The News Release was written by: JonnieHL who produces professional