Call of Duty

Extra Credits looks at employing scale (i.e. more enemies) and tone to break up gameplay and maintain a player's interest level. Extra Credits' example of a game that got this right was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare—who knew that Call of Duty could be the game to actually teach us something?

How to Lose with a Straight Flush

HIGH The gameplay is solid for a portable FPS.

LOW Finishing the single-player modes in less than an hour.

WTF This could have been good, had everything not gone horribly wrong

Call of Duty has arguably been the biggest and most successful IP that this console generation has seen. Yearly releases have set sales records and the first-person shooter genre reached heights never before seen. Activision has had a great run, and the publisher has become dependent on the success of Call of Duty to carry it to success.

Kotaku's Luke Plunkett recently wrote an opinion piece entitled Why It's Stupid to Hate Call of Duty So Damn Much. Intrigued by the headline (and always a sucker for a well-considered opinion piece to counter the never-ending stream of gaming "list-icles" out there) I decided to see why people were stupid to hate on what is essentially the biggest game franchise in the world at this moment.

Battlefield 3.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

War sucks. I've fortunately never had to deal with it myself, but that appears to be the general consensus. Lots of people get killed/injured, resources are wasted, and infrastructure is destroyed. It's an all-around bad deal for most everyone involved. Over the years there have been several films that have portrayed this perspective successfully, but no games. Why?

Call of Duty: Black Ops with Lego. A very productive use of free time. Seriously.

When Xbox Live's director of policy and enforcement, Stephen Toulouse, stridently vowed to ban any Call of Duty: Black Ops player who sports a swastika emblem online, I can't say I felt any particular way about it. As an fence sitter on the subject of censorship, I much prefer to let others do the hard work of untangling that Gordian Knot.

Mcnamara? Really? You Couldn't Throw Eisenhower or Truman in There?

HIGH: JFK spouting off one-liners while blasting zombies in the face.

LOW: The complete and total incompetence of my squadmates.

WTF: Why does the guy I'm torturing suddenly turn around and help me when the bad guys show up?

As promised, I'm continuing to record responses from game bloggers and critics as they come in.