PC

In my review of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, I disagree with my peers that the game is not a compelling example for games as art, rather it's perfect for a sports argument. Take 36-year-old David Dague of Chicago. When interviewed by The Associated Press, he said the game's launch is like the start of football season for a sports fan, and the comparison couldn't be more fitting. But there's another, more obvious landmark the game reaches in the form of its controversial level, "No Russian."

Above And Beyond The Call Of At Least One Duty

HIGH Covering a human player with AC-130 armory.

LOW A hole-ridden plot that ends in obvious sequel bait.

WTF Tactical nuke?!

The Brainy Gamer blog featured a terrific post today directed at Infinity Ward's questionable "FAGS" advertising campaign, in which Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels decries grenade spam.  It's covert advertising for Modern Warfare 2, of course, although the acronym with which said message is provided is obviously the source of the most worry.

With the release of Left 4 Dead 2 just around the corner (it streets on November 17th for the PC and Xbox 360) expect to start hearing more about the game. Gamestop teamed up with Valve to create this new teaser commercial for the cooperative zombie-slaying game, which highlights not only a bit of what players can expect in the follow up to the wildly popular original, but to also convince players to pre-order their copy through Gamestop so they can procure the in-game American Baseball Bat weapon. Ah marketing…is there anything you won’t do?

I guess this means I need to get my red-ringed Xbox 360 fixed posthaste…

Stranded (And Bored) In The Wasteland

 

HIGH Millions of guns to choose from, theoretically...

LOW The "adventure" is pure contrivance, utterly lacking a soul.

WTF Where's the onscreen mini-map? Why do weak guns auto-equip?

Spoiler Alert for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 fans!!

This morning on Twitter, I saw a link come in mentioning Modern Warfare 2. I don't really give a rip about it and I've been skipping over most of the masturbatory OMG-look-at-this-new-feature news on it, but this particular tweet was from one of my recent follows who I perceive as being a pretty sharp dude, and his basic reaction to this piece of news was essentially "holy s**t." That in itself isn't usually enough to get me to click a link, but like I said, this guy has had some interesting things to say, so I checked it out.

Over the past week or so, it seems like the issue of race in gaming has been picking up steam. I've come across two great posts on the subject, one from Paul Tassi and a sardonic take over at the Play Like a Girl blog. More pertinently, an illuminating study from the USC Annenberg School of Communication revealed that minorities—and particularly Latinos—are woefully underrepresented among protagonists and other characters in leading video games.

(Note: I could've used Mad Props as the title but that's already been done like a thousand times)

I stumbled upon a really sweet TF2 mod a few days ago. The red team spawns as various pieces of scenery (barrels, rocks, trees, etc.) with the scout's health, and the blue team spawns as pyros. Blue has to kill all the scenery scouts before time is up or else red wins. Needless to say, the sight of a tree running away from a pyro is pure awesomeness. If you've not played it, you don't get to sit with the cool kids at lunch. You also don't get to sniff dry erase markers with us during recess.

Mad Props (couldn't resist) to the mod author. The Steam group page has a list of servers to play on.