Call of Duty and Gaming Links, 17 January 2010

Three of my favorite things in one pic!

    One of the things I noticed on Saturday's play date was the rock steadiness of the ACOG on the SCAR-H. It's bloody amazing. It's as steady as the iron sights, as far as I can tell. Here's a nice YouTube gameplay vid from christrout91 of the SCAR-H with ACOG and silencer on Derail from December (pre-patch, as you'll note about his mentions of the Javelin glitch).
    If you haven't played the Modern Warfare 2 single player campaign and are spoiler-aversive, stop reading here.

 Arrrrrrrrr! There be spoilers ahead! 

    Destructoid has an op-ed, Overdoing Over the Top, which focuses on the tendency of games, especially sequels, trying to top previous versions. The "nothing exceeds like excess" attitude of developers trying to ratchet up the thrills on games results in a loss of drama and impact. Writer AwesomeExMachina specifically mentions CoD4: Modern Warfare and CoD: Modern Warfare 2 as an example: 

So when the sequel came out and featured another moment of nuclear detonation, the whole thing had a different taste to it. There was no moment of quiet shock at the whole experience like the previous had instilled. Sure, raining helicopters was really bad-ass, but we lost this moment of unfettered surprise and had it replaced with excessive shock-and-awe.

    Even the opening credit sequence of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was more ballsy than most entire video games. You play a helpless victim being driven to his execution. 

    Not that there weren't impactful moments during the Modern Warfare 2 single player campaign. As I've blogged before, there are many which stand out in my memory. But there's nothing on the scale of the searing moment of realization that you, the player character in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, were about to die and there was absolutely nothing you could do to prevent it. That was, I think, Infinity Ward's finest hour. It was a monumental risk, and it was well played. Nothing in the sequel even had a fraction of the power of that moment.
   On to the links:

• GameInformer gives us a Modern Warfare 3 wish list.
  
• YouTube: Modern Warfare 2 Plays of the Week. Number 1 and 2 are epic. The Timmy edition of Plays of the Week. All luck, mostly. It's raining care packages. HybridGamer Map Guide, Ep. 1 (Wasteland). The face of Timmy, PSN sub-species.
• Minnesota Wild players pass free time on the road with Call of Duty.
  

    More Gaming Links:

• Kotaku: As a followup to yesterday's blog link about Battlefield: Bad Company 2 PC dedicated servers being limited to ones sanctioned by EA/DICE, dev DICE says it won't profit from rental of BC2 dedi servers.
• Article title of the day: My Mom thinks I'm great: MS calls Halo: Reach biggest of 2010. The article speculates that MS/Bungie will introduce Call of Duty style persistent stats and weapon unlocks. I'm definitely going to participate in the Reach beta, if only to get my money's worth from the underwhelming Halo 3: ODST. The players who do Call of Duty type shooters and Halo don't cross over much. For me, the physics of the Halo genre sucks. Too slow, gravity too low, and weapon damage meager. It'll take a huge change to make me play a Halo game again.
  
• MAG beta stats: Over one million served.
• Kane and Lynch: Dog Days first impressions from GameSpot. GamesRadar first look. GiantBomb first look. And speaking of first looks, the rumored Kane and Lynch movie is still in pre-production. And here's Bruce Willis taking his own first look, so to speak.
  
• Terminal Gamer Bayonetta review.
• G4TV X-Play interview with James Cameron on Avatar the game. And is James Cameron a douche? Yes, he is. This Destructoid op-ed explained why Avatar the movie is less than revolutionary for gamers back in December. Now that Avatar the game has tanked, the Ubisoft head honchos are back-pedaling like crazy about movie tie-in games.
  
• Has the Red Dawn style FPS Homefront become the next candidate for Rogue Warrior-type crappiness? The brainchild of John Milius (writer and director of Red Dawn, not coincidentally) and Kaos Studios, Homefront is set in the year 2027 when a nuclear armed Korean Army has occupied the United States. Homefront appears to have dropped off the radar since E3 last year. The rumored release time frame is 4th quarter, 2010. If so, the Red Dawn-wannabe will be up against stiff competition from Treyarch's next Call of Duty and the awesome-looking Medal of Honor reboot, not to mention Halo: Reach. Here's a round-up of media about Homefront: 1) Kotaku from May '09 noting announcement of the game's development; 2) YouTube E3 trailer (which, as pointed out by YouTuber Jetman765, has some rough spots, with a notable weapon holding glitch at 50 secs in the vid); 3) YouTube dev interviews (mostly repetitive spiels) from E3 '09: Homefrontfans; GottGame; Digital Trends; Sarcastic Gamer; 4) Homefrontfans E3 single player hands-on impressions.
  

    Non-Gaming Links:

• Kari Byron parties with Grant and Buster.
• Useful tip: How to link to particular time on a YouTube video.
  

PS.