bordagen

OK, so while I’m actually a little late on the pickup of CoD4, I thought that since it’s my latest gaming purchase, I’d chime in about a few things. Please note that if you haven’t played the game you might not want to read this as it will probably contain some spoilers.

First of all let me get out of the way that I don’t usually like war games (such as Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Company of Heroes etc.), nor really war films – but since CoD4 isn’t set in the much overplayed and overused World War I thought I’d give it a go.

If you didn’t know already about this game, it is set in modern day, using modern conflict (namely the Middle East for a fair majority of the game) and above all else modern day weaponry. The game flicks between hardcore-in-yer-face-action-shooting-from-cover when you play as the US Marines and a-bit-more-stealthy-but-still-in-yer-face-sneaky-shooting when you play as the British SAS. I’m only on the 3rd SAS mission (or it could be the 4th) but either way I’ve just passed the bit on the US missions with the crawling around with a guy suffering form extreme radiation poisoning – quite a powerful scene for a game.

Graphically (and though I’m still only playing on a standard definition telebox) it is stunning with realistic texturing and the physics are awesome in it (yeah, thats right – I said ‘awesome’). I have seen a couple of glitches, but nothing serious enough point point out exactly where they are – I just chalked it up to the sheer amount of things that are going on at any one time. Which actually bridges me nicely to my next comments about the gameplay.

Although this game is great, it is very infuriating. Because of the insane number of things that can be happening at any one point in the game (early on in the US campaign you have to defend a tank which is stuck in some mud) where you can be getting shot from 3 different angle, shoot those three only to find out you’ve been shot in the back by some cowardly chump who thinks it is funny to shoot an AK47 at point blank range at the back of my character’s skull (lesson of the day: ‘check your 6′). Because of moments like this, I’ve found myself replaying the same checkpoint (and believe me this game needs checkpoints) over and over again – and I’m only playing on regular difficulty. I’ve been told that it gets a bit worse when you play the veteran difficulty (of course I’m paraphrasing as I can’t remember fully all the expletives Dan used to describe it).

Ranting aside, this game is very good and, from what I’m told, a worthy addition to the CoD series.

Like the 6 Million Dollar Man, I have rebuilt it – I have the technology.

Except of course I’m talking about upgrading my blog to the latest version of Wordpress, and not adding mechanical bits to Steve Austin (not the wrestler).

Sadly, I missed the launch day for WP 2.5 but got there in the end.

After a quick few minutes of playing with the system, it seems a bit more streamlined, although admittedly it took me a while to find everything. I haven’t actually played much but as far as writing a new post (like this one) it does seem a bit more friendly.