Is Modern Warfare 3 good for video games?

"Hey Sam, the game from this commercial will make more money than any of our movies ever will. Yep, even Avatar, sorry man"

775 million dollars in five days.  3.3 million different people played it on one day just over Xbox Live.  People I know buying cases of Mountain Dew just for the double experience points in the multiplayer…..THEY DON’T EVEN DRINK MOUNTAIN DEW.  Apparently it’s even causing the Louisville college football team to lose games (yes, seriously).  It’s Modern Warfare 3.  I’m having trouble deciding how I feel about it.  As a gamer, I love innovation.  I love seeing things done that I haven’t seen before.  I say that, but then I think about the games I’ve most recently played.  Consider this list:  Dark Souls, Batman: Arkham City, Modern Warfare 3, Gears of War 3, Uncharted 3, and I just picked up Assassins Creed: Revelations.  Fine games, all of them.  And all of them a sequel of some kind.  Is that what the gaming public wants?  Is it what I want?

Dollars and Sense

This is the moment I realized I had played this before.

I thought Fallout 3 was a great game.  I played it for sixty something hours.  I played the main quest through in its entirety.  I spent hours just roaming the countryside looking for interesting things, of which there were many.  I used internet faqs and YouTube videos to find the bobble head dolls so I could get an achievement.  So naturally, when Fallout:  New Vegas was announced, I was psyched.  New adventurers to be had in the fallout universe?  In Las Vegas?  Sign me up!  It was a release day purchase for me.  I played New Vegas a little over an hour on that first night…..and haven’t touched it again since.  So what happened?  I realized something when I turned on the game for the first time and got to the main menu.  The menu was the EXACT same one as Fallout 3.  I was about to play the same game.  The characters were different, the story was different,  I’m not saying there were no changes.  I just realized while staring at the main menu that while I had enjoyed playing Fallout 3 I just wasn’t interested in playing more of the same.  Now this isn’t true for every series.  I’ve played all the Call of Duty’s, all the Assassin’s Creed games, both Bioshocks, both Gears of War, Halo 3 and Halo Reach.  I am not championing myself as too cool for sequels.  They have their place.  I’m just growing concerned that developers might be cashing in, literally most of the time, on brand names at an amazingly high rate recently.  I’m growing even MORE concerned that we, as gamers, only have ourselves to blame.

Rock Band 3 and Music Games: More Expensive Than Harmonix

Raise your hand if a room in your house contains a plastic instrument.  My hand is up.  And since I can’t tell if anybody reading this is raising their hand or not, I’m just going to assume a bunch of you are because it helps my point.  It’s the internet, this is considered research.  So this article started in my head as a review of Rock Band 3, which it still sort of is.  The more I thought about it though the more I realized that one basically has to take music games as a whole, at least Guitar Hero and Rock Band anyway.  Why were they so popular?  Why are sales numbers dwindling now?  How the hell did Harmonix, the main force behind creating the genre via Guitar Hero, get sold for FIFTY DOLLARS?  That is less than I paid for Rock Band 3!

Call of Duty: Black Ops OR How Activision prints money

So ok, everybody hates Activision, we get it.  They’ve gouged us on map packs, probably screwed over original Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward, and are generally just a giant corporation hell on bent on making money at the expense of the little guy.  Since Call of Duty is so huge we have the expected backlash of “oh it’s a terrible game only morons buy it”!  But let us be honest for a second, dear readers.  If Call of Duty, as a game, truly sucked, it would not sell over 5.6 million copies on the first day it was released.  Yes, you read that right.  Treyarch, who was kind of the “off-year” CoD developer and most recently made the precursor to Modern Warfare 2, World at War, had the helm for Black Ops.  Considering the state of Infinity Ward at the moment, Treyarch has suddenly been thrust into the alpha dog position for the biggest franchise in gaming.  So, how did they do?  Forgetting all the money and hype and myriad of opinions about the idea of Call of Duty, we do have a game in front of us here.  Treyarch hasn’t done anything drastically different but they deliver a very slickly produced game that delivers on its promises.  An engaging single player, absolutely insanely large multiplayer, and even the return of ZOMBIE MODE (ooooooo scary) make Black Ops an excellent addition to ye olde game library.

Blizzcon 2010: A Journey in Pictures

(If your looking for the more recent article for Blizzcon 2011, it’s HERE)

I was lucky enough to attend Blizzcon 2010, Blizzards sort of yearly festival of nerding the f out.  I figure at this point if you’re a person who is all over every detail of every Blizzard games (such as ME) then you probably have all the newsy stuff digested already.  The aim of this article is not to summarize all the stuff Blizzard dropped on us (which there actually wasn’t a ton) but more give a point of view of what it was like to actually be at the con and walk the hallowed halls of the Anaheim Convention Center.  A quick note:  For some reason my camera imported all these pictures at freaking 4000×3000 pixels.  I’m way too lazy to go through and resize all of these right now, so I’m just posting them in smaller form in the article.  If you want to see a larger version (I KNOW YOU WILL BE CLICKING ON THE HOT NIGHT ELVES) go ahead and click, but I HIGHLY recommend you have the option of fitting pictures to your browser enabled or it gets HUGE.  Other than that, enjoy!

MY REAL NAME ON THE INTERNETZ OHNOES

The Hype Machine Rolls on

I was on the phone with Tophat recently when he made an accurate observation.

“Elrood, the amount of hype for Halo Reach is insane.  Even if it was the best game ever, there is no possible way it could live up to all the publicity it’s getting,” he said.

“Tophat, we’ve known each other since fourth grade, why did you call me Elrood?”, I responded.

“I have forgotten your real name! Please help!”, he yelled.

Tophat being insane aside, he has a point.

Modern Warfare 2: Whaaaaaaat.

Okay, I suppose I’ll get this out there early, since I know how the first person shooter crowd usually goes.  I am bad at Modern Warfare 2.  It’s the truth, plain and simple.  On XBox Live I am no xXDarkAssassinXx, NoobPwner49, or SniperSaurusRex.  Though, come to think of it, that last one it pretty awesome.  How would the dinosaur use a sniper rifle with its tiny, ineffectual dino-claws?  Also, what would a dinosaur even need to assassinate in the first place?  Hmmm.