What I Did During The Great Modern Warfare

In years to come, when I am old and using the words ‘these days’ too often, my grandchildren will probably look back at some old news on Google, turn to me and ask “What did you do during the great Modern Warfare 2 Granddad?”. I shall take a good old gulp of oxygen from the tank, think for a moment and respond with “Nothing”.

The faces of the children will drop and they will ask again with astonishment “Really Granddad? You weren’t on the battlefield killing noobs?”.

“No I was not” I shall reply “Noobs had as much right to be there as I did”.

“Did you not queue up outside one of them old game shops at midnight?”

“No I did not, I was in bed”

“Did you not take out a pre-order from Amazon or something?”

“No”

“Was is something to do with that airport level?”

“No it wasn’t” I shall respond “now stick my tea back in the microwave”.

You’re probably playing Modern Warfare 2 right now, you’ve certainly played through the campaign mode about five times already, you’ve been on the internet to say the No Russian level is a wonderful part of the storyline and you’ve signed up for a clan to go and shoot everybody else. I meanwhile, as the prediction above suggests, have not. It’s not that I think Modern Warfare 2 is a bad game, indeed it looks solid and extremely enjoyable if you like that kind of thing. My problem is that the hype has actually put me off and it’s a lonely experience when the game in question has become the fastest selling title in history.

I just don’t like being first in the queue for anything really. If you’ve lined up outside Gamestation at midnight in order to get your mitts on a copy before anybody else did (well, apart from the other fifty people in shop with you) then good luck to you. You’ve been first up to the front line, the first over the top and the ones who have to put up with tea made from mud. I meanwhile am still back home being chided by the general public for not doing my bit for the country. I wish you all the best but it won’t be over by Christmas I can tell you now, that’s when all the under 12s will be online with you.

It’s not the first time it’s happened. The release of Halo 3 was covered in the national press and on news bulletins all over TV but I wasn’t bothered by it. Hype makes me wary, it gives me the impression that a game has too far to fall. The cynical part of me wonders why they have to hype up a game so much and the only conclusion is that something must be missing from the final build. After about 18 months I found a second hand copy of Halo 3 in my local games emporium for £9 and snapped it up. It was in those following weeks that I found myself really getting into playing this major title that had previously passed me by. By that point in time all the aforementioned 12 year olds had moved on to something else and left the more mature players in peace.

In my ideal world chocolate covered pretzels would never have vanished from the shops, and games would be hyped in very minimal time periods. It would be against the law to even mention a game’s release until it’s gone gold. You’d see an amazing trailer at E3 one week, check out screen shots of it the week after, play the demo the week after that and then be able to buy the thing the following Friday. There would be no hanging about digesting videos of random sections of the game, no countdown clocks on the developer’s website and no constant half mentions of a title in the company’s annual financial report that sends the internet into meltdown. You’d see something you like and then it would be with you in a few short weeks with minimal hanging about and jabbering on about it.

At least Modern Warfare 2 seems to be worth the wait. There was a day when weeks worth of hype and mentions of ‘revolutionary gameplay’ would leave you on tenterhooks only to have something like Rise of the Robots farted out towards you, a game which got Spinal Tap levels of critical response. The game was hyped to the hills for months and months beforehand which gave the developers far too much time to polish the turd that was the end product. We were left with two robotic blobs clanking towards each other in deathly slow motion and the ‘revolutionary gameplay’ was very quickly found out to be false. How Advertising Standards weren’t called in I’ll never know. At least under my suggested scheme the pain would have been over far quicker than that.

On past experience it can be said that I might not be avoiding Modern Warfare 2 forever. It’s just to say that I won’t be in that initial group running around shooting each other in the face in the next few weeks. When I do come online in a few months time then I’ll no doubt be crap at it so I’ll be the one cowering in a sniper nest somewhere wondering where it all went wrong and how I only came here because everybody in the local pub was going off to war and it seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Go very easy on me, for the grandkid’s sake.