Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat, developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision
At Newsweek HQ, most of our colleagues are either boomers in name or boomers in spirit, which means there haven't been many serious gamers among our ranks. But from the increasing number of game-related conversations we've had with our office mates, it's clear that this is starting to change. Our de facto Xbox 360 correspondent Rolf Ebeling, who in his day job is the creative director for Newsweek.com, posted here back in October about how Electronic Arts' Skate triggered his boyhood memories of the birthplace of modern American skateboarding. In today's entry, Level Up's foremost Halo fanboy and online multiplayer aficionado explains why his uneasy reaction to the single-player experience of Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat has made it his Game of the Year for 2007.
I play games to vent. I feel weird admitting that, given that I'm an adult and should just gracefully accept life's real challenges and focus calmly on real solutions. Sometimes, though, firing a fake incendiary round into a group of fake goons and watching them fly into fake walls...well, there's a real satisfaction in that. Playing my own pop psychologist, the primary reason I've burned through two Xbox 360s is to keep a tenuous hold on my childhood and teenage years. It's the same reason I'm stupidly happy when I'm fish-tailing my mountain bike around curves, or how I can listen to "The Queen is Dead" over and over again and never really get tired of it. For that, I feel little or no guilt.
But another part of why I play is to have an experience that's insulated from the consequences or limitations of my current reality. For an hour or two, I'm can free myself of life's responsibilities (job, family, being a law-abiding citizen) and barriers (time, gravity, vulnerability to melee attacks) and put a serious hurt on somebody who deserves it (the Covenant, that sniper over flag three, whoever just ground their heel into my last nerve today). I can overreact spectacularly and get Achievement Points for it.
The very idea of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the franchise's first foray away from the well-trod World War II genre, has had me drooling for the past few months. Shamelessly, I pestered N'Gai for a copy so I could unload serious ordnance on whatever got in my way (sorry, it's been a long year). At first, the game certainly delivers on the taboo appeal of emptying clips and setting off claymore mines in a present-day setting--for which, I believe, it owes a debt to Electronic Arts and Criterion Studios' underrated first-person shooter Black. However, as I venture further into the solo campaign--and in a first for me, I've yet to hit the multiplayer maps in any depth--a sensation alien to my past experience with first person shooters has settled in: unease.
The game feels too real in parts. By "real", I mean my mass-media informed view of actual combat, not firsthand experience. You're forced to weave your way through cramped Middle Eastern alleys while chunks of concrete kick up around you from rounds of ammunition pounding into what insufficient cover you have. You watch soldier after soldier slump the ground in a trench because of your skill with a sniper rifle. You get stuck in a cable network's newsroom floor held hostage, cowering behind someone's desk, knowing you don't have enough shells to fight your way out. You can nit-pick the dialog AI (please stop telling me to "pick up the Javelin" every 5 seconds--yes, I saw it, I'd prefer to take out the snipers first, thank you) or look too closely at the visual tricks used in the environments (the static sky is little more than a well-done old-school matte painting), but the gnawing sensation I get from COD4 is this: shooting and being shot at must be unbelievably scary and awful.
A colleague recently asked me for a list of best rock albums of the year. I surprised myself by not picking the recording I enjoyed or played the most, but rather the darkly ambitious "The Good, The Bad and The Queen" (if you haven't yet heard it, the sprightly political centerpiece of that collection is called "Kingdom of Doom."). I have a feeling that my favorite movie for 2007 will end up being "No Country for Old Men." The hushed desperation of Tommy Lee Jones' retold dream of his father--not to mention Javier Bardem and his "captive bolt" pistol--will stick with me longer than the ridiculous laughter that "Superbad" brought forth from me. Listening and watching these two pieces of art, it's impossible not to be reminded that things are not OK in our world. Their skilled escapism brings you closer to reality.
For creeping me out so successfully, I'm picking Call of Duty 4 as my game of the year.
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