Modern Warfare 2: Wow, ugh, wow, ugh, wow, ugh…

or: Don’t stick your hands outside the rollercoaster.

So I’m almost done with Modern Warfare 2. It is in many ways a beautiful gaming experience, the set pieces – most of them – are lovely. And some of the combat is a lot of fun. For example there’s a mission where you escort a tank through a suburban American neighborhood, fighting through houses and targeting areas for the tank to suppress.

But whenever I get too immersed in the gameworld, I find myself torn out and plopped unceremoniously into my seat. The worst of this has to be your allied AI. The scenario is often the same… I am in a corridor of some kind, with a certain amount of cover. An ally is to one side of me presumably offering covering fire and then… I’m dead. An enemy has flanked me, walked past the guy who is covering me, and planted a couple shells into my back point blank.

That ally is no help at all. So I tried to choose to not think of them as allies and more like part of the background, animated background that says hooaah too much and who I must sometimes follow to progress the mission. But once you stop thinking of them as tactical aids, and more like scenery you run into another problem. The way they alternate from invulnerable bullet sponges, to corpses in ways only a game scripter could justify. When you see your squad-mate take hundreds of bullets and survive only to collapse at a plot relevant moment, then the veil has been lifted and the proverbial bloom is off the rose.

So playing MW2 is like clutching a handful of thorns. But dear me those thorns are pretty to look at, and once you memorize where they are located you are far less likely to get pricked.

Quote engine search result:
“We must always seek to ally ourselves with that part of the enemy that knows what is right” -Ghandi