COD and Chips

It’s that time of the year again and like clockwork another Call of Duty game has come in every man’s face. The average man doesn’t have much in life, he has football, beer, and tits, and now COD. We laugh at how women like shoes, gossip, and Brad Pitt, and ponder how anyone can be comfortable adhering to such stereotypes. We think this as we down our pint, call Gary Neville a wanker and stare at that women’s tits. Then we turn on our 360/PS3 and play COD until it’s time to go to work or that prick from Sheffield snipes us so many times we get angry and turn the damn thing off vowing never to play the stupid fucking game again only to turn it back on within the hour the cycle viciously repeating until we become mindless zombies.
The Call of Duty franchise is not just for gamers anymore, it’s become synonymous with Man and is much bigger than a mere computer video game those darn pesky kids are playing. Call of Duty attracts the most casual of gamers who usually reserve their playing time for FIFA (and nothing else) and perhaps it’s the game’s macho subject matter of shooting faces that transcends COD from being geeky and stupid to the most important facet of life. Nothing says “I’m the alpha male” more than “poning a noob”. The supposed realism is what makes COD so engrossing to the masses, where as Halo with its lasers and aliens requires too much suspension of disbelief and is subsequently left for those dreaded malevolent hardcore gamers.
Everyone wants to prove they’re the best and if they can’t do it on the football pitch then they will do it online, annoying the geeks who thought they found their calling in life to no end. For some of the physically inferior, games are all they have, they’re good at them and in their virtual world they are the Mac daddy. The universal appeal of COD is threatening the false sense of achievement for many geeks and as such online conflict can get very personal.
Games should be fun but for some people, COD is not a game, it’s life. These people give themselves ridiculous monikers like “HellReaper77” or “Gangrapist98” and always get into an argument with another like minded moron over who is the best, really childish and petty arguments, but then again just like two football fans fighting over who’s team is best.
With the release of the latest instalment, Black Ops, things are going to get worse for us. We’ve been promised the biggest game ever, and what we have is sort of the same thing we had last year. 90% of its audience don’t care about the single player campaign but me, I’m part of the 10%, and to be honest it’s pretty disappointing. The gaming industry has never been renowned for its storytelling and Black Ops doesn’t break the trend, it’s just as bad as what we‘re used to. Playing out like a series of 24 set in the Cold War, you play some guy who is being interrogated by some other guy over a set of mysterious numbers. Mysterious numbers, hmm I definitely haven’t seen any TV shows feature a mysterious set of numbers recently. Just as Modern Warfare 2’s story made no sense at all, Black Ops is equally full of massive plot holes and even bigger Michael Bay-esque explosions, or as I like to call them, Baysplosions.
The huge set pieces may look impressive but they come at you relentlessly and actually ruin any tension or sense of danger that a war would inevitably invoke in you. Like the majority of games, it appears as if the writers have just watched a load of action movies and decided to base the story around all of them. Whatever happened to reading books? What ensues is a discordant experience where you are not given any time to follow the confused plot or connect with any of the characters. There is a distinct lack of sensitivity in the game and I can’t help but feel that the subject of war should be treated less abrasively. Every character is full of testosterone and appears to enjoy shooting and stabbing everything in sight. There are a few occasions where the tone changes and the ugly side of war is shown but these moments are too rare and soon forgotten in the mass of explosions.
The multiplayer is what most people came for though and it gives them exactly what they want, to shoot each other. While changes have been made they are all essentially superficial and it’s just the same as last year, much like the annual update of a sports game. The COD disciples won’t care though, Activision could have released Pong and they would have still bought it. Through their rose tinted night vision goggles there’s not much COD fans won’t spend their money on, the £10 map packs of Modern Warfare 2 proving that, even I bought them eventually only to find that everyone else skipped the maps every time they appeared. I never got to play some of the maps and it shows the devotion of many players that they will pay £10 for content they will never use.
Of course as the franchise becomes more popular and more successful why change the formula? Men have something meaningful in their lives now, we’re not going to throw it away. Just like an adolescent teenager discovering masturbation, we are in wonder of COD and we won’t give it up easily, you put them on the shelves and we will buy them. The marketing campaign for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood looks to exploit this new popularity of virtual murder as Tinie Tempah’s Frisky plays over the advert as if to suggest that killing in the 15th century is “bad boy”. Of course it is but there is no need to be so blunt about it.