There are online petitions and online boycotts against Infinity Ward’s latest title Call of Duty: Modern Warefare 2.   The big issue at hand? :  You won’t be able to run your own private game servers.

Not that bad, right?  Not if you take into account the masses who thrive for custom mods, like maps or custom game additions like the ones which took off with Call of Duty 4.  What’s so wrong without having to deal with the monthly cost for your own server?  Centralized gaming offered from Infinity Ward.  Why so bad?  We’ll have to see how reliable the online playability is.  How long will these servers be online for?  How many server upgrades / maintenance’s will gamers have to face?  Stop and think about it, it could get horrible pretty quickly.  Nothing like trying to plan a private clan scrim and Infinity Ward’s doing maintenance.

Infinity Ward head Jason West has been recently quoted laughing “We thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game”.  “We’re just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners”, he added.  Prioritizing the player experience above the modders and tuners, really?  It seems quite obvious that Infinity Ward is centralizing the opportunity for taking the online multiplayer gaming in house.  For what?  Why?  Because running private servers makes playing a selected Call of Duty release longer?  There are plenty of Call of Duty 2 servers still out there, is this the problem?  Is this what’s killing Infinity Ward’s profits?  It’s possible to generate a slue of conclusions.

What happened to the good days of a vast online gaming community which regularly boasted custom modifications to suit their own personal gaming needs?  The times where, setting up your own custom server to heighten difficulty levels or make it more entertaining.  We now live in a current system of centralized gaming.  Perfect example is the XBOX Live subscriptions, which currently goes for $49 a year, and has rumors of raising to $100 a year.

It’s hard to believe that Infinity Ward would truly mean making the outcome of the online gaming ‘better’ doing this.  More like a throttled regime.  One would think of the possible final outcomes of doing this, such as will they cancel the modern warefare 2 servers, so that you the consumer will buy their next release later on?  What would stop them?  Private servers would.

I was greatly excited to see a full game offered in my xbox arcade marketplace that sparked my interest and for the first time, I really did feel like I got my money’s worth.  Lest everyone not forget that I’m usually an avid PC gamer and solely keyboard and mouse, I did quite well for my first xbox FPS.  Of course I at first got lividly pissed off at functioning a controller however I could not forget that I am in fact a gigantic Battlefield series fan.

It wasn’t that bad.  Really it honestly wasn’t.

I knew I needed a FPS to introduce me into the FPS console market as who doesn’t love gaming with their buddies while lounging in their living room, on a couch?  In full 1080p?  I jumped when I saw the game was being offered for 1200 Microsoft points, but thought it  was a little bit of a scam as Microsoft will only let you get 1200 points by purchasing $25 worth (much more than what the game’s worth, which I believe converts to $15).  Nevertheless I was impressed, or at least in the beginning.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my casual gaming experience.  Furthermore I love a gaming experience that encourages leveling, different levels to play on and vehicles to reap your own WWII havoc.  I’m not going to lie though I felt  a little gipped with almost all of the above, and then some.

The good:

First off, the game whacks you with killer graphics of course.  From my playing experiences thus far I’m yet to notice any sort of FPS drops.  The game being developed on the same engine as that of Dice’s previous Battlefield release, Bad company.

For the shear excitement of running and gunning this game wins for sure.  I was thrilled in my first experience, gaming with a couple of buddies of mine, hopping into a jeep.  Best of all, they really nailed a nice WWII plane cockpit.  Though the controls to fly these planes isn’t the greatest (reversed joystick controls by default with altitude), I know that eventually the learning of how to effectively control those suckers will undoubtedly improve in time.

Leveling up your rank as well doesn’t take a vast amount of time.  In a good sitting I was leveling up each round, whilst actively running around and killing the most people I possibly could.  The environment elements were a nice touch.  The fact you can blow palm trees in pieces like how the people advertising Crysis for the first time could.  Generally, the game has some pretty decent physics.

The bad:

While the experience wasn’t all that bad I found there could be many improvements.  Some things I could easily see right off the bat would be (obviously) more maps.  I understand a marketing approach of releasing more maps in the (hopefully) near future, but lets be serious here.  This seriously gave me the general thought that they just kind of released the game to release it.  I (and I know many other gamers) want variety when they game with friends.  Minus the fact that the maps are generally small, at least give us some other places to battle in.

Other critiques would be improving some of the interesting things I see whilst being a sniper when I want to take it easy.  I’ve seen everything from floating opponents across the map, to seeing tanks through mountains and hills.  It’s pretty easy to cheat doing things like that I suppose, nevertheless annoying if the opponent is you attempting to hide behind a tree.

There was some latency issues when I first started with the game.  I thought that should be mentioned, though they did have mentions of server related issues (as at the first initial release of the game, it crippled servers and they needed to expand).

The ugly:

Nothing like leveling up for absolutely (pretty much) no reason.  You get a different badge logo, sure, but weapons?  No.  I find this extremely ridiculous especially like Infinityward’s most recent Call of duty World at war’s ability to level up and gain access to a larger arsenal.

Currently they’re still having horrible server issues.  It will consistently always take me multiple attempts to find an online game that apparently doesn’t go “Unavailable” like it indicates all the time.  This will eventually be aided overtime after their server expansion, of course.

The conclusion:

This being my first FPS for a console I do safely say that I think this was an excellent purchase.  It’s cheap (1200 Microsoft points as indicated above) and will definitely fill your world war two running and gunning hunger for sure.  There are some improvements to make, and I hope that the developers of Battlefield 1943 hopefully address some of the above issues.  Worth the price!

Screenshots:

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