me about to die

After 14hrs 57mins, 1900 kills and 1755 deaths – this is what happens when you constantly run into fully guarded Domination points – someone finally called me a little bitch. Not sure the reason; we were in the lobby, I don’t remember killing him repeatedly or getting murdered by him in previous matches. Maybe he didn’t like me because out of all the gamertags in the lobby, mine didn’t have brackets or numbers or numbers subbing for letters or every other consonant in caps. These names look like they should be passwords.

So if you see me and my pronounceable handle in MW2 killing someone, your chances of dropping me are pretty good – destined, in fact.

my eyeballs are gonna vomit

So apparently MW2 has the same hidden intel items scattered across the game, something I didn’t realize until after I completed the campaign.

The game is so frantic: the way the story is told through cutscenes that bombard you with all kinds of military and surveillance flash; the way someone is always screaming at you during the missions, to either hurry up or inform you of contacts in whatever direction; the way the person you’re supposed to Follow gets farther and farther away as you hide behind a mailbox because russians are pouring out of a suburban house. Never has a game that for the most part doesn’t have timed missions bullied me to keep pushing forward i-dont-care-how-many-explosions-just-went-off-you-better-be-killing-baddies-while-running-you-useless-cretin. A lot of the missions are so exhausting because I feel like I don’t have time simply to stop and admire the environment.

Plus, it doesn’t help that when you’re getting shot, the screen goes even more apeshit, with its violent shaking and blood splatters.

Did the airport scene in Modern Warfare offend me? Not at all. I’m not showing off. This kind of violence is hyper-real (am I using this term correctly?), but it’s also a mature video game, and an M-rated game is at best a PG-13 movie. Rape, child molestation – these are extremes that make me uncomfortable in any medium…

Take the movie Irreversible. SPOILERS AHEAD SO SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU NEED TO. Not only is Monica Bellucci’s character raped, her boyfriend and friend bash the skull of the person they believe is the rapist when actually the person they should be demolishing watches from the background. This is the most depressing and unbearable movie I’ve ever seen. It kills me every time I think about it – and it’s nothing but pretend.

What hit me the hardest in the No Russian mission was the part where, while the majority of the civilians are either running away or falling dead, there are a few that stand still, hands up, believing they will be spared.

Forgetting the controversy for a moment, the scene is simply well-executed; they way it starts off only with the sound of people suiting and gearing up in an elevator; the chorus line of police officers in riot gear. Even the game slowing you down to a crawl so you can absorb the chaos – or to make the situation more stylishly violent. yet this slowdown is also a good design decision because it prevents you from running through the level, running into the crowd and possibly interrupting scripts. Infinity Ward wants you to decide for yourself if you want to squeeze the trigger, and for them to tell you their story, they need to limit your playground. They simply don’t want you to play like an idiot for this particular mission.

Besides, the other highly structured solution would be to make the mission on rails. At that point you might as well turn it into a cutscene. And at that point you might as well cut the scene, at which point, we might as well continue with the mentality that all video games are kids toys.

Do I want to have an Irreversible video game experience? I wouldn’t want to play a game that took me through the movie’s plot but I wouldn’t outright damn a game that depresses me like Irreversible does. It’s like with books; I like to read books for fun, but I’m not adverse to a book that challenges me intellectually or emotionally. And I think video games can do the same; we each just have different thresholds.