Saturday 25 October 2014

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare / Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - NOSTALGIA





I'm finding it hard to get excited about Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Although the air-dashing looks kind of fun, the near-future weapons don't do anything for me. Guns made up in planned city sweatboxes rarely do. They all seem so dull and interchangeable. I spent most of my time with Destiny wishing I had a possessed Mosin-Nagant with a futuristic, retrofitted sight. I want some connection to reality. The classic Modern Warfare games were equipped with the best of Cold War engineering - the M16 platform vs the AK-47, with run-ins by the FN FAL.

Those guns had resonance. I grew up with them, saw them on TV in proxy wars and The A-Team. Good guy and bad guy guns from a million 80s action movies, choose your fav. You can grab an MP5 and play-act as Hans Gruber, or equip an M60 and pretend you're Rambo or Animal Mother. Guns are interesting to me in the abstract, horrifying things that track alongside ideologies and political movements. I can accept them as grey machinery you lug around like an accessory in an expensive, networked game of tag, but I don't want to be told they're awesome. Knee-jerk revulsion is part of the appeal. These new weapons look like something that'd ship with an action figure.

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