Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered - FLAT SHARE

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered is free this month with PS Plus meaning lots of lots of new players who have no idea what's going on. While not quite on the nuclear streak level, I'm happy with these 15 consecutive kills, especially since (compared to Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII at least) Modern Warfare's multiplayer maps have chaotic layouts, tricky sightlines and fragile player characters.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered - BACK IN THE USSR

It's nearly Christmas! Which means there's a new Call of Duty out, getting everyone twitchy and infuriated in the run-up to the festive season. Not that anyone's actually playing Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. If you like sprinting around, looking for headshots you're spoilt for choice this year. Since sales have been trending way down ever since the Modern Warfare 2 / Black Ops heyday, EA have decided there's enough money being left on the table for them to muscle in and release their own first-person shooters.

Last year we had Star Wars Battlefront, this year EA have attempted to do some real damage by getting Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 out before the new Call of Duty could even land. Both games are excellent, particularly Titanfall, but it's difficult for any new release to compete with the kind of mind share offered up by the special bonus game included with Infinity Warfare's special Legacy Edition. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered is a tonic, instantly snapping you back to a simpler, more rewarding time when Activision's military shooter series was actually trying to facilitate strategic combat rather than a meat grinder with embedded scratch card prompts.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered - RETRO SHOOTER

Charles Morrow and Martin McBain drop in to a tiny studio somewhere to discuss Raven Software's exemplary work on the Remastered edition of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Raven's work on Infinity Ward's 2007 barnstormer goes far beyond your typical resolution-bump, as Digital Foundry's video points out, the studio has reworked and redesigned graphical and audio assets while still resisting the urge to put their authorial stamp on the game.

The Complete Call of Duty Single Player Campaign Critique (For PC) by Noah Caldwell-Gervais

For his two hour long Call of Duty critique, Noah Caldwell-Gervais adopts the stuffy persona of an Open University professor, complete with under-lit live-action brackets and a distinct lack of visual dynamism. Caldwell-Gervais' video isn't slick. It doesn't need to be. He's actually got something interesting and enlightening to say, charting the series' slide from a respectable letters-from-the-front simulator to a skeezy recruitment tool. Even if you find the idea of a feature length breakdown of first-person shooters faintly repulsive, it's worth skipping to 26:14 to hear Caldwell-Gervais' thoughts on series highlight Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

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.

20XX's Seventh Gen Favs #2 - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare ditched the moral certainty of World War II, taking the series forward several decades to arrive in the midst of a post-Cold War fog. The covert missions that formed the backbone of the campaign were nasty snatches of ruthless wet working. An assassination here. An ethnic cleanse intervention there. Infinity Ward drafted a muddled theoretical conflict, utilising hot potato concerns like break-away ex-Soviet nations and Islamic fundamentalism, to take the player somewhere other than the beaches of Normandy.

Despite this, one of Modern Warfare's most triumphant aspects was simply chatter. Your time with the 22nd SAS regiment was full of state sanctioned murder and cold-blooded euphemisms. This pally back and forth registering as gallows humour, rather than tone-deaf posturing. A mission set aboard a Lockheed gunship had an alarming, almost documentary sense of reality about it. Modern Warfare was a rare game that seemed informed by solid research instead of just raking over the same old 1980s action films.

The real juice in Modern Warfare though was the multiplayer mode, an unending avalanche of feedback and positive reinforcement. Guns and loadout perks were rationed on a keen trickle, meaning there was always an interesting piece of kit to chase. Every conceivable action tallied towards some form of reward, from exciting new rifle sights to simple XP currency. There was an exhaustive list of conditions to be met, congratulating players for both the mundane and the superlative. In-game kills granted access to rewards that ran the gamut from an in-game radar sweep to a match shredding Hind attack helicopter. Modern Warfare gobbled time. There was always something new to learn, or something old to modify.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - MORE SKILLS

IJQI leaping about, scooping up weapons and filling that feed.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - SKILLS

IJQI with the skills.