The originals were okay. Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare II were legendary FPS games with their own fictional story, but not really a whole lotta bullshit outside of that. Was it propaganda for/against certain countries? Sure. But if you can think for yourself (i.e. you’re not swayed by a fictional story), they were pretty good games. Even Black Ops was a lot of fun.

I had GamePass for a little while and decided to try the newest Call of Duty. I forget which one. The installation was confusing AF even on Xbox. Then when I went in, I could not find the actual game beyond the multiplayer and the ads. I actually had to search the Internet for how to start the game. I’d ask “how is this not obvious?” but the ads and the monetisation had become the whole point of the game. The game was not free, but it was effectively competing with Fortnite, so it was up to the same bullshit. At least with Fortnite, I have no problem getting into the standard Battle Royale match. (I know everybody loves to hate on Fortnite, but I’m an old school Unreal Tournament player, and Fortnite moves the same, due to it being the same engine… so, naturally, I am very good at it, and it’s fun to school the new generation from time to time.)

When I finally got into the game, I thought it was okay at first. We did a prison break and that was fun. Like what I remember from back in the day, it was like an interactive movie. Then I switched to a female character (awesome! representation!), but after a while, I couldn’t figure out where to go. The instructions were unclear, it wasn’t obvious, and the Internet was no help. It was like nobody really cares about the single player experience, it’s all about online now.

With the old ones, it was always very clear what they wanted you to do, and if you had the patience (think All Ghillied Up from Modern Warfare, where you have to crawl on your hands and knees between the marching soldiers and tanks, super slow, to not get caught), you were gonna get through it. Might take a try or two, but you can take all the tries you need. There was no “just run around this big open map until you figure it out”. The gameplay was tighter back then, and, honestly, for a guy who started with Pong/2600, Xbox 360 era games still look good to me. I don’t mind XB1/Series graphics (I’m sitting on my The Witcher 3 playthrough until the remaster comes out, since it’s a free update), but 360 was perfectly fine. It’s not “warts and all” to me; I genuinely think 360/PS3 era games looked great. And, with the RAMmageddon going on, remember that the Xbox 360 had no system RAM whatsoever — the system shared the 512MB of graphics memory from the GPU. (It was also a tri-core IBM PowerPC, so, basically a Mac from back then.) And the PS3 was a bit weaker in some regards and more powerful in others (IIRC it had a bunch of speciality chips that were hard to code for, but once mastered, made it the superior console to an experienced developer). Anyway, my Mac from 2022-2023 can basically play all PS3 games nearly flawlessly, and so can, I imagine, most decent (not even gaming) PCs, so… maybe we should take a closer look at that generation for our gaming.