For our blog Sweaty Hands, Nathan Williams aka Wavves reviews the latest video games for PS3, XBOX360 and whatever other consoles exist and are playable. But while he's on tour for basically infinity, game fanatic Katy Goodman of Vivian Girls is taking the helm. In this installment, she takes on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
Modern Warfare 2 has awoken the video game beast that lives inside me. It has all of the things I cherish most: a first-person perspective, a plot I can skip through quickly, and a few moments where I was caught questioning my own humanity while playing it. In this game, you are a soldier who is traveling around the world, killing (what I assume to be) terrorists, but let's just call them "bad guys." I skipped through all of the plot, but the one thing I DO know is that these bad guys are everywhere (Brazil, Russia, Afghanistan) and they need to be killed.
There is a good variety of missions you have to do, whether it's to bunker down and fight off waves of bad guys at a fast food restaurant, crawl undetected through the enemy base filled with attack dogs, or race a snowmobile in the woods while shooting people. But the one thing I liked the most was that, in the end, you are pretty much constantly killing people. In one life-changing mission, you walk through an airport with your friends killing hundreds of civilians. I might have known why I was doing this, had I not skipped through all the plot, but either way, it was pretty exciting.
Now, there is one other aspect to this game that needs to be brought to light: sheer addictiveness. I went to the FADER office last week and played this game for five hours straight without getting up. I then went to Game Stop, got an Xbox, and continued playing this game for five more hours at home. The next day I bought an Xbox live membership and played Team Deathmatch on multiplayer for 15 hours straight. Instead of spending time with my friends and family, I've been locked away in my attic listening to 13-year-old boys having conversations about getting "tons of p-ssy," "not being gay" and "drinking soda."
So will this be the best-selling game of all time? Probably. This blog review alone will surely sell three more copies. But will it improve lives? Of course not. Mine has already been destroyed. How about you finish the last level of the campaign, hold an enemy soldier in your arms, look deep into his eyes while stabbing him in the chest, and then tell me how normal you feel? Or how about you play multiplayer for eight hours straight, and order Chinese delivery because you don't want to put on "real clothes," and then you can also reevaluate how connected you are to humanity. Have fun!
