[ad_1]
The best moment in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 it is one of almost absolute uncertainty. In it, an electromagnetic pulse has just turned off all electronic and communication systems in the war-torn game description of Washington, DC. As an Army Ranger, you and your squad, stranded in the middle of a silent battlefield, must navigate to a rally point. It is absolutely dark, bathed in rain, and all the indicators you have used so far to identify friends and enemies, from thermal vision to the red dot on your weapon’s sights, are dead thanks to EMP.
Wrecked planes cover the ground and you creep uneasily through the night. His commanding officer pauses every time he sees movement forward, shouting a key word to try to identify a friend from the enemy. For this short stretch, you never know who will be a friend and who will be an enemy. In a game known for reckless action, it’s a short, compelling stretch of horror.
Launched 11 years ago, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is the sequel to the original Modern war, who turned the military action series into a giant by shifting his focus from World War II to the present, reconfiguring his game around the technology and concerns of American military culture of the early 2000s. Recently, he received a fresh coat of paint, with Activision releasing a fully remastered version of the game’s campaign on PlayStation 4, and then on Xbox One and PC. He is an eminently competent and well-made remaster who makes the game feel like a contemporary release. Which shows how strange a relic of its time is. Modern Warfare 2 it really is.
As caught up in American military worship as he is, Call of Duty 4 modern warfare It is a game that deserves at least a little praise. He manages to build genuine fear and disempowerment in what might have been direct jingoism, and in the process creates a game that reads like satire from the first War on Terror, with the heroic frenzy of the early segments of the game that quickly turns into confusion and disaster. . Modern Warfare 2 He had the unenviable job of creating a sequel directly from that narrative and, possibly as a result of that choice, fails to be consistent like any kind of narrative. It is a messy and ugly little game, as fascinating as it is irritating.
His failure is felt most intensely in the part of the game that quickly became the most controversial: “Non-Russian,” a low level in the first third of the game. The premise is elaborate, narrative, but uncomfortably simple in the game. You are an undercover American operative, deeply embedded with a group of Russian terrorists (these games, for whatever reason, are not big fans of Russia). They engage in a horrible terrorist attack: a mass shooting at an airport. To maintain your coverage, you are forced to accept it. The game asks you to participate in the mass shooting (although it doesn’t punish you if you don’t; it’s perfectly feasible to play the entire level without shooting anyone who doesn’t shoot you, which seems unintentional). It is meant to be horrible and shocking, an escalation of the disempowerment sequence where a nuclear bomb detonated in the first game, a display of the idiocy and violence of bad foreign policy and human cruelty in general.
But “No Russian” just … doesn’t … work. Horror is forgotten, in game terms, as soon as it ends. Firing pistols is the solution to any other problem that comes your way, and any political commentary is sidetracked by the fact that the game later reveals that it was all a montage of a rogue general trying to start a war. Nothing about the level has a broader impact on how the game feels. It just feels rude and stupid; what kind of undercover agent embedded in a terrorist group to not Does it stop them from doing mass murder anyway? The sequence is haunting without a clear justification for existing. It was, of course, controversial at launch, and the remaster includes an option to skip it, which feels like an admission that it was never so necessary to start.
