Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Declared Biggest Launch in Entertainment History

About the airport level (if you don't know about this then it will be a spoiler but I doubt there's anyone left who doesn't know about it by now, unless they've just awoken from a coma).

I'm sorry but the airport level where you are supposed to gun down civilians is crap. Not in principle, but in execution. It's rubbish. It doesn't work. I'm not saying it can't work, just that it's been done really badly here. All you get is a 30-second intro of some guy saying "You don't know what it's taken to get you here, this Makarov is a really bad dude and you'll be helping us a lot by doing this" and then you are expected to waste crowds of civilians. Sure, that's fine if you don't want to try to get into the game in any meaningful way, if you see it as no more emotionally engaging than Tetris, but if you actually get a kick out of playing games because (by their very nature) they give you a chance to enter into the role of the protagonist and experience something of what the protagonist would experience, this is not enough justification for you as a player to start mowing people down. Doing so means you are disengaging from the make-believe world of the game, because you are having to suspend your emotional involvement in the game, having no proper motivation to take part in the massacre. All games which feature simulated humans rather than coloured blocks or dots evoke some kind of emotional engagement, otherwise what would be the point of representing people? So even if they are not role-playing games, whenever I play a game what I am looking for is something which will make me believe I am really in the game, really doing what the game's protagonist is doing. That is what makes it fun - combat is fun in shooting games because it makes me feel like I, personally, am the one kicking ass. Not because I take pride in the fact that my hand-eye co-ordination lets me position a target over a certain coloured pixel and press a button. It's because I feel like a badass, shooting bad guys. The more games let me imagine I am really the one doing the cool stuff, the better I like them, and this applies just as much to shooters as to RPGs. This is why the airport level in MW2 is so badly judged, and so clumsily pulled off. The motivation for me, the player, to want to take part in the massacre has scarcely been presented at all, let alone done convincingly enough to make me even for a second want to pull the trigger. The player knows virtually nothing about the backstory, nothing about why the massacre is taking place, and nothing about how taking part in it is going to help anyone, all you have a vague reassurances from a disembodied voice.

In the film Donnie Brasco you see Johnny Depp going undercover in the mafia, and it's really tense, because he's duping them throughout the whole film and the slightest slip could give the game away, get him killed and blow his investigation. So at the end when he is about to shoot an innocent person, there is actually some debate about whether he should do it or not, it's engrossing, because you emotionally understand what is at stake. In this game, you don't even intellectually understand why you are taking part in the massacre, let alone emotionally understanding it. If you'd spent the whole game infiltrating Makarov's gang it would be different, this would be an interesting twist, because your desire to be successful at infiltrating his gang and succeeding at the game's key objective would introduce some conflict, and would at least give you some inclination to think about how far you were prepared to go to protect your cover. But the game isn't about being an undercover agent at all. It is not enough to say we can fill in our own backstory.

If the game had wanted to do this level properly it should have done everything it could to try to persuade you that there might conceivably be a reason why it was important enough to kill innocent people to get close to Makarov. But it happens right at the beginning of the game, so that is impossible. To take part in the massacre you have to turn off the natural emotional engagement which normally goes along with experiencing any fiction. It takes you out of the game. I mean, yes, what is presented is shocking, and the experience of playing through it certainly would be powerful, if you decide to play through it. But the game doesn't bother giving you any reason whatsoever to want to play through it. It doesn't put you in the position of trying to justify it to yourself, it doesn't raise any moral dilemmas, because it completely fails to sell the idea that anything significant is at stake. It is a gargantuan missed opportunity. Seriously, a loading screen with a bit of dialogue is not going to cut it. It's a complete failure. This is why I didn't take part in the killing of the civilians, I just hung back and shot scenery. It's not that I didn't want to participate in the world of the game, I love the game (despite the obnoxiously gung-ho intro voiceover), and I was prepared to experience what Infinity Ward wanted me to experience without prejudice, but they didn't even try to make me want to kill innocent people. Yes I know the innocent people aren't real, that totally misses the point - the point is that when I play games, I like to pretend as much as I can that they are real. So saying it's not real just ruins the whole point of me playing a game. I love pretending I'm an undercover agent. Let me do that, do it properly. Make me see what is at stake. Present me with a dilemma. Leave the terrorism scene to near the end of the game, and make the whole of the game lead up to it - make everything you have worked for throughout the whole of the game be what is at stake for failing to take part. The level fails even at doing what it is supposedly meant to be doing (showing how serious the whole situation is) because it didn't do enough to make me take the level seriously, meaning as much as possible I avoided looking at what was going on. And anyway, you don't have to see an airport of people being wasted to want to go after a bad guy. As a plot device for instigating the rest of the plot, I suppose what happens in the level works, but to expect someone just to play through it because you want to have a shocking level, is inept. It didn't shock me, because I didn't do the designers the favour of subjecting myself to it. Why would I? They should have made me want to play through it. Yes, I know the level is skippable, but then that just emphasises really how ineffective and unnecessary it is, because nothing is done to persuade you that you want to play it. It shows just how unimportant the story actually is that they don't care that a lot of people might be missing a chunk of it and spending the game being confused and uninvolved. It would have been a lot more powerful if they had made players who found the level uncomfortable want to play through it anyway. As it is it just ends up catering to fans of voyeuristic death, and making the game a bit crap. OK, it's not a big deal that there's a crap level in a game, but considering the phenomenal amount of attention this level is getting, the least they could have done was do it intelligently. Instead the did it completely stupidly. The designers have shown themselves to be hopelessly clueless at doing what TV and films routinely do so well.

On another note, excepting that level, this game is amazing, way better than Modern Warfare, both MP and SP are fantastic.