First thoughts of Modern Warfare 3

So Activision have pulled out the stops and let folk try out the multi-player for their latest Call of Duty game. So me being bored and the type that only play CoD due to free weekends (I'm not the biggest fan but I'll play it if I don't have to pay for it. First impression of the game was good, and by good mean complete and utter wank. This is even before I entered a match. I was sat about in the menu for half an hour or so attempting to connect to necessary "online services". For the first few attempt I figured there will be a bunch of folk trying to play the game due to the free weekend. However I grew more and more impatient with the game the longer this went on. Sure there is going to be more people playing the game but surely someone up there at Activision HQ must of thought to check the servers to make sure they would be able to handle the influx of new players, it's not rocket science.

In conclusion my experience of Modern Warfare 3 consisted of:

• Mostly menus
• The game "Connecting to Online Services"
• Then error messages telling me the connection to these servers had failed.
  

I would like to thank Activision so much for wasting my bandwidth, and due to this frankly terrible service which lead to me not actually being able to play the game, I exited the game, went straight to my Steam Library and deleted the game. Half an hour of waiting to play a game is unacceptable should not happen especially from a game made by someone as big as Activision. I was willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt ignoring all the anti CoD flaming that always happens and give the game a shot, but all I got was menus. I'm still not going to say the game it self is good or bad because I don't know. The online servers however are terrible.

Free Weekend for Modern Warfare 3 Multiplayer on Steam

Not sure whether you want to buy the latest Call of Duty game? Here is your chance to give the multiplayer a shot. This weekend you will be able to play Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer completely free. You can start pre loading there game now in preparation here which I am doing now. While I'm not the greatest fan of the series, I tend to play a few hours whenever one of these weekends pops up as I did with Black Ops a few months back. I'm not going to buy the game, but it will at least give me a little perspective on it. There are plenty of people on each side of the fence, some love, some hate it. I like to sit on the fence and watch them fight it out. Just thought I'd mention it in case any one was interested really. I may do first thoughts on the game after the weekend has finished as well.

Modern Warfare 3 makes $1 Billion in record time.

Love it or hate it, it must be doing something right. I am not the greatest fan of the series, but the fact that it breached 1 billion dollars in a matter of 16 days after it's initial release date.

This is the fastest any media product has reached this milestone, beating Avatar which held the title at 17 days to get to the 1 billion marker, which is still damn impressive in it self.

I have played CoD games in the past I can see the appeal as they all are easy to pick up and play. I don't like them due to the health regeneration system in place. I prefer games where you have a set amount of health if you lose it you die, not this whole 'you can suck you thumb behind this car for 10 seconds and magically your cured' system they have in place with a lot of games these days. It makes the game far to easy, which I guess is why it appeals to a lot of people. It makes it easier for anyone no matter there experience playing shooters able to play the game with at least some what of a chance of not dying constantly. Anyway I'm gonna stop there before I get in to a full blown rant about why I'm not a fan and actually congratulate Activision, because like the game or not, this is one hell of an achievements.

Battlefield is picking on Call of Duty

So EA has been trash talking about the Call of Duty predicting the game will collapse in 2-3 years and saying they hope CoD will rot from the core. (which probably has been taken out of context). Anyway the CoD guys don't seem to happy about this. I agree with this to a certain extent, from what I got from these comments is that EA is being a bit of a twat. Friendly competition is fine and good for businesses and should push them to be better, look at ATI (sorry AMD) and Nvidia they constantly are trying to out do each other. But they seem to be wishing failure on the Activision product.

At the end of the day Call of Duty isn't all that bad of a game, more than likely why it is been about for like 8 years now. It's one of those games that doesn't take long to get used to, one you can just pick up and play. It is a game for the casual masses I would say. That's right I said it's a casual game, and it is. It is a casual shooter, (granted it does have a competitive side with MLG and all that kinda shibbang), my point being it's one of those games you can kill half an hour before going down the pub or whatever else you may have planned. It is alot easier to get into than say Battlefield. I am talking of my experience of Bad Company 2 here, that game took me ages to get into the multiplayer. Battlefield is a more technical, more realistic game, it's got alot more to it than you just foot soldiering around like CoD, which is why alot of people say BF is a better game than CoD. I can see the reasoning behind that but it's all preference isn't it.

One thing that does annoy me is the amount of flaming and trash talking between gamers, it's not like it used to be alot of it is purely insults and nothing else. Banter is one thing but being a dick is another. You then get all the people who say CoD is killing creativity etc in the industry. Why do they make yearly releases of a game? First off because people buy them, just like they have done with many other, damn near every sport game you can think of, if sports games can throw out a new game every year only with a few minor tweaks why can't other games. And it's not like Cod is the only military shooter out there if you dont like it you have, Battlefield, Red Orchestra, Homefront, ARMA, Americas Army and Ghost Recon to name a few, all of which are good games in there own right. I frankly am sick of seeing reviews of new shooters coming out pretty much saying its not CoD so it must suck. Homefront is an especially good case for this. Yes it had some technical difficulties with the multiplayer on release, (because that never happens with more well known franchises does it now. I do love sarcasm). The game it self was quite good. A slightly futuristic military shooter with a decent story (albeit a bit short). But until the ending of the game I thoroughly enjoyed it and do hope they make another Homefront game. Hopefully they will learn from the mistakes of the first game and improve on it if/when they do make a sequel. The game was decent but because everyone compared it to Call of Duty, it kinda flopped on the review side of things making people not want to play it. I bought it purely because of these reviews, if someone says a game is crap I will purposely go out and find some good in it.

Anyway back to my original point: EA are being a dick, like I said before competition and banter is fine being a bonafide twat isn't.

MW3 take advantage of Steam

As we all know ever since the announcement of both Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3, there has of course been a lot of fan boy flame wars going on. A lot of which have kept me amused but that is beside the point. So I logged into steam just now and what is on the front page of the store? A big massive MW3 advert. While EA have vowed not to release Battlefield onto Steam in favour of pushing there own Origin product, but I'm not going to get into that because I would be here for days. Looks like the guys down at CoD HQ are going to take full advantage of Valves lovely service, seriously the advert takes up half the screen. No doubt it will be staying there for the foreseeable future.