Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Seven More Things I Hate About Modern Warfare 2!

In light of recent developments, including continued graduate applications and perpetual travel, I’ve decided to avoid missing a single post by permitting my standards to plummet inexolerably. Therefore instead of forming an intelligent essay about a video game I’ve had a profound or interesting experience with I’m just going to list off some more thing I hate about Modern Warfare 2 in an odd numbered list. Let’s go with seven items for this one. And away we go with Things That Are Bullshit About Modern Warfare 2!

1 – Double shotgun dude.

I didn’t get what all the fuss was about (He’s got two shotguns? So what! That’s nothin’) until I started to play a lot of multi. The Double Shotgun Dude is someone you really have to face constantly in order to appreciate just how profoundly broken his build is. See the problem isn’t that Double Shotgun Dude does a lot of damage or can ostensibly attack without pause for an entire game. The problem is that his effective range when firing both shotguns is obscene. It’s an insta-kill at assault rifle ranges and it makes me sad and angry all the time.

2 – Knife wielding psychopaths

If shotgun dudes are douchebags then knife dudes are their nigh indistinguishable guido cousins. There’s nothing more frustrating than an extra speedy dipshit with a knife and a revolver blitzing up to you and stabbing you in the throat, except when it happens to several spray and praying teammates before he catches you from behind. What’s worse is how accessible this build is. You can seriously use this one out of the gates by selecting the First Recon build out of the box. But if I’m going to side with most critics and give IW way too much credit for their efforts I’m going to go ahead and call the whole thing a really funny practical joke, because IW claimed that look-lean commands were removed from the game in order to preserve an apparently non-existentalance.

3 – That Guy Who’s Hacking

Within days of Modern Warfare 2’s release the peer to peer service had been dramatically compromised by a number of modders who wanted to watch Infinity Ward weep emo tears as their statements about the improved security of Peer to Peer matchmaking, a series of statements the most neophyte PC gamer could have readily interpreted as bullshit. While the modders successfully cracked the game and began offering pay-to-play hacks, Infinity Ward seems largely unconcerned. In lieu of any kind of intelligent response they’ve taken up the banner of ignoring the problem, and since the PC community still doesn’t have any way to police themselves thanks to the lack of dedicated servers the game has become profoundly broken on my platform of choice. I never know if I’m dying because I made some mistake and alerted an already nearly prescient “pro FPS player” or if I’ve just been assraped by someone with two shotguns and his mom’s credit card who decided that he wanted to look through walls.

4 – The Rediculous Number of Killstreak Items

Seriously? A lot of these are duplicates. Do I need two different kinds of attack helicopters? Is there a notable difference between them? One’s slightly faster and one’s slightly harder to kill? Really? I think I’ll be too busy trying not to die to notice the difference. Is anyone ever going to use the EMP? I’ve yet to see it in a month of solid play, and I’m not sure it would help anything given how much players love to shoot from the hip. Maybe some terrorists have pacemakers and this will take them out remotely? And while we’re on the subject of utility, is it at all necessary to give someone who has achieved 25 straight kills a game ending item? Hasn’t the game ended by this point? Even the interesting rewards like supply drops are too often sort of worthless. And then there’s the Counter UAV, which is hilarious in its total lack of utility. In tossing everything but the kitchen sink into Modern Warfare 2 IW created a dense list of reward items which people will only use a handful of, and they put a lot of time and effort into doing so.

5 – Tactical Insertion

Why is this even here? Voluntarily allow the enemy to camp your spawn? Seriously? Again, I’ve yet to see this used in a game, but if it’s anything like its introduction in the single player campaign it keeps you from being bombed after an EMP has been activated, assuming you’re in the White House. In all seriousness, permitting players to choose their spawn location might be useful in a thoughtful, tactical game. But in case you haven’t noticed Modern Warfare 2 is less thoughtful and tactical and more of a clusterfuck. They might as well call this skill “give the enemy some free claymore kills and make yourself ragequit.”

6 - Underslung Shotgun Attachments

Completely worthless, kind of funny, referential to Aliens and hilariously out of place, these are probably the stupidest possible buy for an assault rifle. After using these items in single player I’ve got to admit, I don’t see the value in an un-aimable attachment which effectively gives me a third gun I wouldn’t pick if I had four weapon choices. If you find one of these slapped to an ACR then the apocalypse is likely upon us, or someone is choosing a purposefully bad build in order to embarrass you.

7 – The Fact That This Game Is a Straight Console Port

2009 was actually a pretty good year for console ports. Red Faction: Guerilla showed its chops nicely, and while Resident Evil 5 shipped without some features it was still well received overall. Arkham Asylum has been met with acclaim, with special props going to the PC, and I think GTA IV might have been big enough to count as a 2009 release still. There were some great console games that PC gamers had a chance to play this year and Modern Warfare 2 wasn’t one of them. Clumsily ported without any concern for its user base or, in some cases, even the most basic of tests, Modern Warfare 2 lost dozens of features that make the PC a great platform in order to disincentise the use of the PC as a gaming machine. What IW did with their port wasn’t just sloppy, it was an act of psychological violence against the PC gaming community, informing them that their dollars were inferior to those offered by the X-Box community. All of the aforementioned design choices were bad, and some of them tie into this last one but the fact that someone with an editor can crack open MW2’s local files and read X-Box Live code on a Windows is representative of just how little IW cares about their audience now that they’ve made it. They’ve essentially become Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, forgetting that hard work caused their success, resigned to being told they’re great by people who have long since stopped thinking about why certain things work and don’t work.

Modern Warfare 2 doesn’t work nearly as well as it could, and it’s because of decisions like these that a third of its players need to deal with profound bullshit in order to derive even moderate enjoyment from a game that will still be selling for full price in a year’s time. So my advice? Find some way to steal a copy and backdoor into IW’s incredibly porous multiplayer system. I doubt it would be that hard for someone so inclined.