Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

I'm really curious how close this game is to what it would have been had Jason West and Vince Zampella not been fired by Activision and taken a lot of the higher level talent at Infinity Ward with them. Was the plan for the game already in place, or did the people left behind have to come up with the whole thing? If there was a plan, how detailed was it? I'm curious because I had fun with the game, but it doesn't do much besides meet the standards of the previous ones without bringing much new to the table. This is the fifth Call of Duty game in this style in as many years, and both the formula and the graphics engine are feeling a little old at this point. At full capacity, might Infinity Ward have brought their A game and raised modern military shooters to a new level? Or was Modern Warfare 3 always destined to be yet another solid Call of Duty game?

There's nothing really wrong with that, I'm just not sure that I need to play many more of them. Modern Warfare 3 has everything you'd expect and little you wouldn't. There's a campaign that will last you five to six hours which features lots of dramatic explosions and firefights. The Spec-Ops mode returns with plenty of new missions and a survival mode, because every multiplayer shooter needs a survival mode. And there's the traditional online which feels basically the same with a few tweaks and additions. If it's worth it to you, there's nothing really wrong with the package. It's just that it's a very familiar package by now.

One thing in the campaign's favor is that it actually manages to bring the overloaded plot of the Modern Warfare sub-series to a mostly satisfying conclusion, as long as you're okay with the series' practice of resolving story threads by killing off every character involved in them. It seems like shooters are always trying to outdo each other now, and MW3 definitely tries to build that excitement by going as big as possible, essentially portraying what a modern World War III would look like. On one hand you'll be playing alongside familiar characters from the first couple games, chasing down the series' biggest villain, but on the other you'll be hopping all over the place, fighting battles in familiar locations and very extreme conditions. You'll start by saving New York City's harbor from a Russian naval fleet, and then hop to various hotspots all over Europe with your squad of celebrity voice acted comrades. At times the plot justifications for each new location will seem thin, but when all you really want is to shoot bad guys and see exciting stuff happen all around you, it tends to work really well. I don't really buy that Russia would be able to cause this much trouble for the US and Europe all by themselves, but it's an easy thing to let slide. The series' ability to create unique, memorable moments is certainly a boon, as it makes the campaign seem a lot more noteworthy than the one in Battlefield 3, despite featuring similar gameplay and a less technically advanced presentation. The Uncharted series might be the only one that pulls off huge spectacle better in the world of action games.

Not everything is great, though. In what might have been a constraint due to the labor issue surrounding the game's creation, you sure spend an awful lot of time in the campaign driving or riding in vehicles instead of moving on your own. It's not that these sequences are boring, but most shooters use vehicles as a way to occasionally change the pace a bit, and here it seems like a design crutch for when they needed you to kill a lot of guys without finding a more clever way to do it. They did manage to avoid the sort of frustrating choke points that have frequently plagued the series in the past, but instead the game seemed almost too easy on regular, until the final mission which ended up being pretty annoying. You gotta get the bad guy! You only have three minutes! But there's a ton of guys between you and him and they can all shoot you with deadly accuracy the second you leave cover! Go faster! No, slow down and let yourself heal! There are better ways to make a conclusion dramatic than the way they handled it. It seemed odd that some of the biggest twists in the story involved a new character that we didn't have time to really learn much about, and it's hard to be shocked by anything the series does anymore. In the past the series has effectively used the deaths of characters to create memorable moments, but when you get the point where you basically assume everyone is a goner, it stops seeming special.

Also, I'll be honest - I haven't tried the other modes. Battlefield's larger, objective-based multiplayer is more interesting to me, and most of my time is being taken up by other games anyway. Some of the things they've added like ways to get bonuses in multiplayer without being skilled enough to earn a kill streak seem neat, and Spec-Ops was pretty fun from what I played before. I know some people only care about Call of Duty for the online, but I bought it because I wanted to see the end of the Modern Warfare story, and I'm pretty sure I got that. It wasn't exactly a unique or inspirational game, but it was a fun one, packing plenty of interesting moments and enjoyable gunfights into the amount of time it lasted. I'd like to see the series do something really different before I try picking it up again, but it's hard to complain about this as a temporary send-off.

Trainspotting

You can pretty easily draw a comparison between Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream, and the fact that the former came out four years earlier doesn't do the latter any favors. They're not quite the same, but they're both the second film by directors who are still acclaimed today, and use a lot of style to tell stories about the lives of drug addicts. Trainspotting is less overwhelming and depressing, and all told I ended up liking it more as a film. It's about five friends, three of which use heroin. One of them refuses but is a psycho on his own without the help of narcotics, and the other ends up getting pulled into that world worse than all of them.

There's an unusual flow to the plot as the protagonist played by Ewan McGregor goes through many ups and downs over time, falling into and out of his addiction. It's a good performance, making the character sympathetic despite myriad screw-ups and bad decisions, and the people around him are good too. My favorite character might be Tommy, played by Kevin McKidd with far more luxurious hair than I'm used to seeing, and Jonny Lee Miller (who we just saw do his best to save a disappointing season of Dexter) is another friend who sees himself as a very smart person, and who likes James Bond maybe a bit too much. Robert Carlyle is sort of a likable psychopath, and while I didn't know Ewen Bremner by name before this movie, I've seen him before and he fits his sad sack role well. Kelly Macdonald plays a girl Ewan rushes into a relationship with, and it's a pretty different part from what I'm used to seeing from her.

Danny Boyle's direction definitely helps the movie a lot, making every scene more interesting to watch and filling the whole thing with a lot of little touches that are both amusing and enhance the story. The scene where Ewan is in withdrawal and hallucinating is obviously a highlight and the film's most famous sequence, but it's far from the only scene that's unique and inventive. Things like completely entering the toilet and falling into the rug are similarly effective at putting you in the head of someone who's out of their mind, and it all works to somehow make the movie a bit more lighthearted than its subject matter would suggest without glorifying it. I really dug it a lot, more than Slumdog Millionaire, and Boyle is definitely a director I need to see more work by.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Or just Modern Warfare 2, as Infinity Ward clearly wanted to call it from the fact that the words "Call of Duty" don't appear anywhere in the game or on packaging for special editions. MW2 is the follow-up to the last game the series' actual creators made two years ago, and picks up five years later. The fate of a few characters is left up in there, but main protagonist Soap returns as a grizzled veteran with a voice (Kevin McKidd's) of his own, taking Price's place as ally in the field and friendly voice in your ear during the game's consistently better missions as a British special operative instead of a US soldier. While the first game's antagonist was defeated, the world is still unsafe as some Russian extremists still believe in his cause and conflict continues in the middle east. You still bounce between multiple characters, trotting across the globe to find and kill new people.

The first game seemed at the time to be somewhat plausible, presenting an interesting military plot punctuated by a couple shocking, unexpected moments. Modern Warfare 2 is much more over the top, constantly in your face with plot twists, betrayals, and every action movie gimmick you can think of. It sort of tosses the believability out the window in an early scene intended to disgust the player, and it mostly succeeds at this goal, but at the cost of your superiors looking like bone-headed morons and doing things that a reasonable government would never consider. Later events make you wonder if things were really as they seemed, but still, you can tell that their goal this time was to tell an exciting story, not represent modern conflict on a realistic, global scale. Bits intended to startle or shock the player are more frequent albeit less effective, because you can pull off the same trick so many times before it becomes old hat. There are a few occasions where they play with your expectations successfully and some true surprises, and in the end I accepted what they were doing and enjoyed the ride. It's just clear at this point that the developers' intentions with the franchise have changed.

Like pretty much any Call of Duty game, the missions are a grab back of solid shooting, truly excellent set pieces, and occasional total clunkers. They never seem to be able to stay away from a level or two where the enemies are just too frequent and too accurate and you just get pinned down from every direction, so your frustration just mounts as you continually restart and muscle your way through by memorizing where they come from. Luckily they get that out of the way early this time, and the latter part of the game is characterized by things that are constantly new and exciting. The single player campaign is fairly short, but these days that's a good thing - five to six hours of original, constantly changing, high quality gameplay are more than enough to satisfy anyone who isn't made of free time. Missions where you sneak through enemy territory with a buddy picking off stragglers are always fun, and even the more bombastic levels are enhanced by the somewhat unsettling locations they take place in this time.

The game looks and sounds great as expected. Solid sound with nice effects, good voice from a mix of recognizable names and industry veterans, and music that always manages to fit the appropriate mood. The textures of some unimportant details are surprisingly bland looking, but anything they wanted to look awesome usually does. And for people who don't play Call of Duty for the story mode, the multiplayer looks intact with some new features, and Spec Ops is an interesting way to extend the game's life without implementing actual co-op into their carefully planned single player. Infinity Ward is still setting the golden standard in competitive online shooting on consoles, and they just happened to put the best one player campaign this side of the Half-Life series in there too.

Rome - Season 2

Season 2 wraps up the series in satisfying manner. I wouldn't have minded the show covering a larger time period, or fleshing out the time it does cover, but there is something to be said for telling a story and then quitting while you're ahead. Rome is the kind of show that could easily get ridiculous in its debauchery if it went on too long, and one can argue it already started to by the end of this season.

There's a bit of a different feel to the show, as it covers a greater time period in a smaller number of episodes. The first season was a little more insular to the city of Rome, and more political. The second has a bit wider scope and has more true warfare happening, at least in the background if not on camera. They continue to avoid large scale battle scenes, as they're a bit difficult on a television show's budget, but they manage to work around it well and stay entertaining.

Rome should be credited for preventing stagnation. There's always something happening, characters change, move, age, and die regularly. Almost all of the featured cast is genuinely interesting, and there is always something significant happening. Lucius Vorenus' deteriorating ability to keep his anger in check and new role running the Aventine is always interesting, and his comrade Titus Pullo continues to be a very likable character. He usually has a friendly disposition, even when talking to an eminent assassination victim, and can keep Lucius in check, but when angered or in danger, he is prone to brutal, animalistic rages. Octavian comes into his role as the new ruler of Rome, and his development into someone much less kindhearted than he seemed initially is intriguing to watch. Mark Antony's descent into the decadence of Egypt continues to add to his already strange and attention-grabbing character. Women take less of a prominent role than they did in the first season, reserved more for fighting amongst themselves, although Cleopatra is still very important to the events leading up to the end.

There are a lot of creative liberties taken and historical inaccuracies, but I'll restate that that's not what the show is about. It's a general idea of what life was like at the time, with the major events intact, made to be entertaining as hell. It's well-acted, visually impressive, and often quite funny. It can get a little extreme with the violence and sexuality, but if you don't mind those things it's a really great watch.

Rome - Season 1

I'm not sure how accurately Rome actually depicts what went on around the time of Julius Caesar, because a lot of the violence and debauchery seem over the top. It's still fairly historically accurate though, following what basically happened in the years it covers. Most of the characters are fictionalized versions of actual historical figures, with varying degrees of authenticity. A lot of what happened is dramatized and embellished to be more enjoyable, because the show's about that more than being educational.

It sounds kind of weird but I've never seen a show combine violence, sex, and politics so well. The whole cast is made up of stately British actors, and they deliver their dialogue marvelously. It's really fun just to listen to them say their lines even if nothing much is really happening. The storyline is filled with maneuvering and betrayals and posturing, and it's interesting to see how some of the same things still happen today. The show's a bit infamous for the rampant promiscuity of some of the female characters, but it's rarely that explicit and is more to set the tone for the strange time period than to be actually enticing. The violence is an interesting case in the show. There are very few large battles and the ones there are aren't shot in an epic way, but focus on a small group or are just random stuttering shots of a bit of chaos happening. Where the show shines in this area is the more intimate, brutal stuff that just happens in the city. There are many executions and squabbles that just offer a little bit of bloodshed, but are very effective in their briefness. There's also a scene near the end of the season that is hands down, the most amazing fight sequence filmed for television I've ever seen.

As touched on earlier, the show has a lot of good actors, and they play interesting characters. Lucius Vorenus is essentially the main character who finds much success but struggles with his angry streak and affection for Titus Pullo, who often finds himself in a lot of trouble. Titus, along with Ocatvian, is one of my two favorite characters. They're fairly opposite in their methods, but both very likable in their own ways. Pullo is a great soldier who often makes rash decisions in the heat of the moment that land him in jail quite often. Octavian isn't a normal boy, he's more interested in reading and intelligence than swords and girls. Despite his youth he's one of the smartest people in the city and has some ambition. Pompey Magnus is an interesting rival for Caesar for a while. Mark Antony is allied with Caesar, and is slightly off-kilter. He is alternately pleasant and threatening. he is similar to Marcus Brutus, they are both influential young men Caesar trusts, although Antony resists temptation to betray Caesar while Brutus does not, inflicting the final blow when Julius is murdered on the senate floor in one of the more disturbing scenes in the show. I hope it's not a spoiler than Caesar gets killed. The two main female counterpoints are Atia and Servilia, mothers of Octavian and Brutus respectively; who start as friends but come to hate each other during the show. They have very different styles but both exert their influence over others and are very key to the plot.

Rome is the perfect HBO show; decadent, vulgar, entertaining as hell, and with a story that definitely knows where it's going. It ends after the second season which I've already started, so I'll make sure to enjoy what's left of this great series.