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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27631 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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I think Modern Warfare 2’s story is somewhat underrated. It’s objectively ridiculous in the broad scope: It reads like a nightmare Tom Clancy would have when he was in bed with a high fever. But it totally nails the queasy off-balance feeling that spiraling geopolitical crises in the 21st century would have, which makes it feel prescient. It also manages to (perhaps unintentionally) smuggle in some interesting commentary about 9/11 and the subsequent US response.

Are you talking about the series as a whole or Call of Duty 4 (also known as "Modern Warfare 1, The First One from 2007 and not 2019, No I'm Not Playing The New One")? Because I felt Call of Duty 4 was mostly "realistic" in that I could see

  1. A Middle Eastern Country undergoing a violent revolution
  2. A tinpot dictator using nukes if he got his hands on them
  3. Russia falling apart if it ever had a power vacuum

Obviously not all of it is realistic, but the broad strokes feel pretty plausible. Meanwhile, Modern Warfare 2 has James Bond level contrivances and Red Dawn-esque fantasies of Russian military prowess.

I’m talking specifically about MW2 (2009). Modern Warfare 1 was reasonably realistic.

Then definitely agreed. I lump the Black Ops series in with post CoD4 Modern Warfare. Very fun games, completely nonsensical if you apply even the most basic thought to them. And it's sort of indicative of my larger point - the second these games got big and intricate it seemed almost impossible to put a compelling, interesting, logically consistent story in them. Only the lightning in a bottle original game managed to do so, even though MW2 was made by the exact same people (up until the original studio leads quit, which was after its release).

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