Call of Duty 2

Call of Duty was a lot of fun. I really like shooting Nazis because they say funny things when I kill them.

This reminds me of the happy days in boy scouts.

This fellow's getting violent. I guess he'll be pissed when he discovers his gun's loaded with bubblegums instead of bullets.

Naturally, I was pretty excited when I heard about Call of Duty 2 because I would get a chance to kill more Nazis and hear more funny things when they died.

So I went, and I sat in a Call of Duty 2 bunker that Activision and Infinity Ward have paid to have set up here at E3. I got hit on by a big guy in an MP uniform because I am so cute, and then I got to see a movie of CoD2. It was the obligatory D-Day level that has American GIs climbing up a bunch of cliffs to shoot at some Nazi bastards.

First I was treated to a lovely show of Higgins Boats rolling into the shore, with soldiers talking, and bullets coming in. Then, as soon as the boat landed, and the man whose eyes I was watching from on that big projector screen took his first steps into France, there was a great and lovely explosion that knocked him on his ass.

Infinity Ward loves those scenes after big explosions in which the narrator can roll around on the ground with far-away sounds and the images stay longer and blur towards the edges of the screen. A medic held my head and told me that everything would be okay as I watched a bunch of men on-fire stroll in and die on the beach in the cold sand.

They're going for intense, obviously. They're very out-dated, this is somewhat the sad part. Call of Duty 2 has its own new and exciting engine that just doesn't look so great. The ground is the chief complaint, the way that the characters look, same deal; just dated, much like World War 2 itself. It looks a lot like Call of Duty and it feels a lot like Medal of Honor. They've still got death animations, which were nice a few years ago, and now just bug the hell out of me. I want people to drop dead in new and exciting ways. I want to manipulate some Nazi corpses so that they look like they were touching each other when I came in with my fire spitting rifle of judgment. Call of Duty 2 just looks like it is missing a lot of the technology that we have available today and that we should be exploiting for its full potential.

I really don't play games for technology though, I play for gameplay. The gameplay is really just more of the same though. Call of Duty 2 might be more like an expansion pack for Call of Duty than a real sequel. As this World War 2 first person shooter genre has been explored again and again and again ad nauseum, we get the same gameplay a lot of the time. Sure it might be very, very intense, but that doesn't make it exciting or fresh. We become desensitized towards a hellfire of bullets racing in at our vulnerable little skulls. A whistle past our ear doesn't make us jump and shout. It's just another bullet whizzing past our ear on its merry way towards impact and death.

I guess the main complaint still remains with Call of Duty, can we please, please have another genre? Infinity Ward has a lot of talent; I just wish that they would focus on something apart from yet another World War 2 shooter. We've been fed killing Nazis who say funny things when we kill them time and time again, and that's great, but let's get something a little different. You wouldn't have sex in the same position every night, let's not have a shooter in the same war every time.

-Jackson "Smapdey" Johns