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I guess we'll see how the game looks in comparison when Lazyfire posts the next video. Military technology really is awesome, in the biblical sense of the world. It's horrifying and destructive and utterly captivating. In that video, we have people literally reigning down hellfire from the sky to smite their enemies. Hundreds of pounds of explosives are used to snuff out a dozen human lives through a little blurry TV screen. They don't sound too different from gamers on a teamspeak server. Then Call of Duty 4 comes along to complete the circle.
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Mar 10, 2016 23:17
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Octatonic posted:I guess we'll see how the game looks in comparison when Lazyfire posts the next video. Military technology really is awesome, in the biblical sense of the world. It's horrifying and destructive and utterly captivating. In that video, we have people literally reigning down hellfire from the sky to smite their enemies. Hundreds of pounds of explosives are used to snuff out a dozen human lives through a little blurry TV screen. They don't sound too different from gamers on a teamspeak server. Then Call of Duty 4 comes along to complete the circle. Very true. When I was deployed I got to see a lot of FLIR video of "warheads on foreheads," people really did cheer and high-five when a flash of pixelated light would turn people into giblets and trucks into fireballs. Me personally, I was the FLIR technician. I was just glad that our equipment was working and that our CAS missions were keeping friendlies alive. I did not relish the carnage but I do understand why it allowed people to become so detached. A lot of the guys even internalized killing bad guys as the fruits of their labor; we drill stateside for three times longer than any combat tour, when your squadron finally drops a bomb in anger people are loving ecstatic.
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Mar 11, 2016 00:34
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So in reality you can't hear the guns going off from inside the cockpit? That's a little disappointing.  Hell half the fun of calling in an AC-130 was knowing the sounds of your guns are scaring the poo poo out of the enemy team.
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Mar 11, 2016 00:53
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HOOLY BOOLY posted:So in reality you can't hear the guns going off from inside the cockpit? That's a little disappointing. Oh I'm sure you can hear, if nothing else, 40mm and 105mm cannons going off and making the airframe shudder. That linked video was probably an after-action review tool using a no-sound thermal camera with the crew chatter overlaid. e: I mean the AC-130's big gun is literally one of these bolted onto the fuselage. You'll hear/feel it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SehKhHK6PN4 DeusExMachinima fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Mar 11, 2016 |
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Mar 11, 2016 01:07
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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Octatonic posted:I'm sure that you'll mention it in the AC-130 video itself, but I think another thing that made that section memorable was its topicality. CoD4 was released around the same time that Wikileaks was starting to be a thing, and making big headlines with the infamous "collateral murder" video allegedly showing the killing of several journalists US forces believed to be carrying small arms and anti armor weapons from the perspective of an attack helicopter. There were also leaked in-flight videos taken from AC-130 craft operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, featuring the very same jocular, detached, "videogame-y" attitude we will see reproduced by the Modern Warfare gunners. To me, it's one of the key points where I can't tell whether the game thinks war is disturbing and alienating, or just really awesome and spectacular. I remember a video kicking around the CoD thread when MW was released that was a helicopter gunner video and people citing that as the inspiration for the attitude of the gunners in the AC-130. Really, they sound like stone cold psychopaths in the game ("Haha, yep, you got 'em" and "Lot's of little pieces down there." being good examples). I think that's got to be partially because they are so far removed from the people they're firing on, they aren't people so much as they are white splotches on the TV screen. That sort of abstraction is one of the things people have focused on as drone use has increased over the last decade. IBlameRoadSuess posted:I've been kinda wanting to play CoD4 multiplayer again recently. If I can find my copy of it, I'll join in on some shenanigans. If I can't find it, I might just get the drat game anyway just for the sake of having it on steam. Don't buy the game just to play a few hours of multiplayer, not at $20 at least. One of the most annoying/stupid things about the CoD franchise is that Activision stone cold refuses to price the games like you would expect. The back catalog CoD games still sell pretty well, so dropping price would mean they didn't capitalize every sale as much as possible. Usually if there's a steam or humble bundle sale the game goes down to $10. That's actually how I ended up with a PC copy of this game myself.
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Mar 11, 2016 03:03
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Lazyfire posted:I remember a video kicking around the CoD thread when MW was released that was a helicopter gunner video and people citing that as the inspiration for the attitude of the gunners in the AC-130. Really, they sound like stone cold psychopaths in the game ("Haha, yep, you got 'em" and "Lot's of little pieces down there." being good examples). I think that's got to be partially because they are so far removed from the people they're firing on, they aren't people so much as they are white splotches on the TV screen. That sort of abstraction is one of the things people have focused on as drone use has increased over the last decade. Activision's pricing on the CoD games has always frustrated me, they only drop the prices like maybe once a year, and when they do, it's only like a 50% discount. Woo, I can buy all the modern warfare games for 100 dollars instead of 200 yaaaay. Though I will admit I did buy the treyarch pack when that was most recently on sale for like 40 bucks or some nonsense, but that's because I've got this weird love for all the treyarch games from World At War on.  Regardless, I found my old copy of it, now I just need to dust it off and hope that it'll run on windows 10.
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Mar 11, 2016 03:46
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IBlameRoadSuess posted:Activision's pricing on the CoD games has always frustrated me, they only drop the prices like maybe once a year, and when they do, it's only like a 50% discount. Woo, I can buy all the modern warfare games for 100 dollars instead of 200 yaaaay. Though I will admit I did buy the treyarch pack when that was most recently on sale for like 40 bucks or some nonsense, but that's because I've got this weird love for all the treyarch games from World At War on. It should work on Windows 10, at least it runs for me.
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Mar 11, 2016 03:47
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It can't possibly be any worse than World at War refusing to let you play co-op with someone if you don't have the exact same operating system, like what kept me from being one of the first two human beings to actually play that game's campaign co-op. Or even refusing to let you run it at all if you install it on a different computer that's running a different OS than what you had on your own computer when you first installed the game. I'm pretty sure I set some kind of record for install-to-uninstall time when I tried to play it on my bro's laptop three years back.
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Mar 11, 2016 04:08
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Kadorhal posted:I've noticed recently this happens in a lot of games. This other Minecraft-FPS type game I've been into, Blockstorm, has the same sort of thing with the sniper rifle. It only holds one bullet at a time with 9 in reserve, is the only weapon that requires you to lead your shots, and requires a steady hand to get the scope to drift where you want it to, so except for one person identified as the community's Sniper Queen™ (it's a pretty small community) nobody really uses it as their primary weapon 100% of the time - but it's also an instant kill if you hit a guy anywhere, so once someone does take it out and make a kill with it, that guy retaliates by switching to the sniper rifle themselves, and it shortly devolves into the pace slowing down considerably as everybody uses the same gun, until someone gets a lucky killing spree with one of the automatics (and even then some people might just switch out for the Uzi as their secondary so they have an automatic - not like extra weight is gonna hinder a camper). A note about the auto price: that poo poo is real and terrifying/hilarious. One auto kill is all it takes for half the game to be autos until the half ends with all participants claiming they'll stop as soon as everyone else stops. Anyone who dies immediately buys another auto to perpetuate the insanity. I've seen people use just a pistol after accidentally buying autos to keep from starting the war because each game is the Balkans in 1914 with every map being Sarajevo and everyone playing is a potential Gavrilo Princip. Tubes in MW2 are/were somehow worse because it wasn't just other Tubes that triggered multiple people to use them, it was one of the dozen things that were easily solvable by grenade launchers. Riot shield guy? Tube it. Commando Pro knife runner? Tube it. Guy running the SPAS 12? Tube the gently caress out of him. Someone with a hacked controller running a FAL? Oh, you better believe you have to tube him. When I launched Black Ops 3 for the first time I was really surprised I wasn't getting killed by any Tubes for the first few matches before I realized that they aren't an attachment anymore, they only appear as a character special weapon. I think they know there's no balancing those things. Kadorhal posted:It can't possibly be any worse than World at War refusing to let you play co-op with someone if you don't have the exact same operating system, like what kept me from being one of the first two human beings to actually play that game's campaign co-op. God, WaW had the weirdest things happening with it. I remember the 360 version wouldn't even let you connect to people if they didn't have all the same DLC as you did. That was especially depressing to me because I refused to buy their DLC and so I only played maybe six hours of MP in that game before a huge contingent of CoD goons ended up playing CoD4 until MW2 came out.
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Mar 11, 2016 23:47
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Honestly the whole tubes problem HAS been patched for years now! Ever since took out OMA entirely and made it so that you had to get scavenger packs to even get more grenade launcher shells, not to mention the overall decrease in usefulness of the things since the advent of the jetpacks and wallrunning. That said Black Ops 3 is probably the most fun i've had with a COD game since MW2. Most of it having to do with the overall balance of the guns. Now if only Treyarch would make some maps there weren't just 3 lane pieces of crap 
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Mar 11, 2016 23:54
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 DoctorStrangelove and Basics of CQC (AKA da planet earf) join me to blow up a bunch of things on the ground while uncaring skylords casually discuss ripping people to shreds with plane mounted artillery. This mission ends up hanging heavy over the rest of the MW franchise. MW2 didn't have an AC130 mission, and I think the campaign somewhat suffered from that. What it did instead was add the AC-130 as part of the expanded killstreak list, being rewarded to players who selected it as one of their three and made it to 13 kills. In multiplayer it was utterly terrifying, and the "ENEMY AC-130 IN THE AIR" call from the OpFor faction announcer expressed that perfectly. It took two guided rockets to take it out (or one well aimed predator missile), but unless you were off in a remote area and were running cold blooded you were probably hosed. The classic setup people used in MW2 to get their 25 kills for a nuke was generally Predator->Harriers->AC-130. 12 kills with the AC-130 was a bit of a stretch most of the time, but doable on many open maps and if you had people calling out positions. In MW3 the AC-130 returned as a campaign mission but also came back in multiplayer functioning very similarly to how it did in MW2, though by MW3 Infinity Ward had realized that letting people earn their next killstreak off their previous one was probably a bad idea and the introduction of the support killstreaks and their EMP made the AC-130 far less popular. The Campaign mission with the AC-130 is far, far less loved than the MW1 AC-130. There's a few reasons for this: The MW3 story is not as well appreciated as MW1's in general, but the mission is also kind of bad/not as fun or interesting as it stands. You can sense that it was like they were hitting a checkbox from the producers rather than doing something they thought would be fun or interesting. The fact that the rules and requirements of the mission were the exact same as MW1 also helped nothing. In MW1 when you see the AC-130 rain fire on the Russians at the end of Hunted it's a pretty cool/terrifying moment. The first time you play you figure that's the end of your time in Russia, you're in the clear now. Instead the game subverts the expectation and suddenly you're protecting Soap, Gaz and Price as they make their way out of the combat zone. It's a really cool way of doing what is essentially an escort mission while giving the players a mission they probably didn't see coming. MW3 all but tells you that you'll be gunning from an AC-130 far before it happens and then gives you a subpar mission. After playing MW2 and not getting an AC-130 mission (instead you got to drop missiles from a Predator), and then seeing it come back in MW3 you get the sense that someone at Infinity Ward knew that the AC-130 was done as a campaign device after MW1 and then that person left before MW3 came out.
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Mar 12, 2016 00:07
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Well pretty much all of what made IW actually IW left between 2 and 3, so that makes sense
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Mar 12, 2016 00:08
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Psion posted:Well pretty much all of what made IW actually IW left between 2 and 3, so that makes sense This also explains CoD: Ghosts, because pretty sure the rest of what used to be IW left between 3 and that one. The more I think on it, the more I think MW2 was probably the best in terms of multiplayer, since they added some much needed features onto the multiplayer that make CoD4's multiplayer feel.... not exactly lacking but less polished? They basically fine tuned the formula and aside from/including the previously described problems, the multiplayer is genuinely fun to play. And the AC-130 is great the first time, but does kinda fall flat on others. It's not a huge deal when you're playing, since it's like 10 minutes, if that, so it's not as though it's a huge timesink. Though if you're playing through on one of the higher difficulties, is can be drat cathartic to rain hell down on the itty bitty polygons that tried to nade-spam you to death in the previous levels.
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Mar 12, 2016 08:50
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Psion posted:Well pretty much all of what made IW actually IW left between 2 and 3, so that makes sense Makes me think of the real life Griggs and what he worked on in the game that got him his own character. I've always wondered where he is now.
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Mar 12, 2016 09:04
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DeusExMachinima posted:Makes me think of the real life Griggs and what he worked on in the game that got him his own character. I've always wondered where he is now. Looks like he was part of the exodus from IW and is still at Respawn Entertainment. One little thing I remember from these levels where you fight as part of the SAS is that sometimes you can hear enemies shout about "amerikantsy". It could be deliberate design - the ultranationalist assume any foreigners fighting them are Americans, or it might be a relic from an earlier stage in development where you actually fought as a US soldier in those levels.
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Mar 12, 2016 10:46
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Lazyfire posted:I remember a video kicking around the CoD thread when MW was released that was a helicopter gunner video and people citing that as the inspiration for the attitude of the gunners in the AC-130. Really, they sound like stone cold psychopaths in the game ("Haha, yep, you got 'em" and "Lot's of little pieces down there." being good examples). I think that's got to be partially because they are so far removed from the people they're firing on, they aren't people so much as they are white splotches on the TV screen. That sort of abstraction is one of the things people have focused on as drone use has increased over the last decade. What always struck with me was how beautifully it shows the utter lack of threat to the player character (and by extension, most western soldiers in modern warfare). Before that, you always engaged the enemy on somewhat equal terms, they had guns that could easily hurt and kill you. Sometimes they even had better guns than you, forcing you to work around them in order to succeed. In the AC130 mission that is completely gone. You are under no threat at all. You are never even shot at. Yes, you can technically lose the mission, but that only means you go home (or load the last savepoint). At the same time you casually visit lethal violence on dozens of people down there who have no chance to respond. For you, it's just a day in the office. For them, its the last day of their lives. I always thought it was just one step short of asking "So where is the sacrifice and the honor of the American soldier here?" And of course the later installments just take the part where you are an immortal sky god punishing the non-believers from it.
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Mar 12, 2016 20:37
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Yeah, the radical shift in the power balance struck the same chord in me as Spec Ops: the Line. In Spec Ops, you're slowly degenerating to the low level of an inhuman monster, more or less. In this mission, you're so incredibly overwhelming the enemy that you lose track of your own humanity. That said, the AC-130 was the best way to drop a nuke on your enemies in MW2
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Mar 12, 2016 20:50
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Kopijeger posted:One little thing I remember from these levels where you fight as part of the SAS is that sometimes you can hear enemies shout about "amerikantsy". It could be deliberate design - the ultranationalist assume any foreigners fighting them are Americans, or it might be a relic from an earlier stage in development where you actually fought as a US soldier in those levels. I'm willing to believe it's intentional, that the ultranationalist soldiers can tell you're speaking English but can't discern American and British English, if only because I've heard that they apparently do also sometimes shout "SAS". Granted, my source for that is TV Tropes, and as I've said before they may as well be deliberately refusing to get quotes and the like right considering how rarely they do, so they could have just been bullshitting me. EDIT: If you will I'd like to take a moment to talk about things IW gets wrong. Alright, so the thing is that the wireframe model for the AC-130 actually shown is the AC-130H "Spectre", depicted with two M61 Vulcan cannons, but the info given is for the AC-130U "Spooky", which instead has a single 25mm GAU-12. Here's the thing - while the actual gameplay only has you using a single gun, which is identified as a 25mm, everybody in the world thinks you're in the Spectre instead of the Spooky. Apparently people are so quick to jump on IW for getting things wrong that they'll completely ignore the times they get things right, even sort-of. There's similar poo poo involving the LMGs and their reloading animations, but I imagine (or would like to) that's pretty well known these days. Kadorhal fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 00:49
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I always wonder where the rest of the SAS guys come from, when you only had 4 other guys in the previous mission.
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Mar 13, 2016 02:00
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Crossfire is the best Call of Duty map for any Call of Duty. I will fuckin' fight you if you think otherwise. Since I always played Hardcore the Deagle would 1 shot people no matter and because Crossfire is so open I got so good at Deagle sniping.
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Mar 13, 2016 14:26
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I've gotta agree, Crossfire was always my favorite. Well, that and Shipment, if only because the increased number of players on the PC version could make it just magical. For those who haven't/didn't play the PC version, this is what you've been missing. Hardcore mode I never played all that much. Black Ops was the only game where I felt I needed to just to be able to actually damage enemies without the game pretending my bullets always redirected themselves into my own face.
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Mar 13, 2016 17:18
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Kadorhal posted:I've gotta agree, Crossfire was always my favorite. Well, that and Shipment, if only because the increased number of players on the PC version could make it just magical. For those who haven't/didn't play the PC version, this is what you've been missing. Oh, the memories.  A bunch of people spawning in the exact same spot and the person with the best connection getting all the kills. The guaranteed kill with the grenade on death. The magical moment of "Holy poo poo, I survived ten seconds...". The failure of activating your helicopter kill-streak, because there already is one in the air. The 20+ kills with an airstrike. bumblingbee fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 17:41
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Spudd posted:Crossfire is the best Call of Duty map for any Call of Duty. I will fuckin' fight you if you think otherwise. Juan Deags are amazing in any game. Kadorhal posted:I've gotta agree, Crossfire was always my favorite. Well, that and Shipment, if only because the increased number of players on the PC version could make it just magical. For those who haven't/didn't play the PC version, this is what you've been missing. Occasionally we (360 goons) would run into an organized group that would ask for Six-on-Six games after matchmaking to prove that they were better. Little did they know they probably were, but the second things looked like they may be hard we would break out all the broken weapons and classes we had. In those situations we'd make sure that one of our guys was running the game and select Shipment Hardcore and set the kill limit up as high as it would go. If you ever wanted to see how fast people will vacate a game that is the best way. That and the Rust bug from MW2 that allowed people to force matchmaking players into their perpetual private Rust games.
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Mar 13, 2016 18:06
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I've been sitting on this for a while, so I figure now is as good a time as any to share: about a year ago, a game critic by the name of Noah Gervais put a two-hour video up on YouTube discussing almost all of the CoD franchise (he only has access to a PC, so 3 was out of the question), mostly from the single-player perspective and with a focus on how war is depicted in the games. It's an excellent piece of criticism, so much so that it managed to convince me to try out CoD 1, 2, and 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvN51r1o1Nc (The discussion of Modern Warfare starts at the 26-minute mark, if you want to skip.) There's a lot of good stuff in the CoD4 section, but for me one of his more interesting points was his interpretation that the game was tapping into an undercurrent of anxiety that surrounded the Iraq War in America, the feeling that the whole project was a mistake brought about by bad/willfully misinterpreted information that would have terrible, far-reaching consequences. We've already started seeing that in the American campaign, with the hunt for Al-Asad becoming a game of whack-a-mole, and in the British campaign with the ominous hints about the doings of the ultranationalists. He also had a pretty good point about why the AC-130 mission is unnerving (aside from the commentary from your fellow crewmen): there is no way you could confuse the experience of being a soldier in CoD with that of an actual soldier on a modern battlefield. However, when you're up there in that AC-130, bring the hammer of God down on those Russkies...it's not hard to imagine you're actually up there in that AC-130, or flying that drone in a trailer somewhere. The difference is less in the scenario than the details. Vicissitude posted:Yeah, the radical shift in the power balance struck the same chord in me as Spec Ops: the Line. In Spec Ops, you're slowly degenerating to the low level of an inhuman monster, more or less. In this mission, you're so incredibly overwhelming the enemy that you lose track of your own humanity. I played Spec Ops long before CoD4, so it's only after playing CoD4 that I think I understand what the famous "white phosphorous" scene was doing. In retrospect, discovering that you torched a civilian camp was gilding the lily; simply just having you walk through you handiwork afterward was more than enough.
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Mar 14, 2016 02:09
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 I think War Pig is a neat mission. It's not the best mission in the game, or really important to the story at the end of the day, but it shows just how densely IW was able to pack levels. The main segment of the level, the village street we spend most of our time on, is just the multiplayer map Crossfire, but with some alterations. Like I say in the video, it's something you can sprint in less than a minute yet we end up fighting building to building for about ten minutes instead. I don't think that's a feat that gets replicated for the rest of the game, maybe even the series (depending on how you count "Wait while this downloads" thing from Estate in MW2). The level is also fairly unique in that nearly every building is open to the player and enemies, meaning you can choose how to approach the level and where you want to clear out. All these years later and most games don't have that sort design. It's not hard to see why, the openness of the buildings means that it's difficult to balance the map properly; players can be in nearly any window or in any building, which makes it harder to get an idea where you should be looking and giving "campers" more spots to hide than you would expect. The fun aspect of it is that this is one of the few maps that allows for room to room combat and long range sniper battles where most maps favor one over the other. It also provides a good amount of cover with regards to Airstrikes and Helicopter support, so killstreaks on this map are a bit less effective sometimes. The single player mode makes a couple changes, most of which I point out. This is one of those maps that I wonder if it was designed in multiplayer or single player first; I would think it was originally a single player map because the awkward ending points of the single player level are intact in multiplayer, the gate you enter the market area through and the street leading up to it are there, as is the broken building near where the enemy tank comes from at the end of the level. Those spots have no real purpose in multiplayer outside of being good spots for people to hide or snipe from, so I have to imagine it wasn't fully intentional.
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Mar 15, 2016 02:28
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 So this is where the game gets real, at least towards the end of the video. One of the reasons I think the nuke scene has such an impact and is so well remembered is that about 99.99% of the time if you are playing a game where a commanding officer tells you there's a chance you won't survive it's just because they want to build up suspense. CoD4 throws that out the window completely, which is really, really neat. Actually, from here to the point where the Joint Strike missions start is all pretty memorable. These chapters are some of the most well thought out and most story filled segments of the game and we'll be talking more about that in the near future. The bulk of this mission, though, is pretty much normal CoD stuff, or at least what we expect from CoD. You travel through a segment of the multiplayer map Backlot here, that's where the alleyway and the building the Marines are in come from, along with the house with the closet (R Kelly's house). Unseen here is the basement of one of the buildings that had an untextured surface, which is too bad. One of the things I really wanted to convey about this mission is the weirdness of it when you look at the rest of the CoD franchise. You start off gunning from the helicopter, then you switch to infantry, then you get back in the helicopter and keep gunning, then get out again for a few minutes. This is notable because in almost every instance where the game has you changing your "mode" if you will it's always at the very end or very start of the mission. MW3 was really the worst for this. First American mission you start off fighting through New York, then get in a helicopter and gun for a bit. Later you play an FSB agent who is in the Russian President's plane and the level starts off with you doing a bit of free fall/zero G combat before going to the normal CoD stuff. Later in the game you start a raid on a safehouse that becomes a car chase and you are gunning from the back of the truck. There's plenty more examples from just that game. Oddly enough, Black Ops 3 just recently surprised me by breaking the "do thing then do other thing, level over" design that's become so common for the franchise. In one mission you pilot a VTOL jet fighter for a bit, assault a thing, get out on foot, do a thing there, and then get back in the jet a couple more times. There's not a lot to the mission besides killing things from different perspectives, but still, they didn't just throw the VTOL in at the end as a gimmick for the level the way they did in BLOPS2.
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Mar 17, 2016 02:38
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I was fortunately spared from having this part of the game spoiled for me when I first played it (must have been soon after it came out), so I got the full effect. It was quite a moment back then; it hadn't really been done before (as Lazyfire said in the video). I remember my character stumbling around in the fallout, eventually collapsing, by chance, right on top of the body of the pilot he'd saved... which seemed suitably poetic. It took a while for what they'd done to really sink in. I think I was still expecting - even for a few levels after that - for them to double-twist it and go "surprise - of course he's not really dead!" Of course, virtually every CoD game since has been chasing its tail trying to reproduce the success of that moment. I vaguely remember (don't quote me on this) reading an interview with the lead writer, I think it was, talking about the challenges of writing MW2 - in the context of it being a sequel to MW. He said something like "well of course now everyone expects their character to die, so I need to live up to that". Which... I mean, I think actually everyone was perhaps hoping to be surprised somehow; not necessarily to just have a similar "now your character's dead" moment.
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Mar 17, 2016 09:53
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For a brief moment, I was very concerned for the well-being of this man:
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Mar 17, 2016 12:59
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Yeah this is the best Nuke scene in any video game, all through out the Marine campaign there's a really good ramp up to it and you get suckered into the OORAH or SEMPER FI bullshit they spew all the time and ~blip~, it's all over red rover. Although gently caress what they did with it in Modern Warfare 3. edit: holy poo poo I forgot about the  guitar through out the level
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Mar 17, 2016 13:18
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Seal Team Six getting namedropped there is a little weird in hindsight. I don't think I'd ever heard of them until they killed bin Laden, but here they are years before that getting mentioned going after a different Middle Eastern dictator.
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Mar 17, 2016 16:04
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You've been fighting through loud, high intensity combat zones the whole campaign, and suddenly it's dark and quiet except for the howling wind and collapsing buildings and... children's laughter? You're character can't even stand at first, and he shudders and lurches when you move, and curls in pain when you fall out of the chopper. Then you look around an apocalyptic hellscape with the radio operators setting up assistance you won't get, and then you die.
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Mar 17, 2016 16:50
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Polaron posted:Seal Team Six getting namedropped there is a little weird in hindsight. I don't think I'd ever heard of them until they killed bin Laden, but here they are years before that getting mentioned going after a different Middle Eastern dictator. You must not have played much Counter Strike
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Mar 17, 2016 17:15
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drkeiscool posted:You've been fighting through loud, high intensity combat zones the whole campaign, and suddenly it's dark and quiet except for the howling wind and collapsing buildings and... children's laughter? You're character can't even stand at first, and he shudders and lurches when you move, and curls in pain when you fall out of the chopper. Then you look around an apocalyptic hellscape with the radio operators setting up assistance you won't get, and then you die. Like, that part is remembered well because it was so ruthless from a design standpoint and many players(me too) didn't believe that the game actually goes fubar. Real good poo poo Also while I watch these videos, I remember how grenade happy the AI was in this game 
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Mar 17, 2016 17:43
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Polaron posted:Seal Team Six getting namedropped there is a little weird in hindsight. I don't think I'd ever heard of them until they killed bin Laden, but here they are years before that getting mentioned going after a different Middle Eastern dictator. I'd heard of them before, but in fairness because they're the ones meant for counter-insurgency and the like, they are the most famous of the SEAL teams. So, The Casualty posted:You must not have played much Counter Strike basically this. The fun thing about the nuke is that this is essentially the result of half the Marine campaign getting cut. Given how the series turned out for years afterwards, it's kind of funny that the first CoD game with more than c. 18 months of development going for it had cut content, but there's a surprising amount of it, and a lot of it revolved around the Marine campaign. In particular there were supposed to be a pair of missions where you played as entirely different characters from Jackson - one where you were a Marine sniper (hence why the M40A3 doesn't show up anywhere in singleplayer - it's pretty much all M21 all the time) and I believe one where you were to be the pilot of a Super Cobra as the Marine equivalent of the AC-130 level. I remember there's also "Full-A" text on one of the leftover images for what one of those two maps would have been, which indicates that select-fire like in the first CoD was going to be a thing again - there were plans to implement it as an attachment or something for years after that game even though I'm the only human being who used it and even then only for two guns, but they never got around to it until Black Ops 2 like five years after this game. So, yeah, half a campaign got cut, and what we got in its place was one of the most famous single events in any game of that decade. Impressive when you think about it.
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Mar 17, 2016 18:27
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It's hard for people who didn't play MW1 when it came out to get just how much of a shock the nuke was. I knew people who literally reloaded the level because they assumed they must have done something wrong earlier. It's been 9 years since the game came out, longer than the time between the O.G. Halo in 2001 and this. The average public wasn't really into the console FPS until Halo so the genre was still pretty fresh, much less a gut punch like this. Turns out sometimes in war that you just die no matter what you do, no matter how hard you can quickscope! Kinda sucks huh?
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Mar 17, 2016 18:42
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This LP inspired to play through again, and it was good. Funny thing happened for me on this level - I usually through any remaining flashbangs at the end of a level, because it's fun to make my allies stumble around while giving me orders. This level, I threw one out of the helicopter as we were flying away, and it detonated at the exact same time as the nuke. I don't think I've ever giggled during Jackson's death before.
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Mar 18, 2016 05:08
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So as is often the case, the game is on sale on the Humble Store for half off this weekend. If you were balking at the $20 price point before you can now balk at the ten dollar price point! If you pick this up to play multiplayer that is still in the works for the thread. We'll probably be coordinating things through the thread in the second post once we get to that point.
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Mar 18, 2016 22:34
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Been lurking as I usually do for your threads, but as it was for many, CoD4 was my jam. It was the first and probably the last game where I was able to just jump in and carry a team to victory and I've got my share of great match stories. I haven't picked it up for about a year now and I was so rusty then my K/D was 1:1 (that and I'm a console gamer playing on PC so I'm not used to the faster response from my opponent) MP is definitely something I want to get in on if the thread is doing it and work schedule permitting.
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Mar 18, 2016 23:36
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 This poor mission gets saddled between one of the crowning story moments of the game and the one level that everyone remembers and considers one of the best parts of the game. That's not to say it doesn't have its charms, using the helicopter to gun down the Ultranationalists and sweeping building to building is actually pretty fun overall, but the mission is just often lost in the shuffle because it comes seconds after you get nuked and watch one of the player characters die. The "use a vehicle to get assistance" thing from this mission is a nice help, but is a bit wonky. Sometimes you'll point the pilot directly at a building and he'll end up firing at some cow in the pasture behind the village instead, sometimes he'll decide to kill the tank you wanted him to hit even though the tank moved away. You don't know what type of air support you are going to get until he shows up. On Normal that's not a huge deal, the only time you'll really want him is for the tanks anyway. On the upper level difficulties this area is a bitch and a half and you'll need all the support you can get to cross to a building and then capture it. I felt the same way about the Honey Badger mission from MW2. In that a Stryker is escorting you through Washington DC suburbs and you can tell it to fire on people and buildings until it goes away midway through the mission. It's helpful, for sure, but you often forget you have the ability to use it and it's not really necessary. I think part of it is the ally AI being terrible in every game and not being able to hit things just translating over to the vehicles that get called in. The vehicle call ins do work pretty well if it's just a plane dropping a payload or you calling in a killstreak in the multiplayer, so I don't believe the issue is hitting the target, it just looks like assigning a range to a vehicle firing multiple projectiles doesn't add up super well in CoD games. Even titles beyond the MW games have the same sort of issues.
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Mar 19, 2016 01:35
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From a story standpoint this is an interesting mission because it's doing the "SAS and Loyalist Russians working together" thing again, which is more prominent here than the first time because you get an Mi-28 as support to blow a bunch of people up. From a gameplay standpoint it's one of my two least-favorite levels in the game, if not the entire series, because it's a difficult slog. I mentioned before, at least to Lazyfire, I did an LP of this game myself back in like 2010-2011 when Viddler was the video host people used to get away from Youtube, and for this mission I pretty much cut everything between the first death - which from my recollection was at maximum two minutes in - and stacking up on the farmhouse because I couldn't make it interesting. Plus side is it started a minor trend for my videos where I'd replace long sections of boring bullshit with a random PSA bump from Adult Swim. If you recall one of my last posts in the Republic Commando thread, where I mentioned "Azerbaijan" is one of my trigger-words for video game PTSD, this level is why. fake edit: I heard one of the bad guys shout for a Viktor before you shot him. Apparently a friend of that guy from Blackout? Also, on the subject of trivia: when Price executes Al-Asad here, his pistol makes the same sound as the Desert Eagle so it sounds more "dramatic".
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Mar 19, 2016 03:30
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