Computer Gaming Madness

Much of the first week of the holidays has been taken up by two computer games that I recently purchased. The first, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is an excellent first person shooter, and a sequel to the previous Modern Warfare game. The second, Dragon Age Origins is a classic fantasy role playing game.

Before Modern Warfare 2 was released, I decided to play through the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, at a slightly higher difficulty level for a greater challenge. It underlined yet again how the Call of Duty franchise had really raised the bar for first person shooters. You take on the role of both Soap MacTavish, a new recruit to the elite Special Air Service (SAS), and as Sgt. Jackson of the US Marine Corp. In the Call of Duty games you truly get a strong sense of what it feels like to be 'under fire'. The system of not having a health meter, but having the screen darken as you taken repeated hits (thus limiting your ability to fight back) makes you instinctively try and duck for cover, or for those foolish enough not to, die. This innovation is carried over to Modern Warfare 2, as is the lack of your ability to save the game at any desired point, meaning that you have to survive till specific checkpoints or replay that section.

Call of Duty 2 extends the sheer turmoil and exhilaration of combat that was present in the original, and adds multiple new and fascinating settings and perspectives. In this game you are another young recruit this time mentored by Soap who is now a captain in the SAS. It would be hard to top the original which included the detonation of a nuclear device, a stage where you are a sniper in a ghillie suit stalking through an abandoned city near the former Chernobyl nuclear reactor, and you even get to take the perspective of an aerial bomber providing air support to ground troops. Call of Duty 2 does manage to top this though- you get to try your hand at driving a snow mobile, you have to negotiate a cliff face with ice axes, and in one exhilarating sequence you are a gunner on an armoured vehicle racing through the streets of a Middle Eastern city while taking fire from all directions. The settings are diverse and novel - from a slum in Rio, to an oil derrick used to host SAM sites, to a prison near Vladivostock, even to several levels in suburban America. There is also a stage which is bound to attract enormous controversy where you play an American soldier that infiltrates a Russian terrorist cell, and which involves you taking the role of terrorists shooting up an entire airport full of innocent civilians.

There are several drawbacks to the game despite the intense combat experience, the excellent gameplay, the creative settings, and the generally effective AI. First of all, it is expensive. At $75 it is a good $20 more expensive than a normal computer game. I would have less of an issue with it, given its quality, were it not for the fact that it was also disappointingly short. I finished the game in around 10 hours on the advanced difficulty setting. An average gamer could complete it in 6-7 hours on normal difficulty. After you complete the main campaign there is an additional section that you can tackle called "Special Ops" which takes specific elements from the game (evading capture in a forest, snowmobile races, breaching and clearing rooms, surviving a wave of enemy attacks) and you earn between one and three stars by completing these set tasks at higher difficulty levels. That can't disguise the fact that the single player campaign is a bit skimpy.

Another surprising drawback was that the Call of Duty 2 plot ended up far less coherent and structured than the original's which basically involved you hunting down the Russian ultra nationalist Imran Zakhaev. The storyline got downright messy towards the end of Modern Warfare 2, and the motivation behind a crucial plot twist was never really sufficiently explained beyond some bombastic and overly cliched voice-over dialogue between missions. As someone who hardly utilizes the multiplayer component of these games paying such a hefty price for a short campaign was definitely poor value for money. But Call of Duty does provide fantastic thrills and a powerful gaming experience.

Far, far more time was spent playing Dragon Age: Origins. The developers behind the excellent Mass Effect has created a more traditional fantasy role playing game this time around, creating an enormous world to explore complete with its own back story, mythology, political dynamics and much else besides. Incredibly enough, the game even provides multiple back stories to start with, depending on the background and race of your character, with five separate 'origin' quests as a result, all culminating with your recruitment into the Grey Wardens, a group of reknown fighters committed to battling the evil threat of the Dark Spawn. The game is immensely complex, and it is easy to be completely lost in the rich tapestry of this fully realized world. From recruiting and interacting with a multitude of non-playing characters to multiple dialogue options, alternate paths and endings, the game is huge in every sense of the word.

It is also fairly difficult unless you've played through a number of role playing games, particularly the combat elements. For much of the game you will be involved in combat with three other members of your party, and it is essential to have a balance between warrior type melee combatants and ranged characters such as rogues mastering the bow and arrow skill or mages. What I disliked was the necessity to micromanage combat - you had to set out clear instructions in the tactics screen and even then you still had to pause combat repeatedly to control individual characters. The tactics menu also had drawbacks. For example I found it hard to program a mage to cast an area effect spell on a group of enemies far away - or at least to do so effectively. Often, the only way was to pause the game and take control of the character yourself.

The advantage of combat switching was that even if your main character is of a particular class - such as a mage - you can taste combat in all the various roles by playing as an accompanying character for the duration of any particular combat. In the end, I left the game at the easy difficulty setting, minimizing the amount of micro-managing I had to do, and also because I wanted to explore dialogue and character options to a greater degree. I would have preferred a more fluid combat system needing less pausing and tactical development, though.

On the whole, Dragon Age was a hugely addictive and immensely entertaining game. I spent the better part of 25 hours of direct gameplay and I still failed to finish all the various side quests and sub plots, let alone read through the immense codex outlining the history, mythology, and back story that you accumulate as you proceed in your quest. It is a superb buy but only if you are willing to jeopardize your social life for a number of weekends, not to mention risk having your significant other severely annoyed at you for neglecting them! I can't wait for the inevitable sequel that surely must follow, and indeed, for Mass Effect 2, slated for release in April 2010.