Call of Duty: Classic

I beat this game at two in the morning last night but was just too tired (both physically and of the game itself) to make a write-up. CoD Classic is simply a graphically-enhanced port of the original Call of Duty game that came out for the PC in 2003. I knew going in that the game would probably be rather vanilla, being the first in the franchise, and also somewhat clunky and blocky, being a game from that PS2-GameCube era of 2003. But I still managed to be surprised, sometimes pleasantly, and sometimes in  the utmost frustration. First, the gameplay. CoD seemed difficult in all the wrong ways. The control scheme was familiar and easy enough, but movement was rather slow. I know that's because of graphical frame rate limitations imposed by 2003, but it still felt annoying at times, especially when I was under fire. Furthermore, the game was very ambiguous at times in its instructions during missions. There was one car chase level I had to repeat about twenty or thirty times because the first nineteen or twenty-nine times I was shooting at the people in the cars chasing me rather than blowing up the cars themselves with explosives - but when the game's NPCs are yelling at you to "Shoot him! Shoot him!" instead of "Blow that car up!" or "Use the rockets!" it's pretty easy to make that, well, mistake. But no NPC order was more absurd than this one Soviet sniper's in the first Eastern Front level; armed with no ammunition, you're told to run straight from one coverage area to the next under heavy machine gun fire. The NPC basically says, I have the gun and you don't, so you'll need to run for it while I shoot those fuckers. And, yeah, he totally sucks at shooting those fuckers. I died at least thirty times doing exactly what was demanded of me before somehow miraculously making it. And this time I wasn't doing anything wrong. Finally, the worst gameplay occurred during a pair of tank-based levels. To control the tank, you needed to use the right stick to aim your gun, the left stick to move, and the A-button to turn. I promise you, it's even less intuitive than it sounds. But I can't rag on the game too hard for a few questionable directives and some shoddy tank controls. Let's move on to the story and pacing of the game itself. You do nine missions as an American, seven as a Brit, and ten as a Soviet. The American and British missions were fairly routine and been-there, done-that. Destroy some artillery. Capture some documents. Defend a bridge. You know the drill. I was often reminded of the 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers when playing these missions, and several even felt inspired by that HBO show. Of course, that's probably just because both the show and the game were based on actual World War II missions and events. But I have to give credit to the Soviet campaign for really giving me a different and more powerful sense of what that war was like. Right off the bat, as you cross a river toward Stalingrad in a boat with a few dozen other unarmed and terrified men, a commander is barking out orders like "not one step backward!" and "cowards will be shot on sight!" Several boats on your left and right are destroyed by German artillery and planes and all your own commander can do is scream about his hatred of cowards. Finally one man on your boat jumps ship - after its been grazed by artillery, no less - and the commander and several other men shoot him in the water, wasting valuable ammunition you'll soon find out the Soviets don't have. When you land, you're forced into a line behind a supply truck where one gun is being distributed to every other man as the distributor instructs, "If you have no gun, wait for the man with the gun to fall, then you pick up the gun." I'd heard before that the Soviet army had more men than guns but I always figured the "two men, one gun" thing was a tongue-in-cheek exaggeration of how rough the Soviets had it. Apparently, not so! (Because if I saw it on a video game, it must have happened!) Anyway, later in the campaign you're part of a group tasked with shooting retreating Russians (very briefly; it's not like this is the focus of any mission or anything). Basically, one of the few history lessons I took away from the game was that, yeah, Soviet Russia was a horrible, horrible place to live. Stalin used his men as cannon fodder, only even arming half of them and then threatening them with death for thinking twice about running off into battle. The numbers don't lie, and the Soviet Union had 9 or 10 million military deaths in World War II (and that'd before the 13 millions civilian deaths). By comparison, Germany had 5 millions military deaths and the U.S. and U.K. had 800,000 combined. Shit! But as so often seems to be the case, I think I had more fun with the Russian campaign than with the American or British ones. There's just something so gratifying about waving the red flag over the Reichstag in the heart of Berlin. World at War, which I played last winter, has the same climactic ending, and in a much more awesome and over-the-top fashion, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the same mission this time around. Granted, if I have to do the same thing again in CoD 2  or 3, then yeah, it'll probably get old. Speaking of those two games, I don't know when I'll get around to them. Part of me just wants to tear through this series, Mega Man style, but I could also use a bit of a break from these WW2 FPS games. Anyway, when it comes to appropriately rating this first Call of Duty game, I'd call it fun but by no means amazing or unique; it's no Modern Warfare and it's actually rather generic if anything. But with very few exceptions, the game was still fun and enjoyable. But you're probably better off with Black Ops, even for six times the price. Man, I can't wait to play me some Black Ops.