Problems currently facing the Online Multiplayer of Modern Warfare 2

Hey guys, this is just a short little update, which does however, raise a very important point. If you look back over my review of Modern Warfare 2, you will notice that it received a high multiplayer score, because it was well polished and nicely executed; but I docked percentages for it being imbalanced. Throughout the recent days however, various exploits and some big flaws have been appearing continuously, and I feel the need to write about them in this short paragraph; as I feel it may be a huge reason to put down MW2 for a while, until Infinity Ward get around to patching these various issues.

Problem #1 - Hacked, Dedicated Servers - Being a console gamer, this problem hasn't affected me until recent times; unfortunately, for PC Gamers, this problem established itself just a week after the game's release. Infinity Ward announced they would make dedicated servers for the PC; but many gamers signed a petition, thus outlining their discontent; this lead some of the more tech-savvy players, to break into the console command and create their own dedicated servers, many offering up bonuses like Infinite Ammo; the smallest map in the game; never ending matches; miniscule health etc.

While this problem will be massive for PC Gamers now, it's even more of an annoyance to those who don't play these modified servers; this is because it allows those who do to get incredibly easy experience for very little effort, whereas the legitimate players have to push the boat out, and reap the same reward through even more effort. Now the problem has begun to transfer over to the Xbox 360 and assumably it will soon hit the PS3 as well; if you do find yourself in one of the hacked servers, I'd recommend leaving before you get to far in, or your Kill/Death will go out of the window, and your friends will most probably cover your console in petrol and set fire to it.

Problem #2 - Finding a Game - This section is a tad smaller than the last, and is really just here to tell you; that many PS3 and 360 players alike, may have problems finding a game as quickly as they used to in Call of Duty 4. This may be because of the game trying to find a way around the Hacked Servers; however, often when you find a game, you'll wait around with 2 or 3 people, who get bored and leave, leaving you on your own, waiting for someone else to join for about 3 minutes.

Problem #3 - Connection/Lag Issues - During many of the games you play, you'll be lucky to hit a 4-bar connection, even with a powerful router; throughout the course of the game, the lag will get ever so slightly worse, and often result in multiple host migrations, due to the selected host not having enough bandwidth to host a game with multiple people in it.

So, just take note of those 3 problems, perhaps take a little break and let's just pray that Infinity Ward manage to get these problems fixed, because it's really ruining my experience on the game.

Thanks,
Ben.

Review - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

And here we are, Modern Warfare 2, the sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the FPS of the decade, it won countless awards, became critically acclaimed instantly, and for a good reason too. It was actually good. It was so good, in fact, that Infinity Ward have turned the development of their latest release, Modern Warfare 2, into a bit of a game itself, aptly named: ‘Let’s see how much we can get away with because the public will buy it anyway due to the fact that the first one was good’. It’s a long name for a game, I know, but seriously, what the hell are they playing at right now? Let’s take a look at the biggest flaw, and my personal biggest criticism, the campaign.

The story behind the campaign is excellent, and the events of both MW2 and its predecessor, deserve to be turned into a film, or something. The execution of the story, and how well the tale is told, is a completely different matter. Modern Warfare 2 takes place 5 years after Zakhaev is killed by newly appointed, Captain ‘Soap’ MacTavish, and sees the player switching between a total of four protagonists during the game, Private Allen, Alejandro Rojas, Sgt. Gary ‘Roach’ Sanderson, and Soap himself. Now that Zakhaev is dead, ‘Mad-Dog’ Makarov is in charge, he’s even more nasty and insane than the big Z himself, and one mission (Should you choose to accept it, no, seriously, you can skip it) sees you playing as an undercover CIA Agent, storming an International Airport with Makarov and four of his mates, shooting the shit out of everything seemingly unopposed. Infinity Ward seem to be pumping controversy into Modern Warfare 2, as slightly later in the game, you get to try and retake the Russian occupied Whitehouse, just in case the prospect of the Russians invading the USA and slaughtering every single one of its inhabitants wasn’t enough to drive just a few of the... eh... ‘Sceptics’ slightly over the edge. So, in short, the campaign, while it is a good idea, is short, and ultimately, fairly shit, and for anyone who stands by the fact that it is ‘good’ may I refer you to that rather well known thing called ‘history’, let’s go to 1913-1914, the idiots, think a World War is just what the British Empire need, the smart people said ‘No’, and who was right there?

In terms of how fun the game is, let’s skip past The Omen (aka – The Campaign) and move on to Multiplayer (while we can also examine the Gameplay, seeing as they’re very closely linked), which has also, IN MY OPINION, PLEASE DON’T KIDNAP MY MUM, been made less fun, to demonstrate my reasoning, let’s turn to some commonly used phrases of denial:
- “The custom killstreaks are amazing!”
Here’s a common one, and let me tell all of you, no they’re not, people have worked out, that the Chopper Gunner, and the Harrier Strike, are INCREDIBLY OVERPOWERED, as a result of this, a killstreak which is assured to get even the noobiest of players a nuke, which isn’t hard with the lowered recoil and almost every gun being a 2 shot kill for ‘realism’ , this in turn means that a game can be instantly ended once someone gains a 7 kill streak, unless of course, they are killed by an invisible spirit of their vengeful parent who was killed while inevitably trying to get their child to “Get the fuck off of the Xbox” and go and make some new friends.
- “The new guns are awesome”
Someone hasn’t played Rainbow Six Vegas before.
-“The new maps are great”
WHAT THE FU...BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!?!?!?!?!!!!!!!!!!!11111ONE-HUNDREDANDELEVEN111!!!
So there’s the fun factor and gameplay in a nutshell, still just as good as COD4, but, there’s just something lacking, it just doesn’t feel as fun as COD4 or COD2 before it, I just seem to get a lot more bored playing MW2 as opposed to playing COD4, which is why I am still currently playing COD4.

The graphics have been improved since Call of Duty 4, and while not being revolutionary, the game is incredibly well polished in terms of the landscape, all of the settings and locations look exactly like the real life locations they’re based on, I’m especially pleased with the Favela area, which looks spectacular and provides some incredibly well rendered views of the Brazilian rural areas. Superb. The gun models are potentially the most niggling flaw in the graphical side of things, due to the fact that many of them look unrealistic and seem to be distorted into various directions, often making them look either incredibly thin or incredibly wide, depending on which type of gun it is. So, in the graphical department, it’s an improvement, but nothing revolutionary, it is however, one of the most solid aspects of the game design here.

Moving swiftly on; to sound. My thoughts on the sound are mixed, a little bit like a German’s thoughts on the holocaust, at some points, it does itself favours, at others, it creates a pool of its own shit so deep that it could drown itself in it. The gun sounds, are good, but often recycled across many guns, meaning there is very little variation whatsoever and it often gets incredibly repetitive when switching between multiple assault rifles or sniper rifles. The voice acting within the campaign is as good as it can get, it’s not like anyone actually cares about the voice acting, or the campaign itself anyway, they just want to spend hours levelling up, using the same 2 overpowered guns repeatedly and becoming gradually more and more of a try hard, while ignoring the fact that other people are trying to play too, just like Rambo, except more whiney and annoying. The voice acting for the announcers in the Multiplayer however, is absolutely terrible, I mean, slitting my ankles with a gluestick made of gold and virgin’s breast milk terrible, many of the announcers strike me as the offspring of the chosen race, and the French, no matter who you’re playing as, there’s always just a teeny bit of French in there.

All in all, it’s not too bad; Spec Ops is a nice addition, which allows you to play with a friend or solo in various scenarios from the campaign in order to gain stars, but that doesn’t really change any major aspects of the review, so I’ll leave that, feel free to contact me if you have any more questions. Personally, I prefer COD4, and COD2 even further still, however, seeing as everyone’s going to play it and none of them will be playing COD4 anymore, so it looks like you’re pretty much limited to playing nothing but Modern Warfare 2 for now, and you’ll probably skip past the biggest flaw, the dreaded minefield which is the campaign, and just lay on with the still rather flawed multiplayer, but, whatever keeps those funny little 9 year old, COD-obsessed kids entertained, is guaranteed to keep us entertained for a while. So let’s finish up with the scores.

Gameplay – 90%

Storyline – 70%

Multiplayer – 90%

Replayability – 86%

Presentation – 88%

Overall – 85% - FM Gamers’ Silver Award – Overhyped, but still pretty good, worth picking up if you want some fairly fun online gameplay, although it gets rather boring pretty quickly, a good buy, but not perfect.

Reviewed by Ben Dowling (Gamertag: FMG Ben, PSN ID - bensta175)

Review - Dead Rising

A shopping mall filled with zombies, guns, swords and umbrellas. What more could a gamer want? Dead Rising is a zombie littered shopping mall that your character, Frank West, wants to photograph. Yes, that’s right. Everyone else wants to get the hell out of there for fear of getting their faces ripped off and devoured. Frank wants to take pictures for a newspaper. He is flown in onto the rooftop by a helicopter, and told that he has to be in the same spot in three days time. He goes down into the main body of the shopping mall, finds other survivors, and, as we can clearly see from this set up, someone opens the front doors and welcomes the zombies to a feast. Everyone is devoured (except Frank, because he’s secretly Superman) and Frank escapes from the zombies when another survivor, Brad shouts at him to go up some stairs. In another room, Frank meets Brad, Jessica and Otis. Frank uses the air ducts to get back down into the shopping centre, and there you have it, the game begins.

At first, Dead Rising is the best game in the world. You get to skewer zombies with swords, run them over with a shopping cart and sip cocktails. But then, as you get into the story, the fun starts playing hide and seek. After 10-30 minutes of zombie madness, you will start feeling that there is more to life than senseless zombie killing (gasp!). What I have found is that this game is only good in small doses, like medicine. If you take just the right amount, everything will be fine and you will have fun. If you take an overdose, you get bored and are likely to explode from too much boredom.

The controls of the game are fairly easy to master – They are almost the same as any other third person game around. However, I do like how they have added in the gun aiming controls, instead of them being exactly the same as any other weapon. You got one right, Capcom, well done! As I have mentioned before, it can get a little boring. Eventually, all you will be doing is – walk. Attack. Pick up that baseball bat. Walk. Attack. Walk.

Whatever bad things can be said about the game’s controls or storyline stops here. The graphics of this game are brilliant. You can see in detail every cut or hole you make in the zombies, or survivors. The settings are also extremely well created. Every part of it looks exactly as it would if this was really happening. The transition of day to night zombies (at night they get stronger and their eyes glow red, like when yoda gets angry) is very clear and phenomenally well designed. I was actually scared when it was at night, because the atmosphere was so spooky I felt as if I was actually being chased by zombies (didn’t help that I was playing this in the dark, at 11:30).

Another thing done well by capcom in Dead rising is the sound. In the day, all you hear is the happy shopping mall tune, like elevator music, the delightful moans of the undead and the squishing of your weapons against their skulls. However, at night, for some reason, all of the zombies stop moaning, and the shopping mall music turns off. Add this in with the graphics and the genre itself; you have the makings of a great horror game. Another great thing is hearing the survivors’ screams of pain when they are being ripped apart by flesh eating undead.....

Sadly, I found that the replayability of dead rising was below that of an average game. Even the new game modes that you unlock don’t bring much more entertainment out of the game. Capcom has clearly just gone for a ‘kill everything in sight’ game and not thought much about the storyline. There was nothing enjoyable about doing the missions, as they were always just get to a specific place and kill that guy. Now go to another place and kill that guy. Another factor I found that severely annoyed me is: Why is it so hard to survive? Why is it that you have to save every couple of minutes or you lose everything that you have just done? There should at least be autosaves after you defeat bosses. Come on!

Overall, Dead Rising is just a game to play when you want to DESTROY EVERYTHING and not have to do anything specific. If you’re looking for a game with replayability, don’t buy this game. If you want a game with a nice storyline, don’t buy this game. If you’re looking for a game with multiplayer capabilities, don’t buy this game. If you want to play a game with no purpose and just hitting one button, then this is the game for you!

Gameplay – 68%

Storyline – 74%

Graphical presentation – 93%

Replayability – 51%

Presentation – 68%

Overall – 71% - FM Gamers’ Bronze Award – A run of the mill zombie game with hardly any replayability and nothing extra to boast except its excellent graphics.

Written by Alex Tomris (Gamertag: Darkness1328)