Call of Duty 4 is great, both in single player and multiplayer. I finished the single player game last night and it was a fantastic ride. It’s a very linear, scripted experience but for almost all of it that works very well and effectively makes you feel like you’re the star in a blockbuster Hollywood action movie. The graphics are great, controls are tight, audio is superb, technically the engine is rock solid, the pace is frenetic while never overwhelming, the ‘feel’ of the weaponry is just right, and the plot and writing are decent. The end is also great. A lot of times in FPS games you end up fighting some uber cheesey boss battle, but the last level and conclusion in CoD4 are about as good as it gets. About the only criticism I can come up with is that the game is fairly short. I didn’t track exactly how long it took me to finish, but I’d say roughly 6 hours. I didn’t feel cheated because of how engaging the whole experience is, and because the multiplayer is also fantastic.

On the multiplayer side the game reminds me most of an update to the old Urban Terror quake 3 mod I was so fond of, mostly because generally the MP maps are relatively small and feature building to building skirmishes with modern weapons and great weapon physics. There are newish features to the MP though, the quasi role playing system being my favorite. As you play you earn points for killing other players and achieving map objectives. These points allow you rise in level from a lowly private up through the military ranks. Higher ranks entitle you to new weapons, addons to your weapons

Atari has a special place in my heart. The Atari 2600 was the first console I owned, paid for in part by the proceeds of a paper route I had when I was 10 or 11, and it contributed much to my lifelong love of videogames. I’m saddened to note this story on joystiq about Atari’s most recent death.

One of the early, truly great online shooters was the Quake engine derived ‘quakeworld,’ and it lives on to this day thanks to Id’s practice of opening the source code of their game engines to the public once their commercial lifespan ends. There are many quakeworld ‘distros’ these days, and much work has been done to bring it into the modern graphical age with better lighting, texturing and so on. None is easier to get going than nquake though, and it’s this weeks friday fun link. This runs on basically every platform known to man, but do be aware that you need pak1 from the original commercial quake release to play. You can score it unbelievably cheaply if you don’t already have it sitting around from back in the day or on the DVD for Quake IV. You can even score it off of Steam for ~ $10.