My Top 15 Games of All Time: #11

First-person shooters are everywhere in the industry now, there are way too many to count and it's a genre where you really have to do something massive to stand out. Several years ago, there were a metric shit-ton of World War II shooters, with one of the more popular ones being Call of Duty. For a long time there, with games like Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor, Day of Defeat, and Call of Duty, it seemed like time was running out on the historical shooter and someone needed to make the jump forward.

Of course these games were successful and I'm sure it's terrifying to try anything new with a community like ours full of nit-pickers and complainers. However, Infinity Ward decided to take the Call of Duty franchise in a new direction and bring it to more modern times. The end result would be the best Call of Duty game and would kick off what we now know as "Call of Duty Mania". You want to know why everyone squeals like a girl when they see anything about a new Call of Duty game? It all started here.
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#11 - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - First released November 5th, 2007 (Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, PC, Mac)

This is not to say the previous games in the series were bad, they were fine, but I feel with those being more historical and with Modern Warfare hitting a little more close to home for people, this had a bigger response and a deeper appreciation. Plus, to me, having played all the games in the series, Modern Warfare was the first to really up the "shit's-hitting-the-fan" ante. Which is evident in the very first mission on the ship when, all of a sudden, the ship starts taking on water and you have to run for your life and jump into a hovering helicopter. In a case of sheer perfect pacing, the game brings it down action-wise and puts you in a vehicle being taken somewhere while you watch a war-torn city pass by, full of executions and trauma. Once you figure out who you are and what the point of all this is, you yourself are lined up for an execution, get a gun pointed at your face, and are assassinated point blank.

All this sets the scene for the amount of shit you're going to see throughout the campaign. In fact, I can claim that this game was the first game EVER to make me actually say "OH SHIT" out loud, and I did it two or three times. This kind of campaign wasn't seen before and the trick to all this was this: you could imagine this actually happening in our world. That helped make the story gripping. Also, the fact that this was the best action you didn't need to buy a ticket for. The game looked great, played fast, and was an absolute blast.

Of course what is Call of Duty nowadays without its multiplayer? This was the beginnings of what we think about when it comes to CoD multiplayer. All the different modes, the leveling up, the unlocks, the challenges, the perks. This was still all relatively new in the grand scheme of things, putting an RPG element into a shooter like this, so that definitely added the whole "carrot on a stick" aspect that keeps people coming back.

This was, unfortunately, the birth of the Call of Duty players who like using voice chat to make sure you know how much you suck and calling you all sorts of derogatory things. I have been against using public voice chat since my days of Halo 2, and while I do dabble in it while playing Dota 2 (I make sure to play with friends), it's worth mentioning that I have always found CoD to be among the most annoying when it comes to people on voice chat, but I digress.

Though that's a reason I'm not going to put a video on this post, since most of it is just walkthroughs or "Check out how many dudes I kill while telling them how fat and ugly their mom is".

Also worth noting is that this game really brought to life the fact that a constant 60 frames per second does wonders. It helps deliver that fast, frantic gameplay the series is known for. Granted, 30 frames per second works for some franchises, but Call of Duty's main draw is that in-your-face action, and it would not be able to achieve that unless it was at 60.

Call of Duty is still one of the most popular franchises on the planet, and the new one (Advanced Warfare) looks like the next big jump in the franchise. Will it be as groundbreaking as 4 was? We will find out in a few months, but until then, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare stands out as the best in the franchise and the game that helped kick off an era of shooters that we had never thought possible.