Grave Gamer News & Views — call of duty

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (November 4th, 2014)

Here’s actual in-engine shots of Sledgehammer’s “next-gen focused” Call of Duty – the first title apart of Acti’s three-year dev cycle proposed for all forthcoming games in the series.

And it looks… mighty interesting, it turns out. If there were ever a formula in desperate, desperate need of new ingredients, the seven-year-old archetype introduced in the original Modern Warfare would be the first candidate.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Screens Straight from the Future

What if Private Military Contractors turned against us? Scarier thought: what if Kevin Spacey turned against us? I shudder to think.

But we might just find out in Sledgehammer Games’ surprisingly evocative take on Activision’s yearly trip to the bank. Black Ops II took us to the near future, now the series looks to go even further, presenting us with a battlefield of exo-suit wearing soldiers of fortune fighting for corporations instead of governments. It’s like a Heinlein novel come alive, but with more Spacey.

Sledgehammer promises the exo-suits aren’t some cheap gimmick, either; they fundamentally change how you move and fight – from increasing your speed to giving the ability to scale lateral surfaces and outright jump obstacles like a disciple of Matty Damon’s character from Elysium.

You might say to yourself, “So they’ve essentially created a sci-fi shooter where you have upped maneuverability and, hey-o, there’s some mechs thrown into the mix.” Maybe that sounds familiar to you Xbox Oners out there.

Still, my excitement for this stretched-thin property is piqued by the mere fact they’re actually taking risks with the formula. Take a look at Ghosts. It’s fear of change led to a phenomenally boring entry all too easy to want to forget about. Plus a “next-gen first” build of Call of Duty is exactly what Advanced Warfare’s predecessor did not feel like in the remotest.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is strapped into a November 4th, 2014 release. Exact consoles haven’t been locked down, though Activision confirmed forthcoming DLC will continue appearing on Xbox consoles first.

New DLC Has Snoop Dogg Narrating Call of Duty: Ghosts Matches; “It’s the Coolest Game in the Hood” Apparently

Well, in just about the best news I’ve heard in 2014, a new personalization pack for Activision’s annual cash-in, Call of Duty: Ghosts, allows you to replace the multiplayer narrator with – and I am in no way shitting you – hip-hop legend Snoop Dogg’s smooth-as-thousand-dollar-velvet voice.

I’m uncertain what brought us to this reality. I understand micro-content; it makes sense for a corporation to further monetize their top selling product. I get that. And I understand personalization tweaks; for a few bucks, you can download weapon skins so people who don’t instinctively double-tap out of the Kill-Cam can see they were murdered by someone with style.

But Snoop to the Dee Oh Double Gee Dogg? Saying shit like “Squad Member active – a brother from another mother” and “Yeeahh, crizz-ay” during an online match? This is a stroke of idiotic genius. It’s completely stupid, yet I will purchase the voice-over pack with less hesitation than I’d have saving my own child from drowning. Just watch this video and try not to smile. Just fucking try.

Ghosts is a rather dry product – admittedly the least amount of fun I’ve had plugging into this series since Call of Duty 3 – butlittle stunts like adding Michael Myers and the goddamn Predator into the game provide the necessary flavoring that stops me from ejecting this vanilla wafer entry out of my collection.

The Snoop Dogg Voice-Over Pack, obviously trumping The Last of Us’ Left Behind expansion as the most emotionally affecting piece of DLC this year, releases April 22nd on Xbox platforms, priced at $2.99.

Michael Myers Answers the Call of Duty

Infinity Ward is making my childhood dreams come true this month. They’re letting me wield a sharpened axe, don a menacingly emotionless visage of a mask, and sending me on a psychopathic rampage.

No, no, no, it’s not my dream to pretend to be a serial killer. My dream is to be a pop culture icon that happens to be a mass murderer. Subtle difference.

Yes, in detailing the first downloadable map pack for Call of Duty: Ghosts, among the ranks of urban and industrial battlegrounds (that are indistinguishable from the scores of urban and industrial battlegrounds that make up the DNA of this series), there was one oddball map that stuck out: Fog.

Fog is CoD’s DLC as it should be: the designers letting their hair down and coding something ridiculous and fun simply for the hell of it. Siphoning the atmosphere and visual staples of countless horror movies before it, Fog is a darkened, dank slice of macabre geography featuring dead woods, a lonely, dilapidated cabin, and an Eli Roth approved torture chamber.

And that’s not even the cool part. Successfully complete an operation during an online skirmish and you’ll transform into a slasher flick icon – Michael Myers, straight out of John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween (mayhaps “Fog” is a slier reference to the director’s filmograhpy?). When Mikey hits the scene, you’ll know. The music takes a shift – featuring Carpenter’s now classic theme – and the chances of eating axe increase exponentially.

Call of Duty is no stranger to the weird – this is, in fact, a series that saw Danny Trejo and Sarah Michelle Gellar pistol whipping an undead George Romero just a couple of years ago – but it’s typically Treyarch gettin’ up to shenanigans while IW plays the straight man every other year. Ghosts being, in my opinion, the driest, by-the-numbers release in the franchise’s history, it’s nice to have a reason not to instantly forget this title like my mind has been desperately begging me to.

Does Michael Myers’ murderous inclusion make sense? No. There isn’t even an official implementation of the knife-only mode that fans have borrowed his name for. Does his inclusion make me happy? Shit yes; and that overrides logic.

Onslaught, featuring four new maps and a new chapter of Extinction, arrives on Xbox platforms January 28th. PlayStation users are likely to see the pack a month later.

China’s Call of Duty Invaded by Zombie Terminators; Related: I’m Moving to China

So Chinese gamers have cultivated a market where Activision’s annual cash-in, followed up by a year of expensive DLC maps, just isn’t supported.

Instead, Acti tapped its Shanghai studio (along with series familiar Raven Software) to condense the series’ hallmark gameplay and features into a single free-to-play title...