Game Rehab: Call of Duty

If you're a piece of serialised media, make enough money and your consumers will have... interesting feelings about you.  And given this criterion, no franchise has a more polarised, factionalised consumer base than... Sonic the Hedgehog.  But I'm actually writing about Call of Duty, the first-person shooter series inspired by real and prospective military flashpoints of the past, present and future.  From its humble beginnings as a World War II-themed game, already following the coattails of other such titles, to the world-shattering Modern Warfare trilogy, Call of Duty has become the model for many other video games, both shooters and in other genres, trying to make it big.

• Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2003): The first game.  Set in the European theatre of World War II, the story mode alternates at certain points between American, British, and Soviet characters in their combined advance against the Nazi war machine.
• Call of Duty: Finest Hour (Spark/Exakt, 2004): A spin-off of the first game for consoles.
• Call of Duty 2 (Infinity Ward, 2005): Also set in WWII.  A launch title for the XBox 360.
• Call of Duty 2: Big Red One (Treyarch, 2005): A spin-off of the first game for consoles, and a sequel to Finest Hour.
• Call of Duty 3 (Treyarch, 2006): Also set in WWII.  The first main-series game not made by Infinity Ward, kicking off the series' tradition of swapping developers every other year.
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward, 2007): The first game exclusively developed for seventh-generation consoles (PlayStation 3, XBox 360, etc.).  Set in the near future, the story mode involves an American Army Rangers unit pursuing a nuclear-armed dictator in an unspecified middle-eastern land, and a British SAS task force pursuing his Russian partner in crime.  Also pioneered an online multiplayer mode, where players earn experience points to unlock new weapons and items.
• Call of Duty: World at War (Treyarch, 2008): Returns the series to a World War II setting, specifically the Pacific Theatre.  Introduced the "Nazi Zombies" survival mode.
• Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward, 2009): Arguably where the franchise jumped the shark.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops (Treyarch, 2010): A spin-off set in the Cold War-era 1960s, loosely connected plot-wise to World at War.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Infinity Ward, 2011): Finishes the story from MW2.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Treyarch, 2012): A launch title for the Wii U.  The setting alternates between the 1980s Cold War and the not-to-distant future.  In a series first, the single-player campain features a branching storyline with multiple endings.
• Call of Duty: Ghosts (Infinity Ward, 2013): A launch title for the PlayStation 4 and XBox One.  The story is a new one set in the present-day, about an invasion of a South American federation against the United States.

As you can see, CoD has been a very busy franchise, with new games coming out faster than once a year for an entire decade.  So with a schedule like that, it stands to reason that they don't have the time to innovate too much -- and therein lies the problem that many people see in it, myself included.  Now bear in mind: even though I was raised on shooters like Goldeneye 007 and pine for those days, I don't hate CoD on principle.  There's a time and place for different takes on the first-person shooter genre.  But if you're going to do one thing, you might as well do it to the best of your ability.  These are my suggestions for fixing the franchise, categorised into points specific to Call of Duty, and suggestions for the genre as a whole, both for single-player and multi-player experiences.

For the Call of Duty franchise specifically:

• Your stories need to take some Ritalin.  More so with the newer entries, CoD games have a bad habit of dropping you in a different warzone for each level, with the battle du jour already in medias res.  Whilst the Modern Warfare trilogy carried on the original games' tradition of multiple parallel storylines, they jump between them with haphazard abandon.  For example, in MW2, there's a mission with a British SAS task force tracking down an arms dealer in Rio de Janeiro, followed by a mission in suburban Virginia where a bunch of Army Rangers come under fire by Russian paratroopers.  Then another mission with the SAS.  Then another with the Rangers.  Pray tell, what was wrong with keeping the SAS and Rangers missions together?
• Try to keep a consistent tone, specifically in the portrayal of war.  Not all the games fell in this trap, mind you.  The WW2-era CoD games gave off an appropriate amount of patriotism, because by now we've all accepted the Nazi regime was a bad thing.  And CoD4 updated its portrayal of war for the post-Iraq era, minus the oil.  But then MW2 and MW3 come around, and things get a little... simpler.  Like the Brosnan-era Bond films, there's too much of an emphasis on explosive setpieces.  It almost makes war look awesome... and then you die, and the respawn screen pops up with a real-life inspirational quote on the nature of war.  Umm... am I supposed to walk away from my controller with the opinion that war is good or bad?
• Be a little more even-handed and realistic in portaying the world's superpowers.  Oh my, the Russians are invading America and Western Europe?  What is this, 1984?  Okay, so the real Russia is a point of concern these days, to say the least, but the game goes out of its way to say it's not the Moscow government's fault.  That's considerate and all, but it feels like going out of your way to be "safe".  I'd prefer it if you either implicated the Kremlin directly, or chose a completely different antagonist force.  ...On second thought, that didn't work for Ghosts -- come on, South America isn't really that jealous of our freedoms and our kill-sats, right?  I mean, we've still got allies down there!  Which brings me to my next point:
• As for the other side, America doesn't have to go it alone, you know.  The early CoD games were somewhat innovative in letting us play as characters from different nations.  And in these post-Iraq days of America being seen as a renegade force, we might as well buck that trend.  Even now, the USA has a lot of allies, so why not let them get in on the action?
• And don't think of killing off those player characters when you're done with them, that habit's getting ridiculous.
• Either cool it with the "shocking moments", or have them mean something.  For those unaware, the games in the Modern Warfare trilogy boast certain shocking, and often controversial scenes meant for some kind of emotional impact.  In CoD4, the player character dies slowly after getting caught in a nuclear explosion; in MW2, he goes undercover with a terrorist group as they raid a Moscow airport and massacre civillians; and in MW3, the Russians launch a series of chemical weapon attacks across Western Europe -- from the point of view of a tourist family.  Of these, I'd wager the first one made the best impact because A) it was unskippable, and B) it was the first one of its kind.  As for the others, well, they come across as a more contrived effort to tug at our heartstrings.  Plus, they give you the option to skip them beforehand without penalty, and I have to give them credit for thinking about the people who might be offended by them, but that's just it: it's all too well-calculated, too focused on mass appeal to have any real impact.  I mean, look at Spec Ops: The Line (PS3/X360, 2012): you don't have any choice but to launch the white phosphorus, and you don't know that you killed civilians with it until it's too late.  I'd go further in detail, but that game warrants its own review.  And besides, having this stunt pulled on us once every two years puts a damper on its intended effects.  (And no, I haven't played Ghosts, so I have no idea if they've bucked this trend.)
• Don't give us special items only to restrict their use.  One of the things the CoD single-player campaigns like to do is give us a go with all manner of military hardware -- night-vision goggles, airstrikes, vehicles, turrets, robots, and as of Ghosts, playable attack dogs -- only to yank them from our hands after a minute or two.  These sorts of things often become the highlights of whatever level they're featured in, but when you give us something so fun, we'll just chafe at the limitations you impose upon them.

For single-player shooters in general:

• Let us carry more than two guns at a time.  Sure, it was weird when you thought about how, say, James Bond in Goldeneye 007 (N64, 1997) could carry dozens of guns at once.  But to paraphrase that Passenger song, you only miss a hyperspace arsenal when you've only got two weapon slots.  Yes, Halo popularised this trend, but it worked (to some extent) in that game because there were so few weapons to be had (I count eight).  Meanwhile, your average post-Modern Warfare CoD game boasts dozens of guns -- many of them similar, mind you, I'll get to that next -- and without the ability to carry them all as you go, you might ditch one and not find the same one again for quite some time.
• On that note, having a wide variety of guns is great on paper, but if you're going to do so, at least make all your weapons distinct.  Having 5 or more guns of a particular class means nothing if they all behave the same.  Your average Joe six-shooter won't understand the subtleties that set the M4 and M16 apart from each other, for example.  Otherwise, all this variety might overload us, and we'll have no reason not to just forgo it all and just stick with what we're arbitrarily provided with at the start -- especially if you give us more ammo than we'll ever need.
• Don't regenerate our health.  Pardon me for being raised on games that actually carried the risk of making you start over if you goofed up enough, but the way I see it, giving us free refills on health points lessens the challenge below the level of reason.  Again, we have Halo (XBox, 2001) to blame for this trend, but it was handled better there: your health does not regenerate (unless you find health power-ups), but you have a shield on top of that which does recharge.  Granted, this sci-fi technology won't work for every setting, but maybe it's a sign that we didn't need this sort of thing in the first place.
• Don't "force" us to use iron-sight aiming.  I know you're perfectly able to fire "from the hip", or without looking down the sights, but apparently you're much less accurate when you do.  In fact, the tutorial level from MW2, where you and your captain train a bunch of Afghan security forces, hammers this in rather blatantly.  Yes, I know it's good gun etiquette in the real world to look in the sights to hit the target you want, but I didn't boot up a video game to be subject to the same rules I can experience in my own world.  And I think I'd get a bit more efficiency out of my gaming session if I didn't have to waste half a second of aiming animation every time I wanted to shoot something.
• Don't remind us when to reload.  I've started noticing this a lot in shooters lately: when my magazine is down to its last few rounds, a small notice will pop up on the screen telling me to reload and which button I may do it with.  Umm, if it's no offence to you, I'll reload when I dang well please!  Certain CoD games, MW2 in particular, are even worse in this regard: they outright tell you, "You are hurt.  Find cover!" when your HP (temporarily) drops close to zero.  Yeah, as if the throbbing redness taking over my screen didn't indicate that I'm in dire straights!
• And do we really need objective markers all over the place?  Yes, missing an out-of-the-way objective when we didn't even know what to look for is one thing.  But shepherding us around like we're idiots is boring, insulting even.

For multi-player shooters in general:

• Let us choose our own matches.  In some games (i.e. the PC version of CoD4), when you search for multiplayer matches you get a list of results which you can choose from.  But in others (i.e. the console versions of MW2), you just pick your mode and the game chooses the "best" match for you automatically.  The way they do this, it tends to lead to much longer wait times when there aren't enough good connections going about.  This may be a difference between PC and console gaming in general, but I for one value transparency in this sort of thing.  It wouldn't be to much to show console gamers what matches are available -- or better yet, give us the option to do both.
• NEVER make multiplayer-exclusive Achievements.  CoD in particular doesn't have this problem, but numerous other online-enabled games these days, and shooters especially, fall victim to this trap.  See, if your servers don't get enough use, odds are you'll end up like 007 Legends (PS3/X360/Wii U, 2012), where you'll everyone only seems to want to play the regular Team Deathmatch -- and that's only if anyone's online at the moment.  And that's the best-case-scenario -- it's possible for the multiplayer servers to be switched off completely, rendering those acheivements unwinnable forever.  See Homefront (PS3/X360, 2011) for an example of that -- or rather, don't.
• Bring back AI bots for offline multiplayer.  Again, the multiplayer servers aren't going to stay up forever, and some of us don't have friends to call up for split-screen games.  That's the reason I have more fond memories of multiplayer in The World Is Not Enough (N64, 2000) or Nightfire (PS2/GCN/XBox, 2002) as opposed to Goldeneye 007.

And last but not least, take a break for a couple of years!  Nothing hurts a series more than wearing out its welcome.  And series publisher Activision's no stranger to this phenomenon, either.  They've already run the Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero series to the ground with their egregious sequelising, and the way I see it, Call of Duty will be their next casualty.  ...Aw, who am kidding?  Activision's not gonna heed my warnings.  all they care about is money.  ...Welp, it's never too late to heed my warnings, and send Call of Duty away for some game rehab.

...

Yeah, title drop!!

Game Rehab: Sonic the Hedgehog

While you may not be able to tell it by hanging around deviantArt, the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has fallen on hard times.  Regardless of how well the franchise has been doing sales-wise, and it has been doing quite well, almost every game released since the end of the Sega Dreamcast has been critically panned in some way or another.  Game Informer magazine in particular has been harsh on the series as of late.  They have said that the character Sonic is no more relevant than the bee girl from Blind Melon’s music video “No Rain” (ouch), and in their 2009 April Fool’s Day special, they printed a fake article describing series creator Yuji Naka’s (failed) attempts to kill his own franchise through poor-quality games.

N.B.: I started writing this well before the announcement of Sonic Colors and the Sonic IV episodes.  I honestly have a good feeling about these two games, but then again, with the exception of the Wii version of Colors, they're being developed outside of Sonic Team, by Dimps, who did the only *good* Sonic games of the 2000s, including the Advance and Rush series.

Pretty much every Sonic game since Sonic Adventure has had some misstep, whether in design, playability, or both.  Before we discuss how to fix the franchise, let's look at what went wrong with all those games.

• Sonic Adventure, 1999: The first truly 3D Sonic game (not counting the awful Sonic R foot-racing game for Saturn), Sonic Adventure re-introduced the character to a new generation of gamers.  I also understand it played rather well, unlike the 2003 remake for Nintendo GameCube and PC. [citation needed]  The one thing I couldn't get over, apart from the occasional collision glitches, was the hub world which you had to go through to get to different levels.  It’s too easy to get lost in them and too hard to know where to go next.  Adventure also introduced several game modes, such as Knuckles' treasure hunts and Big's fishing, that didn't fit in with traditional Sonic gameplay.
• Sonic Adventure 2, 2001: Starting with Sonic Adventure 2, the Sonic games exhibit a bad habit of taking one step forward and two steps back.  Adventure 2 got rid of the hub world, presenting the levels one after the other in two parallel story lines.  However, these levels alternate among three of the play styles presented in the first Adventure.  Of these, the treasure-hunting stages are more long and boring than before, only now the player is forced to endure them to get to the end of the story.
• Sonic Heroes, 2003: I’ll be honest with you, Sonic Heroes came close to greatness.  This game used twelve characters in four teams of three.  With each team, you controlled one character with the other two trailing behind, like Tails did way back in Sonic 2.  You could change the leader of your team on the fly, and use his/her/its abilities to get past obstacles.  Like Adventure 2, each team had a linear progression of levels with parallel storylines.  And for the first time in two console generations, they brought back the Special Stages!  While this is also the first time Sonic showed up on the PlayStation 2 and XBox, do yourself a favor and only play the GameCube version.  Otherwise you’ll hate it more than you should.
• Shadow the Hedgehog, 2005:  For my money, this is where the series jumped the shark (or so I thought).  This game stars not Sonic, but his titular doppelganger Shadow, first introduced in Sonic Adventure 2.  In some dubiously crowning achievements in bad decisions, Shadow uses guns and even drives a motorcycle at some point.  You can alter your path in the story depending on which faction you attack the most, but when everyone’s gunning for you, you don’t have time to care about taking sides.  Of course, the lack of any manual aiming function whatsoever did anything but help manners, either.  Having been tagged for violence and mild language by the American ESRB, it’s a wonder the game managed to avoid its Teen rating.  Thankfully, this idea seems to be an offshoot the producers were wise enough to avoid pursuing further.
• Sonic the Hedgehog, 2006/2007: I’ll admit it, this is the only game out of this list which I have not played in any form.  The development team claimed this to be a return to the basics¹, in honor of the franchise’s 15^th anniversary, when in fact they have learned nothing from the mistakes made since Sonic Adventure.  To start off, they went back to using hub worlds like in the first Adventure.  It also has pretty much all the problems of the previous titles on my list, *and* the PlayStation 3 version has some horrendous loading issues.  Kinda defeats the purpose of starring "the fastest thing alive".

Long story short, the Sonic franchise has sunk itself from trying to do too many new things – and not doing any them well enough.  From the racing-platformer gimmick of the Sonic Rivals games to the “werehog” segments in Unleashed, each new game seems to have some sort of gimmick and/or new characters tacked on.  Meanwhile, the core gameplay is left to rot.  Perhaps Sonic is just too fast for three dimensions to handle.

Which brings me to how I would go about fixing the Sonic franchise:

• First of all, stop trying to add new gameplay gimmicks.  Just do one thing, and do it well.  Namely, the platforming action we know and love.
• Consider bringing the gameplay back to 2D or 2.5D.  You know, like Sonic Rivals, only without the forced racing gimmick.  Many of the problems with being in 3D stem from the camera.  Sometimes it has a mind of its own, sometimes it can’t keep up with all the speed and gets stuck behind a wall on its way back to Sonic; there are a host of related problems.  If they could make a 3D game that played really, really well, that would be cool, but when in doubt, don’t go for that extra dimension.
• Don’t go crazy with all the characters.  Personally, I don’t mind playing as someone other than Sonic or Tails all the time, but we don’t need to meet a new critter for every new release.  Who really cares about Jet, Wave, and Storm from Riders?
• On that note, whatever characters are included, they should be worked in to the main mode of gameplay, and not have their own mode a la Adventure.  In other words, they should play just like Sonic, only with different abilities as necessary.
• For the love of all that rocks, no more songs with vocals.  The lyrics always end up totally inane and silly.  It’s not even worth getting a better lyricist or translator.  Not that there haven’t been some good songs in the newer games as well, but it’s probably no coincidence that all the great music from the old games was instrumental.
• The composer for the first few Sonic games was Masato Nakamura, from the J-Pop band Dreams Come True.  The later composers, including Jun Senoue, were okay at best, but Mr. Nakamura knows how to compose a background tune.  Or maybe it was the 16-bit synth instruments that did the trick.  Whatever it was, do that.
• In the old games, the story may have been mostly the same ­– Dr. Robotnik trying to take over the world by turning animals into a robot army – but we didn’t need a serious story to have fun with Sonic.  If there’s anything the Adventure games did right, it was the story; there were some great, if not memorable story bits in both of those games.  So for future games, do whatever you want with the stories, but remember to tailor them to the gameplay – not the other way around.
• I may be alone in my thinking, but I say that the 4Kids voice actors from Sonic X and the more recent games were better than those from the Adventure games.  I mean, have you heard Tails in those games?  Sheesh!  So whoever does the voice acting, they had better clean up their, well, act. 

Well, I don't usually like wishful thinking, mostly when it comes to exposing poor logic in movies, but that felt good.  Now, where's that DARN fourth Chaos Emerald...?

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¹ “With Sonic the Hedgehog, we have gone back to our starting point, more than 15 years ago, to reinvent the attitude and speed that made our hero a legend.”  Thorsen, Tor.  “PS3, 360 Sonic leads wave of Sega announcements”.  GameSpot.  9 Sep 2005.  5 February 2010 < http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/sonicthehedgehog/news.html>.