Why Call of Duty 4 is Overrated and Not Actually That Good

The amount of times I've been yelled at by my friends to 'get CoD4, because it's awesome!' led me to believe that they were speaking the truth, and that maybe Infinity Ward's modern shooter really was the better FPS than my beloved Halo 3. So, a week later, I unwrapped my Amazon package and slotted the disc into my 360 once again; I'd bought the game before, when it came out, beaten it on Veteran and sold it, not really caring that much for the online portion. But now, pressured into buying it again, I was expecting big things. Shortly after playing it for a few hours, I realised my friends were all being paid off by Infinity Ward to lie to me: this game sucks.

Now, I know the entire gaming world will disagree with me, but the game takes no skill whatsoever to exceed in. One anecdote which proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt is the fact that when I briefly left my seat to answer the phone, I came back to find I had two extra kills. Yes, I was being a noob and using martyrdom, but the fact that you can succeed at the game without actually playing it suggests to me that there are some stronger forces at work here than anything even remotely resembling skill.

As me and my equally frustrated friend moved through multiple game types and maps, we were getting killed in more and more awe inspiringly stupid and unskilful ways; we were shot from out of the map, instantly when we spawned, we were punished for getting kills (see Martyrdom), we got killed in less than one shot on multiple occasions, although that may be down to lag, and we generally were shown a slideshow of everything wrong with CoD4, with the main participants being the entire community still playing it.

My friends' complaints against Halo ranged from 'it's too easy to get kills', 'it takes ages to kill someone!' (contradictions for the win), 'once you get the power weapons, you've won' and finally, the old 'the game takes no skill.' Well, for the first one, they are comparing this to CoD4, where you can kill somebody without playing. For the second argument they have, that is because most of my friends are bad at the game and do not understand that aiming for the head actually does work. For the third argument, if somebody picks up the shotgun, of course charging at them at close range is going to hand them an easy victory. Finally, if CoD4, with it's spawn campers, glitchers, ridiculously overpowered perks, fanatic followers and ridiculously strong weapons takes skill, then Halo 3 takes more skill than playing Through the Fire on Flames on real guitar at the same time as winning a Gold medal in the Olympics Long Jump, 1500 metres and every event in the Paralympics, whilst building a time machine to go back in time and paint the Mona Lisa before Picasso did it.

To summarize, the mass market has for some reason bought into CoD4, and latched onto it like superglue, defending it's questionable honour at every turn. They claim it takes huge amounts of skill to succeed at, whilst Halo is for noobs and perks are the 'greatest innovation in gaming since the analogue stick.' Well, as much as these people are entitled to their opinions, they can be factually discounted until their argument devolves into simply calling people noobs, incredibly ironically in my opinion. At least in Halo you have to be playing to get kills.