Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty, it's not unfair to surmise, gets a bit of a bad rap these days. Yes, it's understandable that many dislike the series' arguable Michael Bayifying of recent years, and of course, as we all know, increased popularity and commercial success is inherently inverse to the continuing quality of anything. But cut through the current popular opinion and you'll remember that the CoD series has thrown out some absolute stormers in the past. And none moreso storming than Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Which you can currently get for a tenner.

Click on for the details of this, as well as a couple of other low-cost downloadable treats this week.

If recent moist and juicy interweb rumours are to be believed, the next Modern Warfare could well be a prequel, starring ‘cockerney’ badass and all-round unluckiest soldier on Earth, Ghost. While that does sound intriguing, we thought we’d suggest five ‘brilliant’, in no way urine-extracting ideas for Infinity Ward’s next COD. Well, if Infinity Ward makes another entry in the series, that is. So step inside for a glimpse at what Modern Warfare would be like if it was set in space, during the American Civil War or if you just want to see Captain Price in a mankini.

Earlier this year we posted a video of our extremely handsome mugs chattering on about the most important games of the past decade. Did you miss it? Were you so distracted by our handsome facial hair that our words washed across you impotently like waves over rocks? Good news everyone!

We can just about understand the way things used to be. When games came on cartridges, the only way you could play a sports game with the correct player names was to either type them all in yourself (which took hours), or buy the newest licensed version. But things have changed.

The advent of DLC has meant that all games could, in theory, be updated via a patch downloaded from the internet. This could either be for free (like the

The original Call of Duty went on sale on XBLA this week, bringing the game that started it all six long years ago to consoles for the first time. Lucky for you, we just uncovered a strategic stockpile of Call of Duty videos going back to the series’ inception in 2003. Won’t you come for a spin with us in our videomatic time-bender and watch the series evolve before your very eyes?

Now that the veneer of freshness is drying off of our copies of Modern Warfare 2, we can fully devote ourselves to complaining about the lack of dedicated servers, and just how much the maps suck because our piss poor ranking certainly isn’t due to a lack of practice and the statistical disadvantage of playing against millions of people, no! Which got us thinking: What multiplayer maps reign over all others?

Like most of you, we plowed through Call of Duty 4’s single-player campaign in a day and then spent the next couple of years blasting away at multiplayer. It’s not that the campaign was horrible, far from it. The first Modern Warfare employed innovative techniques that pushed the boundaries of interactive storytelling.

Game developers are wrong about 90% of everything 83% of the time. I know, because I’m a super-expert on facts. My dad invented facts. So hold on to your sugary carbonated bevorage, uncross your legs and take your left hand off your face, because I'm about to drop a straight-up 10-megaton truth bomb on this bitch. All the subjective bullshit and “artistic license” that game designers cower behind is polluting the hard facts...

I’m not a miserable sexist ass; I’m just a practical observer. One thing I’ve observed is that men and women are different (I figured that one out pretty early on). Since I’m a rational person, I’m aware that nothing is entirely one way or another. Even the divide between life and death is ambiguous (uh, zombies, amirite?).

Cue the banjo! It wouldn’t be the Week of Hate without our trademark “100 Reasons” videos. In case you missed it, last year we targeted game platforms. So this year we thought we’d change it up and go after a few popular genres. Up first, the ubiquitous shooter.