Call of Duty Classic

With it’s great, great, great, great grandchild becoming the biggest selling entertainment sensation to ever strike the Earth; Call of Duty 1 (AKA: Call of Duty Classic) has decided, after six years of hibernation, that it is finally time for it to piggy-back on Modern Warfare 2’s success and explore the waters of console gaming.

Releasing onto the PSN and XBLA, Call of Duty Classic is the starting point for a lot of the great ideas which made the series so popular. From the different controllable protagonists in the campaign to… well that is pretty much it. Honestly, the release of Call of Duty Classic has actually done more to demonstrate how far we’ve come since than how revolutionary it was for its time. Back in 2003 it was definitely a fantastic injection of enthusiasm that the first person shooter genre needed, and from a then rookie studio, Infinity Ward really glued gamers to their monitors with this gem. However, that was then, this is now.

Even on the easiest difficulty the game is brutally unforgiving. I died more times than I reloaded, and that was after I gave up on the normal setting. The bionic cyber vision possessed by the AI give them a huge advantage over you and your pathetic human reaction time. Which combined with guns consisting of nothing but recoil and sound (and no controller vibration) means you’ll constantly be having freshly shot bullet holes added to what used to be your face the entire time you’re not in a loading screen. That’s not even mentioning the surprise ‘jack in the box’ enemies who will dart out from the other side of a doorway you were about to go through to give you another gun butt to the jaw.

Of course, when the reverse occurs and you are partnered with some AI team-mates they are all as useful as a bayonet made out of sponge cake. When paired with them you are always required to either push on by yourself, separate off on your own from the group to eliminate 100 enemy soldiers so that the rest of your group can take a relaxed, merry stroll over their corpses to the checkpoint, or complete the entire level without any assistance and then run the entire full length of the level in reverse just to get back into the truck at the beginning which is (and has been the whole time) loaded full of perfectly capable soldiers who claim to be on your side.

I may sound overly harsh judging the game on today’s standards rather than 2003’s, but if you’re going to re-release a classic game you have to know that your audience might have changed their opinion of the product. Pacman is timeless, Worms is timeless, but to me Call of Duty 1 is certainly not timeless. Especially with Call of Duty 2 being readily available and with far more value for money to its name. Every improvement which has been made to the series since has been made for a very good reason, so to backtrack with Call of Duty Classic and attempt to wring another 1200MSP from the fanbase just doesn’t cut it for me. It was unnecessary, frustrating, and should have never been anything more than a very small bonus for going for the Hardened/Prestige edition of Modern Warfare 2. Thanks Infinity Ward, but no thanks.