Quote from D3adsYshallow and rediculous plot
got to respectfully disagree with just about everything;
the airport scene is used to set up the betrayal by shepard and provoke the war between the US and russia. if you watch the loading-screen movie before the first or second mission it shows that zakhaev, rather than being seen as a terrorist has been hailed as "a hero for the new russia" - and again this is 5 years after the events of mw1, so any number of things could have happened to strain relationships between the two nations. also this is in a fictional universe so the same rules don't have to apply, allowing IW the artistic license to create these situations you end up with fantastic things like the invasion of the US, and fighting through the whitehouse. the real world is not a video game, and vice versa; nobody complained about demons in the centre of mars in doom3, and nobody called out the aliens in crysis. so the same goes here - we're not teaching history as an industry, we're providing entertainment. just be thankful there's no godawful computer terminology as seen in shows like 24 and so on (open me up a socket, just zoom in on that 16x16 pixel image and clean it up so we can make out that number plate etc).
anyway, shepard has hired makarov to commit the atrocity in order to in order to get a blank check from the secretary of defence, and also to incite a conflict that won't be forgotten, or not cared about. he says himself that "30,000 of his men died (the nuke/conflict in mw1 i presume) and nobody batted an eyelid", this time they won't be able to ignore it. he is obviously a very bitter man and willing to do anything. he is the real villain, makarov is just a bit player who works for money, sure killing him would have given you a sense of revenge for the deaths of the civilians, but he isn't the one responsible for the overall conflict, shepard is, which is why you kill him. which is also why makarov gives you the location of shepards base in afghanistan.
i also felt the final scene where you knife that fucker in the face is wonderfully done. my only complaint is that it feels like IW only tried to one-up themselves on the first mw's ending, instead of perhaps trying somethign new. it felt like what treyarch did with waw, they just copied what mw1 did and changed things slightly, following almost the same pacing and mission structure as IW did with mw1. whereas a little innovation would go along way. that is not to say that the ending didn't give you a great feeling of "fuck yeah!".
as for the russian insgnia and so on, i'm not really sure that matters in the slightest, they're russians, you're killing them. i didn't stop to gawk at their bodies looking for technical mishaps. besides which this is in a fictional universe so you can give IW a license to make changes and deviate from our world.
a russian sign in DC? well fuck it, the russians were setting up strongholds in various locations, you'll notice they have ammo caches and all sorts of shit where they've dug in, it's not a big leap to imagine that they put up a sign to warn their boys not to get fried by a million volts; and even so, a sign doesn't ruin my immersion much; these kind of complaints remind me of the testers that put up "urgent" bugs like "this type of moss doesn't grow on these rocks, or this tree only has brown leaves during the month of september, but the level clearly takes place in october", shit like that is trivial and isn't on the same level of immersion breaking as say, getting stuck in between some wooden planks and the terrain, or not being able to walk over a sheet of corrugated metal because the collision is being a bitch (which both happened to me in rio - get your priorities straight QA! ;D).
the lego jesus stature, i google it and yes, the mw2 version is decidely blocky, and it acts as such a huge landmark for the level that it looks very odd at times. I am guessing it has something to do with making sure all the detail is spent in the playable levels rather than wasting resources on things that you will not focus on for more than a second or two. there's a number of buildings that have what looks like 256x256 or even 128x128 textures on them, and they're barely outside the playable area; but then you look at the beautiful composition of the playable areas and you forget about it, because frankly i wish more companies would focus their time and effort on the things that matter, rather than wasting it on things that don't in actual fact have any bearing on your experience.
thats sick
