Reading 05: Classics and the future

I went back to the old standby for this reading assignment, COD. The last one that I ever purchased was Modern Warfare 3, and I replayed some of the campaign to get back into it. I haven’t bought every Call of Duty game out there, but all of the Modern Warfares for sure, BlOps 1, World at War, and I’m anticipating buying the new WWII game because it looks awesome. The rest of them, I’ve probably played at least once but never bought myself. I don’t know why, I just love the franchise. The campaign story lines of the Modern Warfare story arch were awesome, the online play for any of them is always fun, zombies is another nice feature that is great to play with your friends, and you know when you buy one the games are pretty consistently good. There are always some that aren’t as good as the others because the story line suffered or the developer changed and they went in a different direction or any number of things that can happen to such a long standing franchise as this. COD has been around since 2003 and they’ve been consistently pumping out games almost yearly. I know it is tough to come up with new ways to rebrand COD yearly and come up with new story lines, but I’m glad they try because I love playing those types of military FPS games.

Now on to the real focus of what this reading is supposed to be about. I’m just going to start by saying if someone tells you they don’t like Guitar Hero, or Rock Band, or Wii Sports, you shouldn’t trust them because they’re liars and/or they don’t appreciate fun. Those games are treasures and I’ve spent a ton of time with friends and family playing them, and I know so many other people have too. I love that those types of games are out there and let you be more interactive with the games you want to play. It’s tough sometimes that when you want to play those types of games you have to have all these extra peripheral controllers, but that’s a price you have to pay, and I think it is usually worth it. These games are definitely worth having around and they just add to the great collection of games that people can play. I don’t believe that these interactive games will ever go away, and they won’t destroy the passive video games that are the standard, but they just add to the great world of gaming.

I haven’t personally used a VR system, but I definitely want to because of the fact that it gets you more involved in the game. It would be so cool to really feel like you’re inside of the game and being fully immersed in it. I want to get into it and buy a VR system at some point, but I’m waiting until the day where it’s a little cheaper and there are more games available for it right away. I don’t want to buy a system and then people don’t really develop for it and another system gets all the focus. That’s happened so many times in the past with new technology that it is bound to probably happen again with this, but I know that VR will not go away and just get bigger and better.

With that being said, I have played a decent amount of AR games and those are very cool. There’s a few good apps for my phone that are free, like a mini golf AR app that reads the environment and sets up the course in whatever area you’re in, and everyone knows Pokemon Go which really launched the whole AR app movement. I think there is a ton of potential for apps like those and AR games in general as the normal electronics we own get more powerful and we don’t have to buy into a whole new system just to play games, you just have to have enough space on your phone.