And after a long night at work, after an even longer day at my other job, there’s not much more I like doing than coming home, firing up the old* Xbox 360, and playing a quick round of some first-person shooter. Lately, that first person shooter is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which you may have heard of (even if you’re not a gamer) because it’s apparently fairly controversial.**

I don’t exactly know why FPS games need to have a plot, but this one does: a massacre in a Russian airport is framed on the American government. Russian forces retaliate by launching an invasion into the American east coast. The game follows two stories: in Story A., you play as an Army Ranger fighting invading forces first in suburban Virginia (hooray for destroying strip malls!), and then into Washington, D.C. (I just fought my way through the Commerce building last night). In Story B., you’re a member of a Special Forces squad trying to find evidence to tie a psychopath named Makarov to the airport massacre so that the war will end. One of the missions here involves breaking a prisoner out of an island prison, and those of you who’ve played the game might concur with me that the shower facility looks like it was based on the one in The Rock, yes?

As first person shooters go, the game itself is beautiful: I wouldn’t say that I’ve played a lot of FPS, but I’ve played enough: Castle Wolfenstein, GoldenEye, Counter-Strike, Rainbow Six, and most of the early Battlefield releases to know what I say. The graphics are gorgeous, the AI that controls your fellow soldiers is wonderfully smart and intelligent — so far, I’ve not encountered any soldiers sitting around doing nothing while enemy troops are advancing.

And there’s nothing, at the end of a long day — “No, I’m looking for a red book, but not this red book” — like spending twelve minutes dashing from house to house trying to avoid Russian armor while shooting enemy troopers out of apartment windows and fast food shops to really soothe the ‘Oh my god, now I remember why I hate working retail during Christmas time!’ nerves. And I guess that’s part of the reason for the controversy, isn’t it?

This transcribed bit from Fox & Friends had me rolling my eyes: it isn’t real. Call of Duty: MW2 is no more real than Risk, but when was the last time you saw a Fox commenter complain, “Risk allows an eight year old child to blitzkrieg across the world! He becomes Hitler! On a board game!”

Which is, I think, a bit ridiculous: I can’t think of a recent FPS shooter targeted at children. The line of argument is ridiculous: what, if you have a child in your house, you shouldn’t buy a copy of Watchmen because it’s rated R? I guess you shouldn’t stock any alcohol, either. And besides, even the US Army has gotten into the act, with America’s Army, a first person shooter designed and built to recruit and inform new soldiers.

Back to gameplay. Truthfully, however: I prefer non-linear shooters. I loved the Battlefield series for that reason — so long as you accomplished your mission (which was usually seizing all of the enemy outposts on a fairly large map), you didn’t have to worry about checkpoints or specific missions. Basically, you could just run around the map killing bad guys until the sun went down (there was a Battlefield: Vietnam map based on the Valkries scene from Apocalypse Now that I loved). That’s also a reason why I loved Counter-Strike: there was no ability to play a campaign, it was a multi-player only game — log onto a server (I played on a great one) and two teams of up to 22 people total battled each other out in missions to plant bombs, or rescue hostages. I adored the lone VIP protection map we had: as_oilrig.

*Old = by which I, in fact, mean “brand spanking new.” Had it for a week and a half.

**Because in one early level, you walk through an airport with a SAW machine gunning down civilians. That’s a pretty sick level, and not sick as in “Oh, awesome!” but sick as in “I feel like a horrible person for playing this level.” The option does exist to skip the level entirely, or to play it in a passive mode — following behind Makarov and his henchmen as they commit the murders, which not actually firing at anyone until Moscow’s version of a SWAT team arrives. And, yes, I have tried to shoot Makarov: he doesn’t die, he just clubs you to death with his rifle. Here’s a gameplay on YouTube if you’re curious.