It’s understandable, though, the Modern Warfare series has become famous beyond its target audience, with even non-gamers aware of its existence and what it entails. But as I clicked the link through to watch the newly released trailer for the third entry, I felt entirely disinterested; no excitement for what I was about to see. And even after watching it, that feeling lingered. Had I really lost interest in the genre? Or was it just the Call of Duty franchise that no longer satisfied my thirst for shooters?

As it turns out, the latter. Moments later, I was reminded of the fantastic trailers released earlier this year for Battlefield 3, and quickly sought out the extended video of the opening level. There it was: the jittery fingers; the shiver down my spine; the experience I sought as a gamer. So what does the new Battlefield have over Modern Warfare 3? Both are modern military first-person shooters, both look equally impressive from a graphical standpoint, and both now in the third iteration of their series…

In my mind, it comes down to what they offer to the average gamer. Currently, it seems Activision is set on making Modern Warfare 3 a replica of the previous entry to the series: sticking to that “blockbuster” thrill, with a ludicrous plotline and an unambitious multiplayer. DICE, on the other hand, seem prepared to go that extra mile on each platform with their glittering, fresh-out-the-box Frostbite 2 engine, and up to 64-player online matches for the PC version of the game.

Maybe it’s just me – perhaps I’m biased towards Battlefield. But it’s been over a year now since the release of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and I’m still booting it up and hitting the multiplayer for a few rounds of “Conquest” on a weekly basis. For me, BC2 was the pinnacle online experience of 2010 both on consoles and PC: that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy Modern Warfare 2 or Black Ops, I just found the multiplayer aspect ended once I’d tried all the modes and unlocked the majority of the content. To this day, BC2 gives me tactical online participation that delivers excitement in its gameplay, as opposed to an ultra-competitive environment where the only joy appears to be in killing (and unlocking better guns for more killing).

Frankly, I don’t expect many (or even any) to agree with me: that’s not the point of this article. I’m merely pondering the thought that Modern Warfare might be becoming passé. That, maybe, its continued tread on familiar territory isn’t enough to keep up with the competition. Not with the intention to alter its sales (or even boost Battlefield 3′s), but just with the hope that gamers don’t feel obliged to purchase, come November, just to feel part of the community.

It’s a difficult area to discuss: many love the Modern Warfare games and are willing to defend their corner to the death. And, you never know, Activision may reveal some startling enhancements for MW3 during E3 that make me eat my words right out of the monitor – but I’m not convinced. In fact, I’m so utterly unconvinced that I’ll likely only glance over the updates coming in for the game, much like I would for the next FIFA or Sims. But then, that may be the future for the Call of Duty series. Only time, and sales figures, will tell.

GoldenEye – a licence to kill and a licence to kill for. Despite its low profile since the genre-defining Nintendo 64 game, it’s still one of the strongest brands in the entire industry. Based on a passable yet largely forgettable film from a decade and a half ago, it’s hardly drawing from the most inspirational of source materials. It’s not like there’s an inseparable bond between player and developer either, with the talent that laid the golden N64 egg flying Rare’s coop years before Activision claimed the 007 deeds. Having been burned by the last attempt to exploit our nostalgia with 2004s Rogue Agent, anybody with a healthy degree of cynicism would steer clear of this year’s iteration. And they would be gloriously wrong.

Pitched as a re-imagining (lest Nintendo and Rare’s lawyers catch wind of it), Eurocom have somehow managed to resist following either the film or the N64 title too rigidly; instead, they’ve demonstrated the confidence to add contemporary elements from both mediums, resulting in a game that feels both reassuringly classic and satisfyingly modern. Curiously anachronistic even in the mid-nineties, the KGB-centric plot has been edged out by a far more topical “blame the bankers” motif designed to push the buttons of the modern audience, and the game is all the better for it.

Stealth wins out over brute force. Once you're spotted you have precious seconds to incapacitate your foe before the cavalry arrive.

Bond’s globe trotting sees him revisit the cream of iconic landmarks from Rare’s title such as the rainy Arkhangelsk dam or the snow-covered peaks of Severnaya, but earns us a few more air miles via Barcelona and Dubai. The new locales manage to introduce new gameplay elements including the use the facial recognition software on Bond’s trusty smart phone to pinpoint your contact, or hacking a roomful of experimental weapons to retire a few would-be chopper thieves.

Having proven themselves on Nintendo’s hardware with the superb-looking Dead Space Extraction, the level of wonder Eurocom have achieved with GoldenEye’s visuals demands far more than the “looks great for a Wii game” paragraph usually reserved for the finer looking specimens on the machine. GoldenEye is a graphical triumph in every way, from the scale of the destructible environments, to the variety of the textures, to the volume of the enemies, to the stability of the frame rate. The short-cuts taken in Dead Space Extraction’s on-rails ride were transparent, but GoldenEye rarely cuts corners, firing on all pistons for the duration of the campaign.

While you rarely have to face a chopper head-on, they do make a nuisance of themselves at many points throughout the game.

When it does take shortcuts they are creative and beautifully effective, such as the Barcelona night club where vast crowds of silhouetted revellers dance the night away under the glaring bloom of neon lights. Animation is noticeably superior to anything else attempting to replicate realism on the Wii, whether through the brutally vicious stealth kills, the dives and rolls of the pleasingly smart AI opponents or exceptionally well-realised facial animations. Even incidental characters like the Dubai arms fair guard deliver brilliantly observed performances that surpass many a high-end 360 game.

Eurocom have worked harder than Q to ensure you can control Bond with just about any gadget to ever leave Nintendo’s R&D labs, from GameCube controller to Remote and Nunchuck, and while they all perform to an acceptable level, the fact that they are bundling the game with the Classic Controller Pro tells you all you need to know about how it should be played. Sprint and hard-aim are modern staples that drastically improve GoldenEye’s handling and compliment the stealth elements that Rare’s title so expertly employed back in 1997.

I’d like to break something down for you readers, clarify a point reviewers aren’t, perhaps, quite laying out in black and white.

Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops is now available to purchase in the UK, and if you buy the game (which carries a £55 RRP) for its campaign only, you’re buying it for 7-8 hours of walled-in, rock-to-rock blasting broken up by alternately hard- or soft-boiled flights of political fancy, and spells behind the wheel of a vehicle with an abbreviated name. You’re buying it for the tedious ebb and flow of red damage pigment, for the rough caress of invisible walls, for the meticulously patterned failings of NPC goons.

You’re buying it for a competent variation on yesterday’s shooter, in other words – for blandness, filler. You’re buying it because you need something to do with your hands while you watch Rambo III.

Buy Black Ops for its multiplayer, by contrast, and you’re buying it for thousands of hours of some of the finest online competitive or cooperative action the industry can offer. You’re buying it for heaps of unlockables – perks, weapons, avatar accessories, killstreaks. You’re buying it for a cornucopia of modes, some familiar, some not-so-familiar, all compelling.

You’re buying it for maps you can replay and replay till your thumbs bleed and still get ambushed and stuffed at the outset of the next match you join. You’re buying it for zombies, and Nazis, and Nazi zombies. You’re buying it for those sweet, sweet words “triple kill” and the accompanying rumble of a Cobra attack helicopter.

You’re buying it, in other words, because you have some grasp on the notion of value-for-money, dislike head-butting spawn points, appreciate a bit of actual, genuine variety and are eager to have your wits – rather than your patience – tested.

Now call me presumptuous, but I’d lay heavy odds that those of you buying for the second reason out-number those buying for the first. I’d lay heavy odds that Activision and Treyarch know it, too. They ought to. Multiplayer has been the franchise’s meat, potatoes, peas and ketchup since Modern Warfare, at least. Even the Man in the Street (the one who isn’t queueing for a midnight launch, that is) should have cottoned on by now, and these days, most Men in the Street have steady broadband connections.

So, my little devil’s advocacy routine of the hour is thus: why do we tolerate the existence of a Call of Duty single player? Is that shell-shocked corridor anything more than an introductory formality? Shouldn’t Activision learn a few lessons from the success of Battlefield 1943, and strip the dead wood out of its biggest action franchise? Share your thoughts below.

And watch out for our own Black Ops review shortly.

To first-person shooter studios, the Wii market is deeply hostile territory. But then maybe it’s just a question of making the right shooter, the one that will alter how the platform is perceived and developed for. After all, nobody really gave a damn for console ballistics full stop till the original GoldenEye blew N64′s socks off back in 1997.

Can Activision’s newly Sean-Bean-less Wiimake repeat the trick, 13 years later? Producer Dawn Pinkney seemed to think so when we spoke to her at a preview event last week. Asked whether she and developer Eurocom were fazed by the genre’s struggles on Wii, Pinkney didn’t miss a beat. ‘No, I mean, for our game – did I go through all the different controllers we’ve got?

‘We’ve got Classic Controller play, we’ve got the Gamecube controller, we’ve got the Zapper, we’ve obviously got the Wiimote and nunchuk, and we’ve got all these different controllers. And then we have these different control schemes as well.

‘So we’ve got control schemes for core gamers, control schemes for more casual gamers – so we’ve just totally made it accessible, and obviously Bond is a very popular license anyway, so I don’t see it as a challenge, you know. GoldenEye belongs on a Nintendo platform, we’ve got the accessibility there but also enough for the hardcore gamers, yes.’

While Pinkney insisted that the game was always intended for Wii – ‘Yeah, it’s Nintendo! It has to be on a Nintendo platform,’ – she did not rule out the possibility of a PlayStation 3 port compatible with Sony’s Move controller, remarking ‘that’s not something I can discuss.’

Eurocom’s last ‘exclusive’ Wii game, Dead Space: Extraction, will see life on PS3 as a Move title alongside Dead Space 2 in January 2011. Draw parallels as you please.

GoldenEye 007 is slated for release on 2nd November. A DS version is also in the works.

What do you do when you’ve squeezed all the imaginative juice out of both World War II and the present day setting? You quarry the territory in between, apparently. Treyarch’s fourth Call of Duty project takes place in the claustrophobic second half of the 20th century, with Asia and the Middle East swamped in proxy wars. VGD pitched into a roundtable chat with Mark Lamia, Studio Head, and Josh Olin, Community Manager, at a preview event this week. Interview by the incomparable Rupert Higham.

VideoGamesDaily: Hi Mark, Josh – great to speak with you. What details can you reveal about the Black Ops storyline?

Mark Lamia: OK, so, right: disclaimer – the story and the plot are sort of under wraps because we want you to experience it fresh, and we’re putting a lot of work in to try to make it an exciting story with character development, there’s going to be some twists and some turns. But what I can tell you is, it takes place during the era that is the Cold War. It’s not about the Cold War, it’s not about the Vietnam War – it’s about the black operations that occurred during that period.

Going out with a TWANG.

And while you saw missions that occurred during 1968, there will be missions that occur during other times during the Cold War. Much like the Cold War did not occur during one year, one small period, this doesn’t as well.

And so that’s great, because from a gameplay perspective what we wanted to do and from a creative perspective is focus on variety, and that’s wonderful creative license, being able to take on conflicts in different locations and different areas, and by doing black ops and doing the ‘secret wars’… It allowed us to leverage some historical backdrops and some backdrops that you may not be aware of, or that fit nicely with being creative, being able to create these deniable conflicts during this era.

What I can also tell you about the story is we’ll have a strong emphasis on characters, both the characters you’re playing and the characters you will be playing. You play a couple of different characters in our game. You will have a character voice, that you haven’t heard today – it was a temp, placeholder actor, we don’t have that actor officially in the game yet.

We wanted to take on story, we wanted to take on character and as such we felt it was important for you to respond at some point, or to be commanding on the battlefield. Because these black ops forces, these guys are leaders, they are charismatic, they’re experts, and they have something to offer, and they certainly respond when they’re talked to, whether it’s giving orders, or providing intelligence, or being responsive to what’s going on in the environment, or calling out things in the environment that are important to call out.

What would a shooter be without particle effects?

But we also wanted to craft a rich narrative, and we felt like it was important to kill that sacred cow that we had not done in a Call of Duty – in other words, we’re going to give the character a voice at this point. And it definitely changes things. Both from a creative and a technical point of view, we have to account for that, but we’re taking it head on and we’re excited by it, because it is something that we wanted to do, and it kind of goes in line with introducing new experiences for the Call of Duty player.

Setting the game across several decades and in different places must have taken a lot of additional research…

Lamia: Yeah, we had to do a ton of research. We knew we wanted to make a game in this era, it was filled with these secret wars and these deniable conflicts, it was filled with conspiracy and paranoia and spies and the CIA and the KGB and the Soviet Union – there was so much stuff that we totally immersed ourselves.

Activision’s Kekoa Lee-Creel has a few cautionary words for developers of new game properties. Basically, you shouldn’t expect your spark of originality to explode into a system-selling trilogy overnight: these things take time. Not to mention cold hard cash.

“Initial investment’s the big difficulty, initial investment to start an IP,” Lee-Creel told FPS Gamer during a preview showing of Raven Software’s Singularity, a gloomy, temporally disordered shooter for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. “Obviously they can take years of iteration to get it right, to really feel out the things that make it unique and special. So that’s a pretty substantial undertaking, it’s a risk, and it’s just money kind of ‘going’!”

“But I think the pay-off is definitely there,” he continued, presumably to the intense relief of Activision shareholders (not that they’ve got much to worry about these days). “There are plenty of franchises that have been built off a mildly successful first title, that have ramped into something hugely successful, and I think it’s a worthwhile undertaking.”

Lee-Kreel thinks Singularity has a decent shot. “I worked with Raven on Quake 4 as well, and they’re a fantastic team, so I’ve got a good new IP, I’ve got great marketing behind me, and I’ve got a great development team, so I’m pretty psyched. It’s a big deal.”

Having seen the game in action, we’re inclined to agree. Stay pumped for the full interview this week. Singularity’s out in Q1 2010.

Much has been said about the price tag of Modern Warfare 2 in the build up to its release, and not much of it publishable. But if a videogame’s worth can be measured by how much of it stays with you after you’ve put the pad down, then even the most indignant will have few complaints if this hugely anticipated sequel ends up delivering as much as the original did two years ago.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the original Modern Warfare was the fact that most people didn’t put the pad down, devoting untold hours to mastering its thrilling online component long after they’d come down from its monumentally brilliant, if brief, single player campaign. Having mastered such a winning formula, the last thing you expect are radical changes, and so it proves.

Picking up from where the 2007 classic left off, you’re once again on the trail of a Russian Ultranationalist leader as he plots the destruction of the West. driven by a desire to cause maximum mayhem to the West. Having spun the death of his predecessor as an act of martyrdom, and successfully convinced his followers of the tyranny of the West, Vladamir Makarov proves to be an adversary with an impressively evil CV.

Four by two of reinforced plastic is a soldier's best friend.

Shock tactics quickly become a feature of Modern Warfare 2, so much so that the game specifically checks – twice – if you’d rather not be subjected to scenes of gratuitous violence. Evidently revelling in its new Adult Only status, Infinity Ward waste no time in repeatedly pushing the violenceometer needle into the red, depicting the kind of shocking scenes we’ve long been used to in gritty dramas, but rarely get exposed to in games in such uncompromising fashion. Expect an ugly media frenzy to develop as the wider world wrestles with the ramifications of What This All Means. [We started without you, actually - Ed]

What it means in the context of the series is simple: that terrorism is an ugly business, and Infinity Ward hasn’t tried to mask the reality, or trivialise what it looks like. Whether it crosses The Line is perhaps a topic to wrestle over at length another time, but it’s hard to divorce yourself from how brutal some of the scenes really are, even when, in truth, it’s still some way from reality. The fact that it’s often unclear who the bad guys actually are, and that it’s you that’s pulling the trigger is, of course, the difference.

A quick disclaimer. Modern Warfare 2 is, in all probability, going to be one of the best-executed and most substantial shooters you play this year. I was very impressed by the game when I previewed it last month, and the fact that my name won’t be gracing our review when it goes live tonight is the cause of many a flung teacup at Kikizo Towers (the honour falls instead to FPS Gamer’s veteran duelist Kristan Reed, with whom I’m currently not on speaking terms).

Not every aspect of the game or its titanic marketing putsch is above question, however, and as the first pre-orders blast through letterboxes and all-night-queues sprout from the doors of HMV, we should take time to reflect on the controversies Activision and Infinity Ward have ignited in the run-up to release.

The furore over pricing needs no introduction, nor is it chief among my concerns. A £55 RRP (or $60 across the Atlantic) is pretty steep given the reported shortish campaign length (Kristan’s run-time is 7-8 hours), Activision’s refusal to supply dedicated servers and the absence of crucial new gameplay functionality (not to mention a host of minor compromises), but retailers haven’t turned a deaf ear to consumer complaints – you can now pick the game up for two-thirds to as little as half the RRP in most major UK supermarkets. Over on GamesIndustry.biz, Rob Fahey has commented with characteristic eloquence on the risk that Activision’s brash pricing strategies will find over-eager imitators, but in the near future at least there seems to be nothing to worry about.

Yours for just $150. Cheer up, it could be the PSPgo.

The infamous playable airport massacre sequence leaked online a few weeks ago deserves less forgiving attention. Right-wing tabloid rants concerning the effects of such (100% skippable) material on the hearts and minds of young people are as predictable as they are groundless, but why, we might ask, did Infinity Ward feel obliged to provoke such reaction at all? Considered (admittedly) out of context, the decision to let players slaughter civilians in callously unhurried style seems little more than a shock tactic, a morbid attempt to one-up the previous game’s hostage execution intro, rather than a sensitively judged trot into the realms of ultra-realism.

Vince Zampella, studio head of Infinity Ward

“It’s just a matter of detail, little touches,” Zampella told us during a recent showing of Modern Warfare 2. “Transitions from wall to ground are now hand-touched by all the artists so that everything fits.”

Modern Warfare 2′s got serious visual presence, its muscular streaming technology allowing the developer to push back level perimeters and step up the detail at close quarters, but if Zampella is to be believed, the engine isn’t at its best when rendering shiny normal-mapped AK47s, nor beautifully textured terrorist bandanas, nor exploding helicopters and the like. No sir, Zampella’s an artist – and artists find beauty in the most unlikely of places.

“If you see some of the Rio scenes from the trailers, there’s just like these uphill broken stairwells that are half-covered in dirt, weeds coming through – one of my favourite parts in the whole game is there’s a back alley there, and there’s just two dumpsters and a piece of garbage, some trash blowing in the wind and the weeds coming up through the cracks in the sidewalk.”

"Might I draw your attention, gentleman, to the exquisite brushwork on the tin can in bottom left..."

Cracks in the sidewalk. Not exactly “attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion”, is it? Next up, an in-engine showreel of Zampella’s favourite discarded shopping trolleys.

Check out our tongue-in-cheek “Quickfire Q&A” with Modern Warfare 2, and stay tuned for our full review. The game’s out for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on 10th November, like you didn’t know already.

Activision’s all over the music game thang. There’s just no stopping those zeitgest-courting cats. Sure, they couldn’t get their hands on The Beatles (nicely played, EA) but if you want to scratch tracks on a hideously over-priced replica turntable, there’s only one port of call.

Unless you can find Beatmania down the local pawnshop, anyway. Oh, and there’s something called Scratch: The Ultimate DJ.

The vid above involves legendary double act Daft Punk doing to Freddie Mercury what a cheese grater does to cheese. Rinse out the sound!