It appears that Microsoft are keen to disagree with me. It emerged this week that Microsoft have banned upto a million XBox consoles from accessing their live service. While Microsoft do conduct a sweep for modded consoles every November it can’t hurt to notice that the announcement this year aligns very neatly with the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Which in turn goes to show that timing really could be everything. Piracy hurts the gaming industry and it was a fist-in-air moment when I heard that Microsoft had found a way to put the brakes on some people’s abuse of their console.

Of course, given a few months, the cracker community will have a work around. Where there’s a will there’s a way. But I see this as an affirmation from the big M that COD:MW2 is in fact a great game. I may need to review my opinion. Now all I need to do is convince my wife that playing Modern Warfare 2 will in fact improve our relationship.

How am I going to pull that off?

Once upon a time I wrote reviews of PC games for a friend’s online publication. My experience playing games professionally has changed the way I read reviews today. I’m more aware of the reviewers desire to be fair, interesting and to cram the experience garnered from a few hours of gameplay into just a couple of  hundred words. It’s actually fun.

When you play the games you keep plenty of mental notes for later. You revel in exploring maps, not for upgrades and bonuses, but to divine the amount of effort that has gone into putting them together in the first place. I once caught myself counting how many different tree models had been used to generate a forest. After all, anything less than five is lazy right?

None of this will make it’s way to print. You just don’t have the space to talk about everything, instead you have to focus on how all of these observations made you feel about the game. You then communicate this as effectively as possible, usually while discussing the basic structure of the game and a small number of it’s central pros and cons. Half an hour later you have a review.

Which brings me neatly to my topic today. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Ignoring the content of the articles, which seems to be overwhelmingly good, the tone just down straight worries me. You see computer games take you to another place. They give you access to special powers and abilities. Evening saving your progress is a non-real experience. After all, when did you last “save” during that dificult chat with your boss so that you could go away and read some tips online? Exactly.

What this really means is that any good game will leave you feeling something. I’m not sure what term fits here. ‘Exalted’ is way too much, ‘special’ has the wrong connotations and uplifted is heading in the wrong direction. Let’s call it the ‘buzz’, that’s snazzy and original right? Remember when you came out of Star Trek? You felt it then. Why, because not matter how you look at it, it was a good movie. It took you into outer space and showed you some cool stuff happening to some pretty cool characters. It’s the fact that it is so far from our experience of reality that gives you the buzz.

People that walked away from Watchmen didn’t have that feeling. I’m not one of them, but those who have described it to me never conveyed the impression that it had affected them. I don’t know about you but I want to walk away from entertainment entertained. I want to feel that something, that lift. The buzz.

All of the reviews I have read so far, despite their positive words, have conveyed a feeling of disappointment. That would be the antithesis of buzz. It’s not good. I suspect that despite the hype this game will swiftly join that ranks of the OK. Sure those are only words, but my money is where my mouth is and this fan isn’t going to be purchasing COD:MW2 anytime soon.