I've put down Left 4 Dead (which I posted a user review for finally) over the last couple of days, mostly due to the fear that my head might explode from how fucking awesome that game really is.  I haven't felt that energized and psyched about playing a game since Vagrant Story back in the day, and before that, it was Duck Hunt!  Nonetheless, it means that I've been doing the usual achievement whoring.  What has that led to?

Writing you guys an achievement guide for Call of Duty: World at War, of course!!!  You're welcome.  It's not completed as of yet.  I still need to get video footage done for the Death Cards (although rather vivid descriptions are already in the guide), as well as a video showing all the tower and bunker locations on "Blood and Iron".

This leads me to offering a follow-up of my previous World at War blog.  The campaign just hasn't sat well in my stomach so far, and I haven't really been able to pinpoint it...but then something hit me.  I plugged in my copy of Dave Matthews' Some Devil (great album to relax to).  "Gravedigger" is the first track on that album, and man...the tone in it just really fit how I felt about World at War's story.  It made it all come together for me.  There's just this underlying sadness in World at War that wasn't in the previous games.  I was already pissed about World at War going with this edgy M-rated route when all the other games were rated T for Teen...and it worked perfectly fine for them.  Okay, Call of Duty 4 was M-rated, but it was for language mostly.  There's not really any gore in that game.

I understand that WWII wasn't all pretty and non-bloody, but at the same time, the CoD series has always had magnificently well-done single player campaigns that tell amazing stories.  World at War...doesn't do that.  While war is nothing more than senseless violence for the most part, this game's campaign really DID feel like absolute senseless violence...and that's just not very Call of Duty, now is it?  I mean, I can't find one single character in the entire campaign that I honestly LIKE.  I never really felt like anyone was doing anything truly heroic, but there was this great passage at the beginning of "Downfall" that ***SPOILER*** Reknov is reading from Chernov's diary after he is killed at the end of "Heart of the Reich", and I thought that it was kind of insightful:

So now, I look back at the campaign and think...as dirty as I felt playing that game, and as downtrodden as I was by the end of it all, was I actually doing heroic things?  I mean, I didn't really enjoy the campaign at all from a technical standpoint, but it felt like Treyarch really grabbed me by the balls with a story that didn't impact me until a day or two later, all because of Dave.