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I’m a bit behind on this one, the game having come out in November, but I recently unwrapped a 360 copy of Infinity Ward’s latest freedom-is-awesome, terrorist Russian Arab South American buffet-of-crazy-insurgents-killing shooter. I’ve put in a good two hours now, which means that I’m probably 97% through the single-player campaign if some of the early complaints about the game are so (that’s not true, I kind of suck at shooters unless I play them on a PC, but Call of Duty games, including Modern Warfare, have always been 360 fodder for me, and always will be), and here’s my Close Impressions of the First Kind.

Yesterday Steerpike wrote a thoroughly enjoyable take on Electronic Arts going back to its evil ways, but in all the fuss and rightful condemnation we shouldn’t be forgetting that there are other players in this game too and that they’d like a minute under the spotlight as well.

So, the biggest title this season finally drops. The successor to 13-million-strong-in-sales Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is finally out, sans the Call of Duty prefix, marking a true beginning to a new IP and, possibly the birth of yet another gaming related but general-population-targeting controversy. Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or failing to read Tap-Repeatedly) in the last couple of weeks, you are aware just what we’re talking about here. In one …

So IndustryGamers and others are reporting a new controversy surrounding Infinity Ward’s upcoming Modern Warfare 2: it looks like, for at least a small portion of the game, you will play as a terrorist, with the objective of gunning down civilians in an airport terminal. It’s sparked quite the little inferno. I’m okay with this, and I’ll tell you why. But I do worry about the mainstream kneejerks… and I’ll tell you why.

The degree to which I hate Activision/Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick is nigh-unmeasurable. I loathe the man; I hope he falls into a deep, deep hole with ground glass and spikes and hot lava and sharks and scorpions and poison and fire ants and chromic acid and knives and dead puppies at the bottom. I didn’t think it would be possible – you know, physically – for me to despise anyone in the games industry more …