Open up and say "ahhh" you kraut bastards!

o
Stupid Nazis.

Why in the world would you decide to declare war against :
The world's largest empire (the British Empire), the world's greatest industrial and financial power (the United States), and the world's largest army (the Soviet Union)

Anyway. I played and finished Call of Duty World at War in less than 6 hours! Between 10pm and 4am, I had to swap my nVidia 8600 GT for my ATi Radeon x1300 about 6 times!

Why?

Because the developer of COD5WAW called 'Treyarch', which mainly does games for non-PC gaming platforms decided to not fully support nVidia graphic drivers.

As a result, some missions containing certain textures, can't be loaded using existing nVidia graphic drivers. Even Eu Chuan, who uses, from what I gather, 2X nVidia 8800/9800s with SLI can't even play it. Dozens of online forums have complaints posted about this lack of support.

Lucky for me(not Ian), I have experience in this sorta 'chiplak' style of playing. I can install a game even if it can't be installed from the disk, and crack even the hardest of crackable games. And I can find a cheap solution to stupid problems like this that would usually make people just give up or buy a new gaming rig. Because I'm cheap and have to live within the confines of being cheap.

I don't brag, I mostly boast.

Anyway, COD5?

Awesome awesome awesome.

And that's not even the tip of the iceberg.

Let's start with the loading screen.
It's one of the best I've ever seen. Though, mine gets a little laggy cause I still run a single core processor.

The loading screen features a animated-actual footage briefing on the mission. Sticking to COD4s formula, your ranking officer does the briefing. The load screen video is really really cool, even when compared to COD4s 'satelite briefing', it's much much cooler. You know how those old projector videos have the 3 - 2- 1 - start screens? this is kinda backwards. Like your briefing was made in WW2 era. At the end of the video, it starts to jerk and get distorted. Then you see the screen slowly flicker to a large 'Start', which is absolutely cool.

The graphics?


Although 30% of the time I was running my lousy old Radeon, I think I got the best of the graphics from my nVidia. Suprisingly, my 8600GT could take COD5 at
1280X1024 resolution (just like megapixels on a camera, the more the merrier)
Anti-Aliasing X2 (smoothens lines to appear less jaged)
Shadows : OFF(really kills my card)
Ocean Simulation(real looking water) : ON
Dynamic Foliage(makes grass nice looking) : ON
Specular Map(keeps track of what terrain, for reflections) : ON
Number of corpses(number of dead bodies that don't magicallt dissappear) : Insane
Bullet damage(bullet holes in wood, etc) : ON

At first, I wasn't impressed, everything looked like in COD4. Because its the same game engine.
Then I remembered the developer saying something about adding extra details to the guns.
And when I got to a mission with rain:




Ok, it doesn't look good from here because Blogger doesn't allow very nice pics.
But seeing rain splatter on your gun with so much detail is crazy!!!!


Gameplay:
Same as COD4, and every predessor, gameplay is largely linear.
Linear meaning there's only ONE way of playing the game.
Which = boring.
But the formula works out fine, because its scripted well.
COD4 showed us all how nice it was to shoot. Because unlike all the other game we played, guns were largely stale and ugly.
COD4 had the best animations for guns and all the guns sounded very real.
COD5 isn't as good because of the WW2 and 'Treyarch' factors.
WW2 pistols were largely underpowered, with exception of the British revolver,
guns like the Walther P38, Colt M1911, Nambu and Tokarev TT30 were very soft and cheap sounding guns.

But developers at 'Treyarch' failed to deliver the sheer stopping power of the semi automatic weapons and fully automatic weapons. Unlike the M14 of COD4, the Gewehr 43(which is about the same as the M14), doesn't feel very nice. There isn't much recoil and the bullets feel like something out of a pistol.

It may be the case that in real life the Gewehr 43 was largely underpowered, but the same lack of quality is seen in every SMG in the game. None of the SMGs have significant recoil. Most are dead accurate at mid distance and are a better alternative to bolt-action rifles.

Which is WEIRD. Because Bolt-action rifles are the star of COD5. I've never seen such brilliance in delivering a bolt-action rifle as the Mosin-Nagant, Arisaka, and Kar98k. They just feel very solid and the recoil isn't needed anyway because you have to zoom out a little to load in the next bullet.

A gun I was hoping they'd make really solid is the BAR. However, like most of the others, it just seems like it was from COD2.

Besides the weaponry, you have the brutality factor in COD5.
I accidently shot this guy in the head with a Browning Machine Gun.



It's brutal.

I've only tried the multiplayer once. So it's too soon to say.