Few video game franchises have produced the kind of fanfare and loyalty as Call of Duty. Way back in 2003, the first game in the series came out and we met Private Martin, Sergeant Evans, and Corporal Voronin, as whom we fought through key battles in World War II.
Call of Duty 2 and 3 were similar, featuring a World War II setting and covering multiple campaigns. They were fantastic games in their own right, and established the franchise. Then in 2007, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out and blew us away. New visuals, along with an increased emphasis on character development and a more current conflict and weapon layout made this game something truly special. This masterpiece won plenty of awards from many sources and they were well earned.
More recently, the Black Ops series and continuation games in the Modern Warfare series have gone into other time periods and offered both alternative history and an intriguing glimpse into the future.
Between the characters, the storylines, the game mechanics and, of course, the multiplayer experience, this series is worthy of some savage memes and prime for plenty of ridicule. Here are fifteen CoD memes that any fan can relate to.
15 Imprecise Gunplay
This isn’t just commonplace, it is an epidemic in the online community of CoD loyal gamers. This can go two ways, sometimes you’re aiming directly at an opponent’s head and don’t hit it (either missing the shot entirely or end up hitting a body part) or you see a kill-cam of an opponent aiming at the barn door next to you, which somehow results in a humiliating head-shot. It is hard to say why this happens, but no matter what the cause, if you want a more exact experience (and a better experience in many other ways as well, according to some fans) the Battlefield series may be more up your alley.
14 We All Got Teary-Eyed
If there is something Call of Duty has done brilliantly, it made us form bonds with video game characters in a way normally reserved for RPGs or other media, like movies and television. While we may not have cried for all of these, there are many deaths that hurt us in ways that are unheard of for first-person shooters. Gaz and Griggs both got killed on the bridge at the end of Modern Warfare. Soap MacTavish bit it at the end of MW3. We thought Frank Woods died jumping through a window to save Mason’s life in Black Ops, shortly after we saw Bowman get his head beaten in. Roach and Ghost met a grisly fate when General Shepherd shot them, doused them in gasoline and tossed a cigar on their dying bodies. Saddest of all (in our humble opinion) was Sergeant Paul Jackson. We only got to know that Marine briefly and were getting ready for a lengthy adventure when his helicopter crashed in a nuclear blast, leaving him mortally wounded, breathing his last while looking up at that iconic mushroom cloud. Even the most battle-hardened gamers got choked up seeing these fates for their beloved characters.
13 What is Logic?
This is just one notable example of silly missteps in logic that only the coolest of gamers ever think of. If you’re on a yacht, the last thing you want to do is call in an airstrike, this should go without saying. This is, of course, the hijacked map from Black Ops II and another logical problem comes up here: if you get the dogs killstreak reward, how are these dogs getting to the boat? Are they swimming there? Are they being flown in? Are they teleporting? This franchise may be amazing, but the logical inconsistencies are hilarious and somehow manage to actually add to the experience.
12 Oops
We’ve all had this happen,and, while many of us learn from our first one or two flashbang/stun grenade mix-ups, it can be very difficult to time the throw and then the proper count on which to enter the room one wishes to assault. Sometimes the excitement just gets to you; you have a UAV in the sky, you see several enemies on the map in an enclosed area, so you chuck a flash through the open door, wait a second or two, and head in guns blazing, only to hear that nasty “bang” and then have nothing but a white screen and a vibrating controller. Of course, it always seems like everyone else’s blindfire is so accurate, meanwhile you end up firing an entire MP5 magazine into the wall next to you before watching an embarrassing kill-cam.
11 Priorities
While the dude in this meme is the one ignoring his lady friend for a quick round of Team Deathmatch (maybe Search and Destroy), we’d like to point out there are female gamers who ignore their men for a good time with an FPS, and we don’t want to forget them.
But yes, few games can get in the way of one’s love life quite like the CoD franchise. What can we say, the games are addictive and if the relationship isn’t that new and the pressure isn’t on to please your partner, it’s not unreasonable to sit in front of the screen with a headset on instead of watching a rom-com or going for a sexy time. This isn’t something to be proud or ashamed of; it’s just a reality.
How far the human race has come, right? Some of us would rather engage in a virtual kill fantasy than participate in the activity that propagates the species.
10 Many Excuses for Dying
After months and months of research, we have been able to determine that nobody in the history of Call of Duty multiplayer has ever died because another player had the drop on them and was actually good at the game. It’s a complete impossibility and one we won’t even begin to entertain. It is clear that rather than skill actually having anything to do with players dying, deaths have only occurred thanks to lag, cheating, one’s opponent being a virgin or living in their mother’s basement, and, of course, the dreaded mastermind of the entire world of online gaming; “fing bullt!”
9 Zombies Players Know…
For those who don’t remember or don’t follow the show Family Guy, this scene is neighbor Cleveland Brown describing his favorite civil rights themed board game, “Two Decades of Dignity.” After a frustrated Peter Griffin asks whether anyone ever wins at the game, Cleveland responds with this line, “You don’t win, you just do a little better each time,” which perfectly describes everyone’s experience with the Zombies game mode in any of the games that included it. Sure it’s a great challenge, but knowing that you’ll never win is annoying. Not to mention the sheer terror of an impending doom at the hands of the undead, there’s always that.
8 New Gun Woes
There may well be some kind of psychological explanation for this, but many gamers just tally it up to “fing bullt.” We’ve all picked up a new weapon before and then proceeded to go on a half decent killstreak with it, quickly proclaiming it worthy of its own class. No matter the game, there are those weapons you’ll pick up and have some success with (call it beginner’s luck?), but then be horrendous with when you actually try to form a gameplan around it. Practice makes perfect? No, incorrect, not with an M14 (for example) if you don’t have the patience to actually learn the weapon.
7 Why is the Knife So Powerful?
This is as true in multiplayer as it is in any CoD campaign. Yes, we’ll admit that being stabbed with a knife is most definitely lethal in real life. With that said however, having a system in which a knife wound to the foot or lower leg (arm, hand etc, you get the picture) is a one-hit-kill is silly when many enemies will continue to move forward like Robocop after taking one or more 7.62 rounds to the chest. Body armor or no, that’s going to put you on the ground. It makes very little sense, but like many examples of CoD logic, it doesn’t make us like the franchise any less, it’s just good for a chuckle.
6 Compulsive Reloading
It goes without saying that diligently reloading after every skirmish during a match (or during campaign play) is a good habit to get into. While in real life you’d need to transfer rounds into and out of magazine to refill, the game takes care of this for you and we’ve all had shootouts in which an enemy is killed on one of the last five bullets in our mag. Of course, a great rule to follow is to make sure you’re at least slightly hidden or relatively safe before you tap the reload button. The slight of hand perk helps too, because while regular reloads are a good idea, we’ve all been killed while reloading when it wasn’t completely necessary.
5 Addictive
The obsession that draws one into a lengthy gaming habit quickly becomes a love/hate relationship with any Call of Duty game. After a while, it is the same maps and the same spawn-point with the same guns and the similar kill-cams, but for some reason, no matter how sunny it is outside and no matter how loudly your other games keep calling your name, CoD often wins. You say you hate the game, but you really love it, sometimes to the tune of a months worth of total play time. What you hate is getting blown away by a grenade that was haphazardly tossed by some other player halfway across the map exploiting the small map size, relative to other shooters.
4 It Can Be a Real Tease
Online gaming and the internet are still imperfect technological advances. Yes, both are awesome, but there is no such thing as a flawless internet connection and for many of us, it seems that a poor one happens at just the wrong time. You’ve been there and we have too: you’re in a groove and every time you come around a corner, it seems that your aim and trigger fingers are sync’d up and you’ve been dropping enemies left and right, on your way to a rare and elusive kill-streak, and then the internet Gods decide to punish you for something you did ages ago with a poor connection. This scenario often ends with a controller getting thrown like a Randy Johnson fastball and then someone having to repaint some drywall.
3 Everyone’s Awful on the Internet
We’ve often asked the question, “how did people know how low the human race could sink prior to the advent of the internet?” We still have no answer, but these days, you’re just a few mouse clicks (and because we’re talking about Call of Duty, a couple of head-shots) away from hearing comical ignorance. We’d like to say that the poor sports on Call of Duty multiplayer are all below fifteen years old, but everyone knows that’s not true.
Whether it is racial epithets, comments about one’s family or mother, or, of course, the over-the-internet death threats, for every happy person just looking to relax, play an online game and enjoy the fantasy, there is an angst-ridden moron who is, for some reason, constantly having rough sex with all of our mothers, but can’t play an FPS to save his life.
2 Why Won’t You Die?!
There are plenty of reasons the person you’re shooting at won’t die. Sometimes, it’s because you’re firing through a wall and your shots are losing their effect. Of course, there used to be the infamous Juggernaut perk. Finally, just because your crosshairs or iron sights are aimed right at the person, that doesn’t mean they’ll drop, and every now and again, your shots will all hit their target and he’ll still be running around taunting you. That’s just the game, and sometimes the game is a cruel and ruthless mistress.
1 Something Went Horribly Wrong
Really though, what happened to this franchise? In case you haven’t noticed, we tried to include as much content here from the Modern Warfare and early Black Ops era of Call of Duty, because the franchise is kind of like Lindsay Lohan: it used to be totally hot and awesome, but now we aren’t sure what is going on and we’re kind of confused, and we expect that a great deal of cocaine may have caused the franchise to go in the direction it has.
The futuristic weapons, exo-suits, and far-out story lines are cool and fresh, but the games we’ve seen in the last few years have primarily been re-skin jobs with a few shiny objects here and there to keep us coming back. It will take something special to come up with games that achieve the kind of (relatively) realistic story-telling and overall experience we were delivered in Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2.
