Why Call of Duty 4 rocks--and why nuclear energy is scary

So you don't think I'm totally blowing off the holidays: Merry Christmas! Looking forward to spending some time with family, and especially some time away from work. Now on to the topic at hand.

So I just finished the single player campaign in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. WOW. The intensity, the realism, the graphics--this is an amazing game. I boycotted it when it first came out because my system couldn't run it--and after that just never got into it. (I was also a little disappointed that the series left their WWII roots). But I got it for 1/2 price a couple weeks ago (Black Friday sale), so I've been playing the single player mode. Even within the first few levels, I was amazed. One took place on a cargo ship in the North Atlantic, where you were searching for a stolen nuclear device. By the end of the level, the ship was sinking--and you had to race across catwalks that were literally turning sideways to escape before you went down with her. And that was not the most intense level--really cool stuff. Infinity Ward, who developed this game, really outdid themselves with this one. If you have a computer that can run it--or a game console (like Xbox 360) and you like FPS games--I recommend this one. Do beware however, this is not a kid's game. There is some violence that is more severe than previous games in the series. That did bother me, but I didn't find it bad enough that it stopped me from enjoying it. My favorite level, however, is what brings me to my second topic.

The former town of Pripyat, Ukraine was home to about 50,000 people until the fateful day in 1986 when the soviet nuclear power plant at Chernobyl suffered a meltdown/explosion. I was 11, so I don't remember much about it--just that this big scary thing happened in a country where the government was really mean to the people. I knew it was scary and sad, but not much more than that. In recent months, I happened to learn about Pripyat--where else? Online! With a BA in History, an interest in old things comes naturally to me. Learning about an entire town where people had been forced to evacuate in about 36 hours, leaving almost everything exactly the way it was on that day for the next 20 years, was fascinating to me. A ghost town of the nuclear age, if you will. So I started looking up pictures and reading about it. Talk about creepy--a whole area, where people couldn't go for years without fear of radiation poisoning. Guard posts blocking off roads, warning signs--no, this isn't a movie. It's real. It really happened--a group of people no different than you or me were living their lives in their town (which was only a bit smaller than the town I lived in at the time), and they heard an explosion, and saw a huge plume of smoke in the distance. Shortly thereafter, they were told to evacuate and that they would be gone for 1-2 days at most. After they were safely away--"sorry, you can't ever go back there. Forget about your old family photos, your clothes, anything you left behind. And if you do try and go back, you'll be shot or get sick and die." Can you imagine? It's so hard to fathom. And along with the pictures of a ruined town with stuff strewn in the streets, a public pool now empty and dry with old garbage in the bottom, a rusty ferris wheel towering over it all--it becomes eerie, creepy and morbidly fascinating at the same time.

And while writing this, it occurs to me that there was a small nuclear power plant operating within several miles of my town when I was growing up. I camped near there once as a boy scout. Maybe it shouldn't be quite so hard to fathom? What if it had been my town forced to flee our homes, and not to come back for decades afterwards? I have a vivid imagination, but wow--that's tough to get my head around. Public vote shut the plant down in the late 80's, apparently due to low efficiency and rising costs--but the explosion of a few years before at Chernobyl can't have been far from those people's minds when they made that decision. Say what you will, but I'm sure glad to have been living in a democracy where people could make that choice. Holy cow.

So due to my mildly morbid fascination with Pripyat, my favorite level is one where, on the trail of said nuclear device, your character has to sneak into--guess where? Pripyat, to find an evil dictator in hiding with some nationalist rebels in the abandoned town. The game developers created a detailed map of the town for the the game, and I was looking forward to 'virtually' exploring the town through the game, since I probably won't ever get there in real life (not sure I want to either). The level was so intense however, I didn't get much chance to do so--I was too busy running from crazed nationalists. I did find a more limited version in multiplayer that I was able to explore, though. Pretty cool--and creepy.

To read more about Pripyat, click here.

To see photos, click here.

Some comparison shots (COD4 vs real life) for you (click for full image):