Akusai from Action Skeptics here, folks. Well, ladies and gentlemen, plans for a symposium of reality-based programming at Gen Con Indy 2010 are coming together faster than I could have imagined. Some of you may remember that back in September Les was kind enough to allow me to post A Call to Skeptical Action, wherein I detailed my preliminary hopes and plans for Gen Con (i.e. trying to get a Dragon*Con style Skeptic Track going), and I’m back to beg your indulgence again for an update on those plans.

First off, we have a dedicated blog: Gen Con Skeptics. Everything I’m about to tell you here is covered in greater detail there, so it’s worth stopping by. I’m constantly adding new material, so click early and often.

Our plans, as of now, include half a dozen presentations covering various skeptical topics and delivered by a bunch of different people. We’ll be educating the Gen Con population on archaeology, evolution, and cargo cults, and we’re staging two different iterations of a four-man panel called “Skepticism, Critical Thinking, and Pop Culture,” for which we’re prepping basic information on almost twenty different woo-woo and pseudoscientific topics and letting the audience decide what we talk about.

Perhaps the biggest deal of all, however, is the fundraiser we’ll be running to benefit the Indiana Immunization Coalition. I spoke last week with the director of the IIC, and she’s very excited that we’re offering to raise money for them. They plan to put all proceeds toward new educational and informational programs in an effort to counter misinformation about vaccines spread by the antivaccination movement.

I don’t have the details finalized with Gen Con yet, but I have a scheduled phone call to make tomorrow afternoon with their Marketing Director to do just that. She, too, loves the idea, and it looks like we’re going to have a table situated in the Kids and Family section of the exhibit hall, which is almost perfect for our plans. What we’re going to do is trade our amateur magician skills (there are two of us with those skills) for donations based on a “menu” of card tricks, simple close-up magic, and amazing feats of mentalism and cold reading. While we’re doing that, we’re going to distribute information about vaccines and about the Indiana Immunization Coalition, basically what they do and why it’s important. We’re going to back up the fundraiser with a couple of pro-vax presentations that will combine good immunization information, counters to common antivax claims, and PR for the IIC and their mission.

We don’t have any so-called “Big Name” skeptics coming to the event, but hopefully with a good showing this year, we can attract people in the future. I do have a proposal into the fine ladies at Skepchick, but I’m not promising anything. I also have an e-mail out to Mike Stackpole, bestselling sci-fi author and founder of the Phoenix Skeptics, who was kind enough to meet with us last year and offer advice. Who knows? He might want to give a talk, too.

All in all, this year’s Gen Con Indy is shaping up to be a big win for grassroots skepticism. We have educational outreach, audience involvement, and a fantastic opportunity to help raise vaccine awareness and bolster Indiana’s pathetic immunization rates. If anybody is going to be in the Indianapolis area on August 5-8, we’d love to have you drop by. If anyone’s interested in joining our little dog-and-pony show, we’d love to have you. Event submission for Gen Con doesn’t end until mid-March, so we have until then to add programming to our schedule.

If you don’t want to talk or run an event, we still do need volunteers to help out with the fundraiser. The rest of us can’t man the table all day and still do our own presentations, and we’d like to enjoy the con at some point, too. If we get a decent rotating roster of people haranguing the masses for donations while supplying them with accurate information about vaccines, we can all take part in what I’ve just now decided to call “Vaccination Win 2010″ and have a good time at the con, too.

And, though I did note his (perhaps conspicuous) silence on this note when last I posted here, I still think that Mine Host Mr. Les Jenkins hisownself should come down to Gen Con for the festivities. Join me in bothering him until he says yes, would you kindly?

As before, you can visit the planning forum, leave a comment at the blog, use the contact form, or just drop me an e-mail at causticbox[at]gmail[dot]com. Hope to see some people there!

It looks like the folks at Infinity Ward may have started a trend among developers of first person shooters on the PC. Word now comes from a Q&A about Bioshock 2’s multiplayer mode over at The Cult of Rapture that it will not have dedicated server support, LAN play, or the ability to kick troublemakers from the game:

Do you support LAN play on consoles or PC? Do you support dedicated servers?
Short answer, no and no. There is always a finite amount of time for the development of a game. Bringing Multiplayer to BioShock was a daunting task between the tech (there was no multiplayer support in the codebase from the first game) and the expectations of the community. Either you try to do everything and so nothing feels finished or you focus your efforts to do a smaller number of things really well like an accessible online experience. We chose to spend the time we had creating a solid game foundation and unfortunately that did not include LAN play or dedicated servers.

How does your matchmaking system work and how do you make sure there isn’t lag or bad match ups?
The matchmaking system takes a couple of things into account. We try to get you into a game as quickly as possible (since we know how much waiting really stinks), but match you up to people who are as close to your rank and skill as possible, with a certain amount of weighting to each factor, as well as requiring a low ping for those matched players.

How do you deal with people who grief or cheat or are otherwise not making a good ranked experience? Can you kick them?
Even though we are doing everything we can to try to find exploits in our own game, there will always be people who will find a way to grief a game. There is no kick option as we felt like it often leads to more unfair kicking than fair kicking. We hope that because there are a variety of player goals and a multitude of options for ranking up and killing, the player will always feel like he or she is gaining something in a match with mean people and griefers. If you do get matched up with one of those people, please report it, leave that game, and we’ll try to smooth out the online experience as best as we can.

It sounds more or less just like the multiplayer system in Modern Warfare 2 which a lot of fans, including myself, weren’t happy about. This is disappointing to say the least and I expect it’ll be plagued with similar problems as a result. No word on what ant-cheat system they’ll be using, MW2 uses Valve’s VAC system, and that could go a long way to determining how much of a problem cheaters end up being.

Back when I wrote my rant discouraging folks from buying the PC version of MW2 the number of people using aimbots/wallhacks was simply ridiculous and, combined with how long it takes a ban in VAC to be enforced, was making the multiplayer almost pointless. These days it’s settled down quite a bit and I can only assume that someone must be banning cheaters more often as it’s possible to go through a number of sessions with nary a cheater in sight, but the damage has been done and now legitimate players are accused of cheating simply for having a high kill/death ratio. It’s even happened to me and I’m hardly a great player.

I never bought the first Bioshock due to the ridiculously restrictive SecuROM DRM it had and it was looking like BS2 was going in a similar direction, but they recently announced they were scaling back the restrictions for BS2 at least somewhat:

There will be no SecuROM install limits for either the retail or digital editions of BioShock 2, and SecuROM will be used only to verify the game’s executable and check the date. Beyond that, we are only using standard Games for Windows Live non-SSA guidelines, which, per Microsoft, comes with 15 activations (after that, you can reset them with a call to Microsoft.)

What does that mean for your gameplay experience? This means that BioShock 2’s new DRM is now similar to many popular games you advised had better DRM through both digital and retail channels. Many of you have used Batman: Arkham Asylum as an example to me, which uses the exact same Games for Windows Live guidelines as us as well as SecuROM on retail discs, and now our SecuROM is less restrictive on Steam.

This is better than the first game, but still not fabulous. It was loose enough to make me consider buying the sequel along with perhaps the original – seeing as they’ve since dropped the DRM from the first game altogether – but the fact that they’re using a similar matchmaking system as MW2 has dropped my enthusiasm back down to zero.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - $59.99 MSRP

I’m in a real love/hate relationship with this game and I’m torn on how to present the review. So I suppose I’ll start off with a quick summary: It’s awesome and horribly flawed at the same time. This latest outing manages to improve upon the original in almost every way, but at the same time it also manages to take several steps backwards that mar what would otherwise be a flawless game.

The original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was a big surprise for me and, I think, for a lot of other gamers when we finally got our hands on the release version. Not only were the graphics as new as the setting, but it was clear that Infinity Ward had been paying attention to what the modders had been doing with the multiplayer in previous CoD games. The addition of kill-streak rewards recreated the functionality of some of the most popular CoD2 mods and then when you stacked the RPG-ish XP system that unlocked new weapons, attachments, and perks on top of that it made for a helluva fun experience and a title that is still widely played to this day.

The sequel builds on most of what made the original so damned amazing and that generally is a good thing, though in some places it’s a bit over-the-top. Take, for example, in the singe-player game’s storyline.

Single Player

I said in my review of CoD:MW that I didn’t pay that much attention to the plot in part because it had you jumping back and forth between a couple of different characters in different locations and was hard to follow when you’re busy just trying to survive the mayhem taking place around you. The plot for Modern Warfare 2 is similar in that you jump back and forth between no less than five different characters throughout the course of the game. If you thought that mechanic in the first game was a tad confusing then you’ll just love it in the second one.

The story is set some five years after the events of the first game and it apparently involves the Ultranationalists (Russians) from the first story gaining control of Russia and declaring the main Russian villain from that game as a national hero and martyr. The new villain, an Ultranationalist lieutenant, is engaging in acts of terrorism designed to ultimately bring tensions between the U.S. and Russia to a boiling point. It’s hard to go into too much detail without revealing a lot of spoilers, but suffice it to say there’s a lot of setup for an eventual Russian invasion of America without the use of nukes and then a whole shit load of plot twists that reveals yet another major villain and sets things up for the inevitable sequel.

Here’s the thing about the story in MW2: Imagine the folks at Infinity Ward weren’t happy with the quality of the story from CoD4 and decided they needed to bring someone in to punch it up for this game. Now imagine that they hired Michael Bay to write it and he somehow got a little confused and thought it was a James Bond film. That’s the sort of aftertaste that was left in my mouth by the time I was finished with the campaign mode. It was that over-the-top at times.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Early on in the story you take on the role of Sergeant Gary “Roach” Sanderson who, along with a Captain “Soap” MacTavish, infiltrate an airbase in Kazakhstan to recover a lost ACS module from a downed satellite. It starts off with lots of stealth, but finishes up with a wild snowmobile race to the extraction point and a waiting helicopter. There’s lots of shooting and exploding snowmobiles and trees to avoid until the very end at which point you have to leap the snowmobile over a yawning chasm that in the game looks to be at least a quarter-mile wide. The longest snowmobile jump I’m aware of was around 263 feet by Ross Mercer which is sill a tad bit short of the 1,320 feet in a standard quarter mile. Now I don’t know how big the chasm was really supposed to be, but it definitely looked bigger than what the snowmobile could handle so when I made it across easily it just seemed a rather silly ending to the level. There’s a lot of stuff like that in the single player campaign, but you don’t really notice it being quite so silly at the time because so much of the rest of it is just very cool. When you get done and reflect upon the events, however, you realize how silly a lot of it is.

That’s only a slight disappointment, though. The real disappointment about the single player game is just how short it is. This was a problem with CoD4 as well, but it seems even more pronounced in MW2. I don’t recall how long it took me to finish the first game — it was a couple of nights — but the total time for Modern Warfare 2 was a scant 6 hours. Much like the first game, again, there are collectibles scattered throughout the levels to stretch things out through replaying the campaign mode, but it’s still short by past standards.

Continue reading »

Updated 12/17/09: I just might have to eat my words as IW looks set to prove me wrong. A couple of recent Tweets from Robert Bowling indicate that there is indeed a patch for the PC version of MW2 in the works that will fix several bugs and at least one currently undetectable cheat.

While it doesn’t appear to deal with the issue of people using aimbots/wallhacks to cheat — IW seems content to rely on Valve’s VAC system to identify and ban those players — it will fix a cheat involving substituting texture files that paint all players as red, remove extra foliage that obscures line of sight, and eliminates the blood splatter effect when you’re wounded. All three of those changes give a huge advantage to the player using them, are not detected by VAC, and won’t necessarily result in a ban if you use them according to Valve’s official FAQ on the topic. The patch should fix that exploit and repair any modified texture files.

I still say that the problem with aimbots/wallhacks and the lengthy delay between when someone uses them and when they are actually banned for them (Valve says it can be many weeks before you’ll be banned) is still something they need to address. It only takes a handful of cheaters in a night or two to put you off of playing the game and that’s something you’d think IW would prefer to minimize. Still, they are working on patching exploits and bugs in the PC version and I have to be fair and admit that’s more than I thought they’d do. Bowling has even hinted that IW might be, and the emphasis is on the words “might be”, considering making available some means for custom content such as user created maps.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 moved over 6 million copies for the Xbox 360 and PS3 combined smashing records along the way in November. Sales on the PC? Well, those numbers are much less impressive:

According to a new report from Gamasutra on last month’s NPD figures, the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 moved “nearly 170,000″ copies at retail. That doesn’t include figures for Steam, Valve’s digital distribution system, which are likely to have been significant—today, over 100,000 Steam users were playing the game online at the same time, but we’re not sure how that breaks down to retail and online sales.

Still, at least 170,000 copies to a group of gamers that balked at the lack of dedicated servers and a higher-than normal price tag is…. pretty good?

On the one hand it’s good to see that PC gamers are generally voting with their wallets, but on the other hand the success of the game on the consoles pretty much guarantees that the folks at IW aren’t going to be too concerned with the plight of those 170,000 PC gamers that did buy the game. If anything I’d hazard a guess that they’ll probably just use it as a justification for dropping PC development altogether.

To date no one at IW has had anything to say about what they plan to do with all the hackers/cheaters running rampant through the PC version of the game. Infinity Ward front man Robert Bowling (a.k.a. @fourzerotwo on Twitter) has been addressing player concerns about issues such as the over-powered Model 1887 Akimbo shotguns, the public-private match glitch, and the unlimited ammo glitches, but both of the attempts I made to ask about IW’s plans to deal with the hacking/cheating issue on the PC went completely ignored.

Now he does get a lot of tweets and he does end up repeating a lot of the same answers, but in digging through the last 24 hours of his tweets I found only three replies to people raising concerns about the PC version. One of whom had to send out 16 tweets of his own before Robert even responded and when he did, this was all he had to say:

@Zube56 what specific issues on PC are you wanting the team to look into? You’re 16 tweets in and haven’t named anything (besides cheats)

Considering cheats are probably the biggest issue the PC version is having at the moment, you’d think that would be enough. The other two replies weren’t any more useful.

One was to report a cheater through the player’s Steam account page, which isn’t always practical. The cheater in question was named “Multicam” and if you do a search for that name on the Steam forums you find at least two people with that name. Given that only one of them has played MW2 recently you could probably figure out which one to report, but type in my gaming nick (GodLes) and you get five people. Type in “Sgt Mike” and you get 9. Type in “Sniper Killer”, and I’ve seen a lot of players who go by that name, and you get 33 possible choices. The more popular the words the more possible players you pick up. “Ninja”, another popular gaming name, gives you 9,228 possible players.

Given the low number of PC copies sold combined with the ridiculous number of Xbox 360 and PS3 copies sold, I’m not too optimistic that IW is going to lose any sleep at night over the problems the PC version is suffering from. I know I won’t be bothering to ask Robert Bowling for comment on the issue any longer as it’s clear he has nothing to say. I will continue to follow his tweets to see if IW does decide to toss us a bone somewhere down the line, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for it.

I love the Call of Duty franchise, but my first love was the original PC version of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault which was released back in 2002. The very first game was for the Playstation in 1999, but I never played any of the Playstation versions due to my aforementioned hatred of FPS games on consoles.

MoH:AA was developed by 2015 studios for EA after which a good portion of the developers of the game left and formed Infinity Ward and went on to produce the CoD series. I’ve always thought that part of what made CoD such an excellent series of games was the desire by the developers to put out a better product than their old studio which was continuing to develop the Medal of Honor series. Indeed the MoH series kinda fell off a cliff with the release of Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. Which ran sluggish on even the best hardware and was uninspired story-wise. Medal of Honor: Airborne wasn’t much of an improvement as I recall and that was the last we heard from MoH on the PC since 2007.

Now EA has decided to follow in Infinity Ward’s footsteps and bring Medal of Honor into a modern setting with the just announced fall 2010 game and it looks pretty good. Check it:

Details are very scarce at the moment. For example the only platforms confirmed for the game are the Xbox 360 and PS3, but I’m holding out hope for a PC version that will include all the stuff the folks at Infinity Ward decided to leave out of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 such as dedicated server support and the ability for admins to kick/ban cheaters and troublemakers. Given all the ill will IW has drummed up with the PC version of MW2 now is a good time for EA to regain some ground in the hearts of minds of FPS gamers.

Yes I am upset and it’s probably a bad idea to write a blog entry when I’m as upset as I am now, but I’m going to anyway because this needs to be said. This is not a review of the game, I’ll write one of those later. This is a warning to anyone who’s thinking of buying it for the PC: Don’t fucking bother.

The reason why is quite simple. Infinity Ward decided that it was too much work to do much more than simply port the game over from the Xbox 360 so that’s all they did. The broke a long-standing tradition among first person shooters on the PC and decided they were not going to release a dedicated server to the fans. Instead they announced that MW2 would make use of a new matchmaking service they would be calling IWNet. They made this announcement during an interview on BASHandSlash.com’s podcast. It was not received well:

Bowling, the Infinity Ward community manager, said IWNet makes multiplayer more accessible to the PC community on Modern Warfare 2, replacing the need for dedicated servers that are hosted and managed by players. But the hardcore PC crowd to whom he was talking, on BASHandSlash.com’s webcast, did not take the news in a completely positive light.

“The silence you hear is because we’ve got a community right now structured in such a way that it relied on having dedicated servers,” one of BASHandSlash’s moderators told Bowling.

“You’re definitely reshaping the way the community has been set up,” another said later.

“Definitely,” Bowling acknowledged.

Reshaping is certainly one word to use. I prefer to use the words fucked over. Which is definitely a much harsher assessment, but the lack of dedicated servers is not the worst of it. A bit later the folks at ArsTechnica filled us in on the other changes to come:

We thought the lack of dedicated servers was bad, but now we can add the lack of console commands, the inability to have a say in who hosts the game, a lengthy pause while the game migrates to a new host if the currently selected host quits, no leaning, no option to record matches, and no way to kick or block trouble players, hackers, or cheaters.

See that last part I made bold type above? That’s where Infinity Ward has fucked over PC fans of their game. Mere hours after the game hit store shelves there was an aimbot/wallhack released for the PC version which you may recall me writing about previously. CoD:MW2 was released on November 10th. They didn’t get around to banning the first batch of cheaters until November 30th at which point about 2500 people were banned from Steam. Not that it matters as there is a crack out there and you can make as many Steam accounts as you want, each of which gets its own SteamID. There’s even a YouTube video showing you how to do it. Plus there are new hacks being created all the time. That’s just a fact of life on the PC. Hell, some of the hacks even advertise themselves in the game.

There’s no way that Infinity Ward or Valve can keep up with the cheaters in any reasonable amount of time. If we had dedicated servers this would be less of a problem as the admins can kick and ban by IP address at the first sign of a cheater. As things stand now not only are there no admins to deal with cheaters, but there’s no means of kicking cheaters at all. At the very fucking least it would’ve been nice to have the ability to call a vote to kick someone who’s being an ass in the game, but Infinity Ward won’t even let us do that.

I can live without dedicated servers if I have to. I can live with the max size of a match being 18 people. I can live with not being able to use custom user created maps. I can even live without the ability to lean around corners. Not being able to get rid of the cheaters, however, completely ruins the multiplayer game which, when you consider how short the single player is, is the main reason to buy the game in the first place.

There’s a certain class of person out there known as a Griefer and it appears they are having a field day with MW2. And why not? It’s not like anyone can do anything about it outside of Valve and Infinity Ward and that’ll take weeks before the SteamID is banned and then they can just make another one and keep right on going. This evening I joined and quit no less than two dozen games because the cheaters were out in force with no less than at least 4 cheaters in each game and one where half the players where cheating. I spent an hour just trying to find a game that didn’t have a cheater in it. When I quit the last game I sat down and wrote this entry.

This has to be the stupidest decision Infinity Ward has ever made. I find it hard to believe there isn’t a single person on that development team who didn’t foresee this being a problem with their decision to drop dedicated servers and remove any ability to kick players from a game. It was one thing when it was one guy every few dozen games or so, but when every game you join has a whole bunch of fucking cheaters in them it kills any desire I have to play the game at all. On the console versions all you have to worry about is people taking advantage of glitches that will eventually get patched and when people get banned there they can’t easily get back in. The PC is a completely different environment and only a fool would try to treat it like a console, but that’s just what Infinity Ward has decided to do.

As a result of this fiasco I can not recommend people buy the PC version of this game no matter how amazing it is. Perhaps IW will come up with a fool-proof way of eliminating the cheaters in a more timely fashion, but until they do it’s just not worth the aggravation on the PC. As a long-time fan of the company I am deeply disappointed and my outlook isn’t helped by the almost complete lack of comment from the Infinity Ward people on the problem.

And now an important message from the Save The Murlocs Foundation:

http://www.SaveTheMurlocs.org – The Save the Murlocs Foundation aims to preserve and protect these majestic creatures. Through numerous awareness and outreach programs, we work to outlaw Murloc cruelty, help rebuild villages, protest part harvesting, and find homes for poor orphaned baby Murlocs.

Update: Yes, I realize this is a pretty clever bit of marketing by the folks at J!NX to sell plush Murloc dolls. It’s well done, though, and the dolls are cute. If somewhat on the pricey side.

In it’s first day Activision and Infinity Ward’s latest iteration of the CoD franchise broke sales records and Activision isn’t about to not tell you about it:

Most Anticipated Game of the Year Becomes

Biggest Entertainment Launch in History

Santa Monica, CA – November 12, 2009 – Activision Publishing, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI) announced today that Infinity Ward’s much-anticipated Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® 2 has become the biggest launch in history across all forms of entertainment with estimated sell-through sales of $310 million in North America and the United Kingdom alone in the first 24 hours, according to internal Activision estimates.

Modern Warfare 2 was released on Tuesday, November 10^th, to worldwide fanfare across the globe, including over 10,000 retail outlets in the U.S. alone which held midnight openings to meet consumer demand.  In its first day, the blockbuster title sold through approximately 4.7 million copies in just North America and the United Kingdom, according to internal Activision estimates.

“The Call of Duty franchise has become a cultural phenomenon showing the power of video games as an entertainment medium,” said Mike Griffith, CEO, Activision Publishing, Inc.  “The shattering of these entertainment records is a testament to the compelling, cinematic and uniquely engaging experience that the Call of Duty brand delivers. Modern Warfare 2 has taken interactive experience to unprecedented heights setting a new standard for entertainment.”

There are developers out there who would kill to see 4.7 million copies sold in the entirety of a game’s shelf-life, let alone on day one. The vast majority of those sales are most likely the console versions. Not a bad start at all and breaking the previous first day sales record of Grand Theft Auto IV which had first day sales of 3.6 million copies. If you expand it to worldwide sales, well, Activision didn’t actually provide any numbers for that, but Analyst Ben Schachter estimates it sold seven million copies worldwide.

I have to admit that holding out until after Christmas is going to be tough.

11/13 Update: Thanks to the folks over at the MacNN Forums the video is working once again.

11/12 Update: It appears that this video has been hit with a take-down claim from Activision or Infinity Ward. They claim it’s a copyright violation, though I’m not sure how that can be the case. I asked IW spokesman @fourzerotwo for IW’s official stance on the hack yesterday on Twitter and never received a reply. I guess they’d rather just hide the video than talk about it.

The game is out just a few hours and the first aimbot/wallhack has already shown up for the PC version:

I figured someone would release a cheat along these lines eventually, but I didn’t think it would happen this quickly. As the game currently stands there is no way kick these cheaters off your games. Can’t do it as an administrator or host and can’t do it with a vote. If a hacker joins your game you’ll just have to suck it up, or go find something else to play.

Considering that one of Infinity Ward’s big justifications for not putting out a dedicated server was that their network would do a better job of policing against cheaters and hacks, this doesn’t bode well. IW is going to be looking at a lot of unhappy gamers if they can’t get rid of this hack pretty damn quickly. If they respond as slowly as they did to hacks and cheats in the first Modern Warfare they may find their place as a fan favorite deteriorating quickly. Especially if they don’t add in some means of allowing the players to boot out cheaters.

It looks like the bloodbath may have already started. The IW Forums are swamped right now with page loads timing out due to too many database connection attempts.

It’s been a long time coming, but Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has finally hit store shelves as of midnight last night. Despite a rough ride it’s had the past few weeks with several controversies springing up, it appears that CoD:MW2 is going to break all kinds of sales records in the days to come. Even before its release it was setting new highs:

Noting that buzz has “been consistently strong” for the title over the four weeks preceding its launch, the data gathering firm said that MW2 had unaided awareness levels in gamers six times higher than historical benchmark titles. Aided awareness numbers were almost triple that of the average videogame (71% to 26%).

46% of all gamers aware of MW2 reported seeing TV ads last week while 30% reported hearing info on the game from a friend or co-worker.

While an average game release has about 3% of gamers indicating they would pick up the title in the first week of release, the number jumps to 9-12% for MW2.

As I mentioned earlier, the game hasn’t been without its controversies as of late starting with the revelation through various interviews that the PC version of the game would not have a dedicated server option unlike all previous versions of CoD and that PC multiplayer matches would be limited to a paltry 9 vs. 9 maximum.

Needless to say this started a firestorm among the PC crowd faithful with some folks canceling their pre-orders and one person going so far as to mail a check for $60, the amount he would have paid for CoD:MW2, to rival developer DICE who plan to have a dedicated server option for their upcoming Battlefield: Bad Company 2. There’s also the near-mandatory Facebook boycott page. Alas, the PC version of the game will probably be a relatively small portion of the sales so any boycotts will probably be ineffective at best.

Another controversy, one that’s likely to garner no small amount of media attention (FOX News is already going to air a segment on it later this morning), is one that came about due to leaked footage of a sequence depicting a terrorist act at an airport from the game. I won’t go into too much detail so as to avoid potential story spoilers, but it’s an optionally interactive sequence that has what many consider to be some disturbing violence in it. Activision was quick to hit sites carrying the video clip with take down notices and Infinity Ward put out a short statement saying the scene is out of context and that players should wait until they play the game before passing judgment.

Yeah, like that’s going to happen. The debate has been raging on pretty much since the footage was first leaked and is likely to be a major focus of the news media reports in the days to come. The amazing thing is that none of this appears to have had any impact on enthusiasm to buy the game:

The seemingly constant storm clouds surrounding the upcoming Activision-published and Infinity Ward-developed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 have not done much, if anything, to negatively influence pre-sales of the title.

Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter thinks the title can reap global sales of in excess of $500 million in its first week of release reports Industry Gamers. Pachter also believes that the game could sell over 10.0 million units in this year’s fourth quarter.

Across the pond, MCVUK talks about the Modern Warfare 2 selling 1.7 million units in its first week at retail in the UK, citing pre-order numbers for the game at around 500,000 already. Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV currently holds the UK mark for unit sales in a week, with 926,000, a number that MW2 could obliterate. Factor in the rising price (suggested retail prices at least) of videogames in the UK and MW2 setting a record for gross dollars culled at launch seems almost a given.

I suppose it all goes back to the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. As for myself it’ll probably be awhile before I pick the game up due to my annual suspension of buying stuff for myself before Christmas tradition, but, even though the PC version is limited to 9 vs 9 multiplayer without any dedicated server option, I’ll probably still pick it up at some point. I’m a long-time fan of the series and all the reviews are saying this one doesn’t disappoint. Until then I will have to content myself with Call of Duty: World at War.