Things Every Man Should Know About Call of Duty

Contains top secret information. Please note: if we tell you everything, we’ll have to kill you by chucking an unarmed grenade at your head

If you’ve never played Call of Duty before, here’s what you need to know...

Call Of Duty is the biggest games franchise in the known universe thanks to a Tom Clancy-style single-player mode and a multiplayer mode so addictive that men in hoodies could sell it on street corners. Kicking off in 2003, the series first focused on WWII – but after it ran out of Nazis to kill, it started killing Russians with 2007’s Modern Warfare series. Releasing one game a year, it now alternates between Modern Warfare and Black Ops, a Cold War-themed mind games-fest, but the core of the game remains the same – get online and shoot as many of your mates as possible.

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The games aren’t regarded as the most accurate representation of modern warfare

Put it this way – a man can be shot five times in the chest and survive, but die the instant a knife clips him in the foot. Running into combat at a sprint and opening fire at point-blank range is not a currently-advised military tactic. In-game, grenades always explode with the same localised effects, rather than being hellish spheres of arbitrary destruction that can kill up to 1,000ft away from the initial explosion. But the AC-130 gunship sections – the black and white thermal imaging bits that look like ITN news report footage from the mid-’90s, where you open fire on insurgents from a plane with explosive cannon rounds – are so chillingly real that it’s rumoured they’ve fooled actual AC-130 operators.

When you start playing, you’ll die a lot. Here are five quick ways to make that not happen

Don’t chase people

Odds are that they know what they’re doing, so it might be a good idea to keep away from them in order to stay alive.

Hide behind stuff

Stay out of the fight. Work at the edges of a conflict, not standing in the middle of it getting shot like an idiot.

Duck!

For God’s sake, when you’re not running somewhere, duck. It makes you a smaller target, makes your shots more accurate, and is named after our favourite genus of waterfowl.

Don’t hesitate

Most fights come down to you and one other person facing each other; the first one to pull the trigger wins. Do your best not to be the second.

Never stop moving

If you stand still, you’re easier to shoot. Even if you just shuffle like an indecisive crab, it’s better than nothing.

Here are five very addictive things and five reasons why CoD is exactly like them

Cocaine

It goes fast. Really fast. And the constant barrage of demands makes it difficult to become bored of the game or even really think coherently.

World of Warcraft

It offers choice – building your own class from customisable parts gives you a) plenty of ownership over your game and b) plenty to obsess over.

Sex

It comes with an explosive finale if you do it right. Often, all we end up with at the end is a stupid helicopter which must be the equivalent of a disappointing wank.

Gambling

It’s hard to tell if you’re going to win at the start of the match. Relying on your team makes each game an exercise in hope and despair.

Cigarettes

Everyone else does it and it looks cool. CoD has shifted huge numbers, so your friends probably play too, and who wants to be worse at something than their friends? Losers, that’s who.

You shouldn’t be trusted to open doors

Throughout all nine years of the Call of Duty games, the complex process of door-opening has been mostly left to your superiors. In fact, in the four instances you’re allowed to open a door all by yourself in MW3, you are:

• Punched so hard you fall down a flight of stairs
• Shot right in the face
• Blown up by a dirty bomb
• Assaulted by rabid hyenas

...So maybe it’s best left to the professionals

No one does launch parties like Call of Duty

The various events for the launch of Modern Warfare 3 included a green-carpet central London gala hosted by Xfm funnyman Danny Wallace with a military-style Laser Quest in the basement, a battle between European footballers in which Joey Barton managed to come last by firing at walls and not really understanding what was going on, and a 1:1 scale recreation of the MW2 Scrapyard multi-player level in Los Angeles. Impressive.

No game has ever made more money than Call of Duty

Beating the records set by Black Ops, Modern Warfare 3 took over $400 million and sold 6.5 million copies of the game in the first 24 hours of sale in the UK and US alone. That’s a lot of games. Or to put that in perspective…

• If you wanted to play through each single player campaign on each disc sold it would take you, in hours, over 5000
• The weight of them could crush the life out of 244 individual men if wrapped around them like a boa constrictor; maybe more if they were dropped from a great height over a wide area.
• It would take you more than 90 days of constant labour to shift all those discs from your car to your living room (assuming your car, and living room, are big enough to hold them).
• If you laid them flat next to each other they would cover nearly 3000 football pitches and make it really, really difficult to play either football or the games themselves.

Recent games included a colourblindness option

A thoughtful move to make the game easier to play for the one in eight men that suffer from the disorder? Or because the lead tester for Black Ops is colourblind. You can use the mode to cheat and spy on enemy stealth bombers thanks to a glitch.

Get online on Christmas Day

“Christmas Noob” is a community term for all the kids who unwrap the game on December 25 and start playing online right away, so you can rack up some points and feel good about ruining their present.

Grenades can be even more deadly than you imagined

If you time it right, you can finish off a wounded opponent by throwing a grenade at him and killing him, not with the explosion, but with just the force of the grenade hitting his head.

Terrorists reportedly use Call of Duty to plan devious attacks

According to The Sun – the private nature of CoD lobbies (where players hang out and chat in-between games) has been reason enough for terrorist forces to use them as a means of orchestrating terror plots. Apparently, they then go on to practise their terrorism on games “much in the same way a pilot might use a flight simulator.” If they’re really using it for practice, expect the next major terrorist attack to be 30 seconds of grenade-throwing followed by an eternity of waiting to respawn.

Call of Duty: facial hair

A guide to growing the four best beards in the CoD franchise and what they say about you

Price’s rufty-tufty full beard

From: Modern Warfare 1,2,3 How to: Refuse to shave for as long as possible because you’re too manly. Trim occasionally if you start to look a bit homeless. What it says about you: You’re your own man, and you enjoy crawling through swamps in the dark, halting military invasions using space nukes, and a fine cigar.

Soap’s designer stubble

From: Modern Warfare 1,2,3 How to: Look grizzled at all hours of the day even when you’re jetting around the world to shoot things in the face. Don’t moisturise. Carry it off with a cheeky Scots sense of humour that makes the ladies swoon. What it says about you: Everyone will be really upset when you die in the third game.

Harper’s unshaven underdog

From: Black Ops 2 How to: Defend the US from a Chinese land invasion while furiously trying to protect the President, and subsequently have no time to shave. If it starts to look coherent, chop bits out of the side to make it uneven. What it says about you: You’re a busy man, damnit, with no time for proper beard care. You’ve got a nation to save.

Zakhaev’s evil goatee

From: Call Of Duty 1, 2 How to: Find the manliest man you can. Beat him in a arm-wrestling contest then share cigars and jovial laughter with one another while you build some furniture and fix a classic car. The moustache should appear in your face in a puff of testosterone. What it says about you: You are better than everyone else at everything.

It’ll tell you the time, if you’re not being tortured

In Black Ops 1, Mason’s wristwatch displays the time according to your computer’s clock. When he suffers torture-induced hallucinations, the time wildly fluctuates. Crazy!

There’s a British soldier called Price in 5 CoDs

Although the series takes place over 70 years and he dies in one of them, we like to imagine it’s the same Price kept alive by the power of his moustache.

It isn’t afraid to go right for the jugular

Modern Warfare 3 courted controversy by depicting the death of a child in a terrorist bomb attack – players could skip it if they wanted.

How to know if you’ve overdosed

Call Of Duty can eat into your spare time like a hungry lorry driver into a pair of Ginsters pasties. Sometimes, it can be hard to tell if you’ve been playing too hard. If more than three of the following statements apply to you, put down the controller and go for a walk.

• Your honed reflexes are so wired your flatmate came into the room unexpectedly and you made an involuntary snap-second decision on whether to rush and knife him or drop prone and shoot him with an imaginary SMG.
• The sun rises, and you’re pretty sure you remember noticing it set.
• You suddenly realise you haven’t eaten anything that wasn’t crisps for the last 12 hours.
• You go to the bathroom and instinctively strafe around corners on the way in case someone’s camping in your laundry basket.
• You open your third consecutive can of Red Bull with mixture of lust and apprehension.
• You don’t know where your phone is, you don’t care, and actually you prefer it this way.
• You haven’t spoken to another human being in eight hours (not counting swearing at them over a headset).
• Your eyes feel dry, scratchy and tired and your attempts to keep them open with matchsticks like they do in the cartoons only makes things worse.
• You can’t remember the last time you went for a piss, and that’s not bothering you as much as it should be.
• Your girlfriend has just left you for another man because a) you play too much Call of Duty or b) your constant nit-picking of her Perk selection finally got to her.

From the February 2013 issue of FHM India.