I know they’re giving me EXACTLY what I want by including two of the best maps from COD4 (Overgrown and Crash), but I just refuse to shell out that much for DLC. I bought the Variety Map Pack for COD4 and regretted it pretty quickly. I thought it would get me back into the game, but I found the maps mediocre and I probably played them a couple of hours. And those four new maps cost a total of $10. Why am I going to pay more for less new maps? Getting two maps I’ve already played to death doesn’t scream additional value to me, even if I appreciate the thought.

I would just not get the amount of playtime from these extra maps that would allow me to justify to myself spending 15 bucks. I haven’t played MW2 in months. I think I only beat a handful of the single-player campaign missions; I think I played even Spec-Ops more than it, since that had online co-op functionality. Maybe I’ll get around to finishing the campaign sometime, but I don’t see any way I’ll have the patience to beat it on Veteran like I did with COD4. I’d say I burnt myself out getting 1000/1000 on COD4, but my total playtime for MW2 is somewhere between two and three days, which is a significant amount of time. But I’m done. I haven’t had the urge to kill hooded terrorists on my 360 in a long while now.

It’s not even that I’m not buying this map pack, it’s that I’m not buying it DAY ONE. I was in the COD4 beta and played that for a couple of days total. I bought COD4 day one and completed it in its entirety while playing an additional few days of multiplayer. I went to the midnight launch of MW2, even after half-seriously contemplating a boycott only to stand with my former PC brethren who were screwed over by the removal of dedicated servers. But it wasn’t even a boycott in my head — I legitimately wasn’t interested until the day before it came out when I realized I could not live without playing a new Infinity Ward game as soon as possible. But I don’t see such a turnaround happening again; the Stimulus Package isn’t a new game — it’s an overpriced add-on.

I don’t regret buying MW2, but I know I’d regret buying this map pack. I’ll save my 1200 MS points for an awesome Xbox Live Arcade game or two. And so ends the love affair of a non-dudebro with his — and seemingly everyone else’s — favorite FPS series of the past few years. I’m sure Infinity Ward will care after a million people buy the Stimulus Package today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8toHfZm6jNE

Leave it to Infinity Ward to tingle my balls with this epic trailer. It’s better than pretty much 95% of movie trailers. If it were a movie trailer, the music would be the Requiem theme or some similarly overused song, the voiceover would be done by one of the three guys that does it for a living, and the reveal would have been handled like total shit.

Modern Warfare 2 is going to totally destroy everything in its path. Even though I barely follow the gaming scene, I do know that plenty of games have been moved away from its release because companies are afraid of this fucking beast. Apparently this trailer was aired during the Sunday Night Football game — I bet at least 5 million of the guys watching that game already have 60 bucks put aside to give to Infinity Ward.

A note: The music in the very beginning sounds similar to the TDK trailer music, right?