Just finished Call of Duty 4, and am suitably impressed. While the single-player campaign’s relatively short, it’s very, very highly polished, and a really spectacular experience. Where most games would introduce something, run with it for a little while, then re-do it over three or four times throughout the game making it tired and boring, COD4 has entire levels that are specialized mechanics, and they don’t feel wasted or boring in the slightest.

Instead of 15 hours of “meh,” it’s 5 hours of BOOM! and it works really well. “All Ghillied Up” is one of the best single levels of a game I’ve ever played, and the whole sequence, which includes two more levels afterwards, is one of the best game sequences and examples of interesting character building I’ve seen in a game in a long damn time.

One thing: If you play to the end, watch the credits through to the end, and there’s a surprise after it’s done. This shocked me for two reasons: 1.) it’s a buttload of content to put after the credits roll, and 2.) when I interviewed at Lucasarts a couple years ago (and got rejected), one of the interview questions was to design a level that might be interesting, and the thing after the credits is, almost detail-for-detail, EXACTLY what I’d proposed, to the point where I laughed out loud at one point during the level.

Crazy. Awesome game, though. I liked Call of Duty 2, but this, to me, really puts Infinity Ward on the map. The whole game, from the single-player to the multiplayer is so well done, I can’t wait for their next game. Until then, the multiplayer will provide me with additional hours of entertainment, I’m sure.

Assassin’s Creed holds up to expectations well, as well. The character movement is spectacular – something you really have to see to believe, and the scope of the areas in the game is ridiculous. They’ve basically modeled stuff that amounts to three cities, almost all of which can be traversed fluidly using their insane free running.

The game does suffer from some measure of repetition, but I don’t mind all that much. The story’s intriguing, it’s a great world to just wander around in, and the mechanics are so fun that you can just lose yourself in the world for a couple hours at a stretch. I’m really interested to see what they’re doing with the … uh… part I can’t talk all that much about without spoiling stuff, but it’s good, because I’m intrigued. The thing about it is that it feels like the spoiler-related stuff… I could have skipped all of what’s happened so far, and the game would still go on. It makes that side of things feel like a discovery. Weird stuff, but very cool.

This “season” for games has just been ridiculous. There’s still Super Mario Galaxy, Mass Effect, Rock Band, and I’ve still gotta knock down all the rest of the content in the Orange Box, spend some time with Virtua Fighter 5, Sega Rally Revo, and I’m sure there’s even more. There’s a couple factors leading to this ridiculous glut of games coming out this season, but I don’t think we’re gonna see another like it for at least a couple years – certainly not holiday 08 or 09. Why you would release so many AAA games in the span of two months, I have absolutely no idea. No one’s gonna be able to keep up with it all.

Oh – in non-game-related news, the Civic’s transmission looks to have freaked out. Had to call AAA to drag the car to service. I don’t know what we’ll do if the repair’s too expensive. The car’s got 160K miles on it, and while it IS a Honda, there’s a point where more repairs is just not going to be worth it. We’ll see, I suppose.