Bonfire of the Fanboys

Spoilers within for Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company 2, don't sue.
Browsing a favourite forum of mine recently, I came across a thread entitled.

Stop Trying To Challenge Call of Duty

A thread which was so idiotic and fanboyish that I am going to have to take down every point it makes. Bit by bit.

I say this, not because I'm an obsessed, overzealous keyboard warrior, but because there just really isnt any point in doing it anymore.

Yes you are.

COD has just well, nailed it. At least, better than anyone else really has.

It hasn't. It really really hasn't.

I rented out and played Medal of Honour recently, along with Killzone 2 and Bad Company to see how they stacked up, and by comparison they were just awful. Sure, maybe they wouldnt be so bad if I didnt have something better to compare them to, but for christ sake they bored me.

I haven't played Killzone 2 or Medal of Honour, but Bad Company is something I play regularly, and I, my friends, and professional reviewers have all managed to see that it kicks the living crap out of Call of Duty, I am sure that if Call of Duty had 'nailed it' then it would have compared favourably to the sublime Battlefield franchise (hopefully me being a blatant fan of said franchise doesn't lessen the credibility of this, truth be told I quite like Call of Duty's singleplayer, but I'm sure that the fanboys are blissfully oblivious that it exists)  so obviously the opinion of one fanboy makes it far more true that Call of Duty is superior to these other games. Perhaps he just can't handle anything less than a deluded power fantasy.

Is Killzone even trying to compete with Call of Duty anyway? It's set in the future.

Aiming the weapons was a sluggish chore, point blank hails of bullets took a solid 6 seconds to bring down an enemy, the close combat animations were lame, the characters were highly punchable, the story was broken and unfocused and badly told, and the set pieces made me yawn.

For one thing, you can't fire most weapons for 6 seconds. Your standard assault rifle will be roughly 600rpm with a 30 round box magazine, that's enough to fire for 3 seconds. Guns don't immediately jump to the nearest target when you close your eye either. Most of the time you'll need to carefully track their movements lead the target just right and fire a shot or small bust to take them down, you don't keep blinking like mad and squeezing the trigger until the entire room is dead.

There's no way I can really respond to the last three points there in text, so lets break them down.

The close combat animations were lame,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3KuklbNM80
Apologies for linking like it's the stone age, but it's the only way this damn thing will work right now. Embeds be broken.

 The characters were highly punchable

The story was broken and unfocused and badly told, and the set pieces made me yawn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt4IwjU2jrU

Okay, I'll admit, it's pretty well done, but really? Double crossings have been done by everyone, hell, even Bad Company decided to throw one in, the reason was more humanly motivated, and it seemed at least a bit more real than 'LOL I'MMA SHOOT MAH OWN SIDE, 'CUS AMERIKEE' but it still didn't quite work. It's honestly been done to death, I doubt it was even fresh when Deus Ex did it.

As Yahtzee once said, popular things are often popular for a reason, because they are good.

He also said that Emm Dubya Two was a pile of tripe.

So who agrees? Is anyone else sick and tired of hearing about "COD killers" and just wish these bland imitations would stop so new first person shooters could just be good on their own merit, or is it actually possible to knock COD off its perch with a new title? (That would be, off its perch in its prime, not when it starts releasing endless successions of clones after MW3.)

History lesson time!

Medal of Honor - November 11th 1999 (Releasing a war game on Rememberance Day, good job, America)
Battlefield 1942 - September 10th 2002 (A day before the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks?)
Call of Duty       - October 29th 2003 (No conspiracy theories there. Something to do with Halloween.)

Now, these are all World War 2 games, so lets examine how long these franchises have been stuck in the modern era of Marines shouting about apple pie.

Battlefield 2               - June 21th 2005
Cod Four: Mod War - November 5th 2007
Medal of Honor 2010- October 12th 2010

Not sure where all this 'bland imitation' stuff is coming from, if we're going to claim that only one person can hold a certain genre or subgenre, then it looks more like Activision wanted some of EA's shooty pie. Maybe only Stephen Spielberg should be allowed to create arcade shooters, and that would be a horrible thing, Call of Duty and Battlefield at least recognise that wars tend to involve more sides than just America. Though BC2 and Black Ops would hint that they've forgotten that. Apparently America has assassinated Fidel Castro as well. You know, that guy that they've failed to assassinate about 638 times, and that number is not an exaggeration or sarcasm against America.

I think I've lost my train of thought now though.

I'm sick of being shot by my own side.