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" SANTA MONICA, Calif. \u2014 In an earlier post, we said the most impressive game we had seen at E3 was Killzone 2, a PS3 shooter that was demonstrated at Sony&amp;#039;s press conference. Here&amp;#039;s an update: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is not only the best thing we&amp;#039;ve seen here, but it&amp;#039;s coming this fall to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. [Check out first-look video here; preview continues below...] This is the first title in the successful Call of Duty franchise that&amp;#039;s set in the present (the others were during WWII), with modern weapons, vehicles, and socio-political headaches. The plot is Tom Clancy-esque, with a Russian hardliner starting a civil war, while his allies in the Middle East launch a bloodu coup to divert Western attention. But whereas the Ghost Recon series is now set in the near-future, allowing players to tinker around with UAVs and gun-mounted cameras that work suspiciously well (and with experimental assault rifles that are currently drowning in qualification benchmarks and budget-cut quicksand), everything in CoD4 is the real deal, right now.  And when it comes to weapons, sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, such as when we watched a developer fire a Javelin missile launcher at an enemy squad. After aligning the hulking apparatus, you aim not through zoomed-in cross hairs, but an awkward green-toned LCD screen. And when the missile launches, it takes an indirect route, rocketing upward for hundreds of feet before slamming down on the target. If you fire it at an object that&amp;#039;s too close, it will smack into it and hit the dirt, unarmed, a real-life safety feature designed to keep trigger-happy troops from blowing themselves to pieces.  Like the other CoD titles, this shooter is first-person, not over the shoulder, and hitting the aim button means looking through the scope or sighting down the barrel. And unlike the advanced nightvision goggles in Ghost Recon, which give you a bright, black-and-white view of the environment, these nightvision goggles restrict your peripheral vision, and provide a gloriously grainy, green-on-green view. And when your team is using infrared laser sights, the otherwise invisible beams only show up when your goggles are turned on. The only truly unrealistic aspect of the game is the regenerative health system, which allows you to take a few hits, and then wait under cover for the damage to essentially heal (this is a common approach for military shooters, including the other CoD games). Still, this means no scrounging for health packs or magical patch-ups from a field medic. The game&amp;#039;s military adviser, Lieutenant Colonel Hank Keirsey, Army, Ret., who played through that nightvision fight, wouldn&amp;#039;t take credit for the game&amp;#039;s intense realism. But every detail, including the dialogue from other squad members, feels authentic. The game has you fighting as a Marine Force Recon in the Middle East and as British SAS in Russia, and also includes flashback missions, like an attempt 15 years ago to assassinate that villainous Russian hardliner.  We watched the first full mission in the game, a quick-rope assault on a cargo ship in rough seas. There were incredibly gritty moments, like when you perforate targets still sleeping in their bunks. But it was the dynamic lighting that stole the show, from the glare of exposed bulbs reflecting off your squadmate&amp;#039;s goggles to the final flash of lightning as you watch the ship slip under the roiling waves. The level design was also impressive\u2014the ship sways as you move through corridors below deck, and then tips nearly 45 degrees to one side as it begins to sink, making a frantic escape even moreso. Lame as it sounds, by the time the demo ended, with a leap from the deck to the waiting chopper, our hearts were pounding. And we weren&amp;#039;t even playing. Call of Duty 4 is the game we were born to play, and it&amp;#039;s on its way very soon. \u2014Erik Sofge "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a1889/4219258/>