Introduction:

To date, the Modern Warfare series has sold over 15 million copies, but conventional wisdom cannot explain why this is.  There is nothing particularly new or ground breaking about the game.  It is a first person shooter set in the modern day, something that has been done before in video games, and something that Modern Warfare doesn’t do exceptionally better than other games.  The games’ graphics, gameplay, and story are only above average¹ and do not give any hints to why it has become the blockbuster it is.  Modern Warfare’s popularity is simply without any obvious explanation.  Therefore, we have dared to dig deeper.  As entitled by our PhDs in Gamesology, we have designed and executed a legitimate, not-fake, scientifically sound study attempting to answer: Why is Modern Warfare so damned popular?

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Friday the 13th for NES is fucking awful. A terrible, shambling wreck of a game that, much like Jason Voorhees, refuses to die. I was unfortunate enough to have this game as a kid and my inability to make even a small amount of progress in it still haunts me. Some nights, I wake up in a cold sweat and find myself screaming, “GEORGE, WHY ARE YOU SO FUCKING SLOW!?”

I have been to Camp Crystal Lake. I have heard the shrill uncontrollable bleeping of countless young campers being slain. I have been stalked by zombies, attacked by crows, and lost in an endless maze of trees. I have stared in to the absolute definition of terror time after time and failed.

But not tonight. Tonight, I drag Jason Voorhees and his horrible NES cart STRAIGHT DOWN TO HELL.

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The powers that be at Bomb Guts have told me that I haven’t written an article in over a month and that if I don’t put something together by tomorrow night, I’ll lose my job, access to the company Lamborghini, and my $5,000 per diem. Much like the bulk of the research papers I wrote in college, I only saw one way to make it through this with a job…I’m going to make all of the research up and hope they don’t check my sources. Since there are no cliff notes for video games, this review will be based on my imagination, bullet points written by NCSoft, and screenshots provided by the Aion community.

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I haven’t figured out what to call this type of post yet, but I’ve had a lot of ideas for them lately. The premise is that most of the moments people remember from great games aren’t nearly as powerful as some of the more subtle moments that get overlooked in the same game. This time around, we’re talking about my favorite game, Final Fantasy 6.

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In what I’m hoping will become a somewhat regular offering here at Bomb Guts, allow me to introduce you to the first, of hopefully many, takes on the worst in innovation. I’m talking about features so awful, they make an otherwise solid game unplayable. Somewhere in the development cycle, something was horribly lost in translation. And one man’s fun turned into another man’s agony. These are gameplay elements that make even your mother scream “WTF were they even thinking?”

And for me, no other game comes more readily to mind than Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (GC).

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