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I do believe I'm in love.  Or maybe that I could just say I've found a new mistress in the video gaming world.  One to replace my one-time infatuation with the great game Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas.  Rainbow Six Vegas held my fascination and admiration as a great video game for quite some time.  Well over 40 days of gaming.  Eventually I'm sure, while I wait for my new love to actually get into stores, I'll be back to playing more of R6V.  It is a great game, and I still have plenty of room to 'rank up' and move up the built-in ranking system so I'll surely go back to playing it for a while longer.

There is also the very well done Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2.  A slightly shorter, and some say slightly easier, version of the game by the same name (minus the '2' that designated the follow-on version).  I still have achievements to get there, and missions to complete when I have some time to give it a try.  It too is a great game and will get more of my time eventually.

But, in the meantime, for as long as the beta is available to me, and most definitely once the game is released, I know I'll be loving Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

COD4 brings back the developer of Call of Duty 2, Infinity Ward.  While they had more than their share of issues with a buggy game in the initial release of COD2, they went on to release patches that fixed that game and created a game that was quite enjoyable to play.

Call of Duty 2 was followed by another game in the Call of Duty series, but unfortunately that game -- Call of Duty 3 -- was rushed to market and never seemed to receive the attention it needed to fix problems that plagued the game play.  Team play was consistently unbalanced, and weapon balance between Axis and Allies was atrocious.  Thanks to those problems, my friends that liked playing that sort of game quickly great tired of COD3 and I did the same.  I wound up selling off the game quite a while ago determined to block the bad memories of frustrated gaming attempts out of my mind.

Infinity Ward (IW) still has problems to make up for in the gaming community, including an incredibly screwed up process for making the beta version of COD4 available to the legions of fans that wanted to play.  IW published news of the pending beta on their website and in effect created their own private Denial of Service (DoS) attack on their systems.  10s of thousands of gamers attempted to access the site during the designated time periods, and the same 10s of thousands tried to e-mail in their entries in the original lottery that was supposedly used for determining who would get to participate in the beta.

I applaud IW for recognizing their mistakes in this area, and for opening up the beta to pretty much all comers.  While I still think that the idea floated by one of my friends -- offering the beta up to people that still had Call of Duty 2 discs, similarly to how Microsoft tied the beta of Halo 3 to the game Crackdown -- was probably the best way to do this, I give credit to IW for opening things up to get more people into the game now.  Other alternatives to their initial fuster cluck system of handing out invites would have been good too, including using a true e-mail lottery spread out over several days, but at this point it really doesn't matter as the beta has basically been opened to everyone that completed the sign-up process at the CharlieOscarDelta.com web-site.

I still have a few friends that are digging through their spam/junk-mail folders waiting for their invites, and a few others that have been very frustrated by glitches in the beta, either downloading the game or getting online once the game is downloaded, but eventually those friends will get the invite/download tokens, and on the bug discovery front that is exactly what the beta is for -- to find and help kill those problems.  To help balance the loads on the servers, and help determine where there are problems that need to be addressed.

All of my friends that have been playing are saying the same things about the game that I am saying here -- once you play it you realize you are probably not going to want to play many, if any, other similar games.  It is that good.  Halo 3 has absolutely nothing over Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and while there will be plenty of Halo 3 fanboyz (and galz) running out to buy and play that game, COD4 will get my money in a heartbeat while I ignore the hype of Halo 3.

While I'm still very much on a rental kick, rather than in a buying mode, I will definitely, unconditionally, be buying COD4.  It will be my big purchase of the season and I will be glad to have paid for it.