The last thing I did lately was run through the most recent entry in the Modern Warfare trilogy. (You can see from the awkward construction of the previous sentence that I have no idea if it really was a trilogy or if I should expect more to come.) They have a clever thing in the opening credits where it starts as WW3 and then the first W flips to become an M (and their acronym). Because, you see, it picks up immediately after (or, really, probably a few moments before) the end of the second game, in which World War 3 has well and truly blossomed.

The other thing about Modern Warfare 3 is that it took me several minutes to recall just now exactly how it ended, and if said ending would actually count as a completed story sequence. The answer is yes, but my inability to immediately remember what happened a mere eight days after I finished the game tells the rest of the story of this review for me. It was a perfectly adequate game, identical in play to the previous volumes, but without quite the punch and edge-of-my-seatness the others had. Maybe it’s because I’m overly jaded. It was cool and shocking the first time a viewpoint character in the game died, but after three such games, they had taught me not to get attached to anyone, and it turns out that this may be a problem in a first-person game, the inability to be attached to your own damn eyes and ears.

But still, from a purely narrative point of view, yes, I am satisfied by the complete story told in these games. Not, ultimately, as satisfied as I was with the Halo series, but pretty satisfied indeed. Will I later play the Black Ops games as well? Just maybe! It’s nice to have a game I can start and finish over the course of one or two weekends.