Call of Duty owns me

Or pwns me, if you prefer. It's true. I just can't sit at home for more than 10 minutes withought the thought entering my mind- Hey, go power up that magical box and bask in the glory of realistic modern combat fps greatness. Heck, the only reason I was able to come up here at all to write this entry is my controller died, and I didn't have any backup batteries on hand.

Guitar Hero had a great enough hold on me, what with the ever present possibility of improving my score and beating previous records for Freebird. I thought I couldn't get any more obsessed than that, when the only thing that kept me from it was the frequent build-up of pain in my fingers, my body's way of saying "What the fuck, man?! Cut it out already!"

But then I got Call of Duty 4, and my willpower went out the window. At first I was just enjoying the single-player campaign, where I knew eventually I would get tired of my hopeless attempts at beating Veteran level. But then I opened my very own Pandora's Box of gaming: xbox live multiplayer. I had played Halo online before, so I thought I knew what I was getting into. I quickly learned how wrong I was. If you don't know already, CoD4 has totally awesome gameplay and design, which would be enough on it's own, but the guys over at Infinity Ward apparently didn't want anybody to ever stop playing this game, because they added a feature to this game that is so addicting that there should be a warning from the Surgeon General on the box.

The rpg elements of CoD4 taps into my greatest weakness: leveling up. I don't care how bad it is or how many times I've played it; as long as I have nothing better to play, I will not stop obsessively leveling in whatever crappy game you throw at me. Normally a game with a character leveling system has a storyline and quests and sidequests that you eventually tire of and at some point it's just not worth raiding the goblin's cave again. But put those rpg elements into a dynamic multiplayer experience where nothing is scripted and each game is unique and I don't think I'll ever get tired of this.

Alas, my epic fail.