I have to be honest; I’m not much of a first-person shooter kind of gamer. Still, when Modern Warfare 3 came out, I figured I’d give it a go. It had been a while since I’d tried to play Call of Duty, and surely I couldn’t be as terrible at it as I remembered.
Plus, my husband was buying it either way, so what could be the harm in borrowing his Xbox for a few hours to see what this zombie business is all about?
Well, it turns out my ego and the possibility of my ever surviving the zombie apocalypse was at stake, at least if my performance in Call of Duty has any correlation to real-life survival tactics.
What Am I Doing Here Again?
I went in feeling relatively confident I could handle the whole zombie situation. Shoot zombies. Don’t die. Easy enough… right?
Well, it turns out that Modern Warfare 3’s zombie mode is a bit more complicated than that. You have objectives, but it’s hard to tell what they are exactly. They flashed up on the screen during load time, but by the time we landed, I had completely forgotten the list of three things we were ostensibly supposed to be doing while killing zombies.
Pretty much as soon as we landed, my teammates ran off with purpose while I lagged behind, shooting at (and missing) zombies. As I tried to survive, I asked myself whether I should follow them or divide and conquer.
I decided to shoot zombies and try to stay within sight of the little dots that indicated my allies until our little radio friends let us know what to do next. This probably would have worked out okay if I was any good at shooting zombies. I was not.
How Do You Reload This Thing?
Due to my lack of aiming ability in first-person shooters, I run through a lot of ammo pretty quickly. You’ll do that when you only land every fifth shot or so. The problem is, it’s been long enough since my last foray into Call of Duty that I couldn’t remember how to get more ammo.
Since this was not my first rodeo, I knew the workaround solution was to switch to a different gun that did have ammo. Boom, back in the game! Or at least, back in the game until that gun also ran out of ammo.
Cue me running around the map, opening lockers and supply kits, trying to find more ammo while also avoiding zombies to the best of my ability since I could no longer actually shoot them. It turns out that punching zombies doesn’t work very well when you’re surrounded, and they take you out pretty fast when you’re just throwing hands.
When you think about what I must have looked like to the poor souls who got stuck with me as a teammate out of all the options in the lobby that day, you can almost understand why they ultimately made the difficult sacrifice of leaving my useless butt behind.
My Team Abandoned Me, And Honestly, I Get It
As I ran around the map punching zombies and trying to find bullets, I naturally kept getting killed. This was honestly kind of a relief until one of my teammates came back to revive me. I hit the button to thank him, but really, I wondered why he didn’t just put me out of my misery. Did you know that even hitting “give up” doesn’t actually let you exit the game? I did not.
I resumed running around the map and punching zombies until they inevitably bested me again, and then this poor guy hopped on an ATV and came back for me. To be fair, the other person we were playing with had fully vanished from the game, so I guess I was his only hope. Obi-Wan, I am not.
My new virtual friend came back for me a good three or four more times before realizing I wasn’t going to be any help in the nebulous objectives I’d all but forgotten about. At last, he was either too far to justify coming back for me again or made a conscious choice that I wasn’t worth it, and he left me behind, presumably to a fate worse than death.
At that point, I was stuck in spectator mode purgatory, watching him run around the map, being actually halfway decent at Call of Duty. I spent a few minutes poking around with the controls to figure out how I could officially bow out of this round. I’ve never been one for watching other people play video games, and in this case, it was too painful to see him seamlessly reloading his gun and using it to destroy the same zombies I’d been hopelessly hitting with my bare hands.
Eventually, I figured out how to leave and immediately hopped into another lobby, hoping beyond hope that this next game might go better.
I lasted a few more sorry attempts before the overwhelming reality that I’m not cut out to play zombies in Modern Warfare 3 set in. Alas, I did not survive the zombie apocalypse in the world of Call of Duty, and my teammates had to follow that age-old advice no one in action movies ever takes: “Go on without me!”
