War Handwavium

This is the War Handwavium score for “Call of Duty 4″, a video game. The specific version used was for the PS3.

+3,500 points total score

!!!!SPOILERS!!!!

All levels were played from start to finish on “novice” level. All “kills” were counted once. If while playing the game, I died and had to restart a level, I didn’t count the kills twice. I’ve played through the game on Veteran difficulty through all levels, and I’ve gotten all the “laptops” so I was able to active the slow motion cheat code, infinite ammo cheat mode, and super grenades. Using these cheat modes made it easier to count while playing (slow motion) and it allowed me to go through all the levels as quickly as possible. I tried to avoid any “excessive” killing. There are spots in the game where bad guys will keep coming out of certain locations and you can just sit there and rack up your body count. I tried to avoid anything like that that would overinflate the body count beyond what would be required for someone to play the game normally.

I didn’t count bodies killed by Artificial Intelligence characters. I only counted the ones that I, as the player, killed. I didn’t distinguish between how the bad guy was killed. Various ways include using a knife, a firearm of some kind, hand grenades, and an M203 grenade launcher, among others. I avoided using RPG’s and such to kill bad guys, just to make it easier to count the bodies. I didn’t count the bodies that might have been killed by me calling in an airstrike. Just the ones that I had to directly kill.

The game has a prologue, three acts, and an epilogue. The three acts are broken up into several levels, each with a name. What I’ve done below is list each level and the number of bad guys killed on that level by the player character.

Prologue

33 “Crew Expendable”

Act 1

75 “Blackout”
89 “Charlie Don’t Surf”
88 “The Bog”
81 “Hunted”
125 “Death From Above”
68 “War Pig”
111 “Shock and Awe”
0 “Aftermath”

Act 2

76 “Safehouse”
14 “All Ghillied Up”
92 “One Shot, One Kill”
100 “Heat”
40 “Sins of the Father”

Act 3

62 “Ultimatum”
33 “All In”
72 “No Fighting in the War Room”
57 “Game Over”

Epilogue

33 “Mile High Club”

The total number of bad guys I killed playing the game from start to finish was 1,249. I’m going to round that to 1,250. 1,250 paper targets is (multiply times three) 3,750 points.

In addition to the straight up body count, there is at least one scene during the game where the commander of your team executes a prisoner, for an additional 10 points (not that ten points matters that much).

Also, during game play, members of your team occaissionally die. These are somewhat harder to count because the death of a teammate has zero effect on the game, and the ground is littered with bodies here and there. So, you as the player, are functionally apathetic about your teammates dying. It doesn’t make any difference to you. So I didn’t count them unless it mattered in some way to the player.

In one level, “All Ghillied Up”, you are with one other teammate, and if he dies, the game ends and you have to restart at the last checkpoint. So, that one counts as a -3 points.

At the end of “Shock and Awe”, something interesting happens. You and your entire team all die. You watch as 7 of your helicopters are destroyed. You watch a man fall out of your helicopter. Then you watch your helicopter crash. After the crash, you are mortally wounded and get to struggle around for a little while with burning wreckage everywhere, and then you die.

7 choppers plus the 10 or so people in your chopper dying, that’s a total of -51 points.

At the end of “Game Over”, everyone on your team dies except you. Griggs tries to rescue you, but you watch him shot down. You then watch three of your teammates executed. And when the medics arrive, you watch one of them doing CPR on your commanding officer, and then pounding his fist on his chest (I assume the CO dies). You are left seriously wounded.

5 teammates dead is -15 points. You seriously wounded is -3 points.

Subtracting the points for teammate deaths, gives a total of 3,688 points.

Just because I’m feeling generous, I’m going to take off an additional 188 points, which would account for an additional 60 white hat deaths.

Leaving a total War Handwavium score of 3,500 points.

Summary:

“Call of Duty 4″ is clearly a game where the entertainment is the killing. The counts above are based on how I played after I had mastered the game sufficiently to know where to go and what to do. Someone playing the game for the first time will probably end up having a slightly skewed count because they’d be going through the same levels more than once, so they’d experience killing bad guys a lot more than the numbers above reflect. Also, once you start playing more difficult levels, the number of bad guys goes up. So, this body count listed above (1,250) is really just a baseline. The actual body count that someone playing the game multiple times and different difficulties would be higher.

One of the interesting things in the game is you play different characters. Most of the levels are played as “Soap” a member of the British SAS. But a few levels are played as “Jackson” a US Marine.

Jackson is only in Act 1 because he dies at the end of Act 1. Jackson plays during the levels “Charlie Don’t Surf”, “The Bog”, “War Pig”, and “Shock and Awe” (he dies in Shock in Awe).

An unnamed character plays an airman manning the guns in a C-130 gunship in the level “Death from Above”.

In the Epilogue level “Mile High Club”, Captain Price and Gaz, who had died in Act 3, “Game Over”, are somehow magically back for another level, so I’ll assume the player character is Soap for that level. I almost want to add a few points for reserrecting Price and Gaz after watching them die, but unless it’s a hundred points, it’s really lost in the noise.

Anyway, this means that the various characters in the game have the following individual body counts:

880 : Soap

245: Jackon

125: Airman (C130 operator)

Which I think is a little high for what a special ops person might experience.

Last but not least, most of the levels have absolutely no civilians, even though many levels are played in urban areas. In “Death From Above”, you’re the gunner on a C-130 gunship, and there are two civilians that come out of the commendeered vehicles. There is also a church that you can’t target. Everything else, an entire town, is open game. In “Hunted”, there is one civilian who you are supposed to save from the bad guys. He walks out of some farmhouse and the bad guys come up to him. You’re supposed to shoot the bad guys and he runs into his farmhouse. But many of the levels take place in urban areas, and you have to go door-to-door to sweep out the bad guys. But there are never any unarmed civilians anywhere. If you kill one of your own people, the level restarts at your last checkpoint. There should be some unarmed civilians in the urban areas, and killing them should also restart you at a checkpoint. When you burst into a room, there should be some civilians in there, maybe sometimes the run out and get in your way. Oh, and if you play on veteran difficulty, sometimes the room has bad guys, sometimes it has civilians. It’s different every time you play.

http://www.warhw.com/warhw-in-fiction/