Call of Duty 4 (CoD 4) - makes me sick - literally!

Anyone that plays games on any of the next gen gaming consoles, will have heard of the mighty ‘Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare’. It is awesome. Not so much for the ’story mode’, but for it’s huge online game play.

For the most part, the way the game has been setup for online play, is near perfect. My only criticism, is that although everyone starts of at the same level, hard core gaming anoraks, will put in huge amounts of hours and get very skilled, very quickly, whilst casual gamers like myself, stay at a pretty mediocre level. The problem? the game doesn’t match skill levels when setting up a game. You are thrown into the lions’ den with everyone else, no matter what their skill level.

Despite this ‘flaw’, CoD4 is absolutely brilliant. It’s realistic in terms of it’s graphics, and that is on my low-def TV. Heck, the actual simulation of all the different guns and explosives may be realistic too, I don’t know, but when you are in the game, It’s as real as it gets, without the need for physical injury, Brilliant.

So why do I say it makes me sick? Well, I can’t play on it for too long, especially if I haven’t played it for a week or so (almost unheard of in the CoD4 online community, it’s that addictive). When I do, I start to feel really queezy in the stomach, and I have to stop.

I did mention these symptoms to my doctor once, whilst I was there for a different matter. He said it may be vertigo. I laughed, nay mocked at his suggestion silently in my head, saying, “I’m not exactly jumping off of very tall buildings, believing I’m falling to my doom, it’s a game”. However, I believe he is probably right.

You see, after about ten days of not playing it, I decided to have a quick match or two online. When the game kicked off, I felt like a noob, “which buttons do what again”? I was looking frantically all over the screen, wondering where the next lot of hostile fire is going to come from. It took less than ten minutes for that aweful queezy feeling to rear it’s unwanted head.

Thinking about it, I realised, that when I have been playing regularly, I am more confident and my eyes aren’t darting around all over the screen, I am more focused, I know what I’m looking for and what I want to do. In essence, I think when my eyes are darting around all over the place, not focused, my brain gets dizzy. It’s the only way I can explain it. I get the same feeling with Halo too, but not driving games.

The other odd thing is that my brother, who plays way more CoD4 than I do, and is way better too, came to visit one day. We switched the Xbox 360 on and fired up CoD4 for a few quick matches online, and my brother started to feel queezy too, something that he doesn’t suffer from at home. The only difference? He has a Hi-def TV, I don’t. Can this be part of the reason too?