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Tuesday
Feb212012

PC Games via Steam

Tuesday
Feb212012

Blu-ray Movies

Wednesday
Feb012012

PC Games via Steam

Wednesday
Feb012012

Blu-ray Movies

Sunday
Jan292012

Call of Duty Elite Liberation & Piazza Maps

These two maps, though, in and of themselves, are great. Where the stock maps largely consist of uniform grids of buildings, alleyways, corridors and stairwells, with an open area here or there, Liberation and Piazza are both way more interesting. They’re totally different to any of the main game maps and totally different to each other.

Liberation is set in New York’s Central Park, or at least part of it. It’s more open than any other map in Modern Warfare 3, but thanks to its undulating terrain and some carefully placed scenery, it never feels wide open.

There’s a lot of freedom of movement and points from which you can get a good view of the battle and make use of long-range weapons, but there’s no part of the map open enough to make you feel totally exposed just by setting foot in it.

Everything’s so curvy that there are very few long, straight lines of sight, so no one can just sit at one end of a long corridor, picking off anyone appearing at the other.

The central area of the map is particularly well-designed – a dry river bed with a bridge at either end and a hatch leading down to an underground maintenance room in the middle.

The maintenance room is a great place to dig in and defend, and the bridges make excellent vantage points, so fierce battles inevitably break out over control of these key areas, and you don’t get everyone just hovering around the edges like you do in many other maps.

If Liberation is about curves, Piazza is about criss-crossing diagonals. It’s also a much more vertical map than any other seen in Modern Warfare 3 so far.

There are steep slopes and staircases and several points where bridges cross over streets – and not just at boring 90-degree angles. It’s a manic, fast-paced map with a lot of corners that can, and often do, have trouble waiting around them.

As with Liberation, the lack of long, straight corridors means there aren’t any obvious vantage points, so you’re forced either to react quickly to sighted enemies before they disappear around corners, under bridges or behind pillars, or else be prepared for sudden, close-range gunfights.