I have spent the last three weeks living with my 22-year-old son in a two-bedroom flat he has dubbed the ”brotel”. We cook curries and watch Lanterns. We barbecue meat and analyse Tarantino movies.
We get pizza and we play video games. Boy, do we play video games! The first game I ever played in co-op with him was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in 2009, when he was five.
He wasn’t the most accomplished sidekick, not so great at placing a mobile gun turret while under fire from what seems like a bazillion enemy soldiers, but we had a laugh. It started the video game bond between us before his sister introduced him to Banjo-Kazooie and Rayman, and he stopped being a preschool warmonger. So how would it be tackling the same game nearly two decades later?
We start with the two Special Ops missions we used to play. We never completed them because, once again, he was five – and I am left-handed, which makes me rubbish at joypad-controlled first-person shooters without the help of auto targeting. Thankfully, one of those circumstances has now changed.
The first mission is officially called Evasion, but to us it has always been “the guard dogs in the snow”, because they got us every time we played. Our initial attempts highlight the differences between us as gamers. And men, if I’m being honest.
I sense calamity around every corner, so I creep forwards, mostly crouching, frequently crawling on my belly, slowly and carefully scouting for enemies using my sniper scope. Charlie is running through the level firing from the hip like Leeroy bloody Jenkins. Which means he alerts all the dogs, who for some reason are able to smell me from miles away and nom nom nom me to oblivion.
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