I finally got back to finishing Call of Duty 4 today, blowing through all of Act 3 in one shot, which didn’t actually take that long since it’s fairly short. It was mostly straightforward firefights, but it was mostly about the plot at that point.

The notable parts were a timed crawl through the underground corridors of the launch control centre, which I managed to clear with about three minutes left (out of 11), and the truck ride as you’re escaping, which is a traditional rail shooter segment but the enemy vehicles crash and burn in interesting ways. There’s also an interesting post-credits mission on an airplane, though it’s not clear how or even if it fits in to the story.

Completing it also unlocked arcade mode and the cheats. I’m not really too interested in the arcade mode, where you just redo missions under time and respawn limits and score points for kills. And I only unlocked some of the cheats, and the ones I got are mostly cosmetic graphics changes (making the view high-contrast, or inverted), but there’s a really amusing ‘ragtime’ cheat where the graphics become sepia-toned and flecked with scratches, everything happens 20% faster, and old-timey ragtime music plays instead of the usual audio.

I’ll leave it installed for now in case I want to try the multiplayer a bit, since it’s supposed to be excellent, but I’m not sure if I’ll have the time. I’ve still got other shooters like Crysis and STALKER to play, though after all these other shooters I might try something different first.