A certain video game that once upon a time featured the Taliban has leaked. I only bring this up because this prompted me to check Steam to see how much they want for the game: oh, right, $59.99. But then I also noticed this: last year’s FPS—that’s first-person sensation—Modern Warfare 2 is on sale right now on Steam.

Yes, the game is available for 33 percent off the regular price. That is, $40.19.

The additional map packs are also available at a discount: they’re going for $7.49 each.

If I recall correctly, the campaign in Modern Warfare 2 takes less than 10 hours to complete. You could beat it in a weekend, easily.

Still playing Modern Warfare 2 online? Better you than me! In any event, it has now been confirmed that the next pack, named the Resurgence Pack, will be released on June 3. It will contain five maps…

But only three of those maps are new—”Vacant” and “Strike,” maps from the old game, are included in the pack.

You’re looking at $15 (well, 1,200 Microsoft points!) for the pack. So if you’ve bought the two packs, that means you’ve shelled out $30 for a couple of maps. Is that insane to anyone else? Remember the good old days when you could download mods and custom maps for free, created by some guy in his free time?

Where has the romanticism in gaming gone?

Quick note, friends. One of the better Steam weekend deals in recent memory is live right now. It’s Civilization IV and all of its expansion packs for $10. That’s pretty much ridiculous any way you look at it. (Oh, and Modern Warfare 2 multi-player is free this weekend, if you’re into “that.”)

You’ll recall that the two bigwigs at Infinity Ward, Jason West and Vince Zampella, left the studio a few months back under, well, insane circumstances. It’s basically he said, she said, only involving lawsuits, hired goons, and Activision, the least popular video game publisher according to a recent GameFaqs poll. Yes, I just cited a GameFaqs poll. West and Zampella didn’t like the way Activision were treating them, and Activision alleges that the two were looking to leave Infinity Ward and perhaps start up a new studio under the watchful eye (and with the gigantic bank account) of EA. Funnily enough, West and Zampella have done just that, forming a new development studio called Respawn Entertainment. Wonder how Dice, makers of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, feels about all of this?

The new studio will remain independent of EA, creating games under the auspices of EA Partners.

Zampella called it a ” fresh start for Jason and me. For the past decade we led a great development team and poured our hearts into creating an epic game franchise. We’re very proud of what we built—and proud that so many millions of fans enjoyed those games. Today we hope to do it all over again—open a new studio, hire a great team, and create brand new games with a new partner, EA.”

The duo worked for EA in the past, creating Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for the PC. It was basically a better (and harder) version of the PS2′s Medal of Honor: Frontline. The Allied Assault version of the D-Day level is pretty much the hardest level I’ve ever played, ever.

Here’s a handy chart! (I don’t know how this thumbnail nonsense works.)

Now, it was no big secret that it would sell like gangbusters (in spite of that $15 price tag), but the real figures probably have Activision execs seeing stars. According to a recent press release, sales have shattered Xbox Live records for downloadable content: 1 million people downloaded it within 24 hours, and more than 2.5 million copies were sold within the first week of its release. We here at CrunchGear would like to offer our most sincere congratulations to all parties involved, but seriously, can we get more than 5 maps next time?

Actually, it might be the best fan-made Call of Duty: Modern Warfare live action movie you’ll ever see, and it only cost $209.42 to make says the YouTube description. Here’s hoping that part 2 comes real soon.

STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING~! MODERN WARFARE 2 WILL BE FREE ON STEAM THIS WEEKEND, AND THIS WEEKEND ONLY. THAT MEANS YOU HAVE 48 HOURS TO BEAT A FIVE-HOUR GAME, THEN PLAY MULTI-PLAYER TILL YOU GROW BORED OF IT.

Man alive, how great would it be to be rich? You could afford crazy things like, I don’t know, new shoes, healthy food, and six 20-inch monitors to play Modern Warfare 2 with. That’s the dream.

So as you can see, the game scales quite well across all six screens—the only “glitch” occurs when text gets cut off at the bezel of the TV.

ATI’s Eyefinity technology makes this magic possible. The 5800 series of cards (and up, presumably) allow you to span compatible games across several screens. It’s not something you’re going to find at a Best Buy demo area or whatever, so people were freaking out while they passed by.

Pretty neat, I thought.

Yup, it’s still $15.

NowGamer

A lot of people think they should be getting the old maps for free. Don’t you think 1200 MSP is a little bit expensive for what is essentially three new maps?

Rob,

I have no doubt that anyone who downloads this map pack is going to get their money’s worth. They’re going to feel their investment is worthwhile. Because if you’re playing Modern Warfare 2 like myself or many other people do every night, that’s actually going to give you a bunch of new mileage and a bunch of extra gameplay – to really explore and discover them and to really, you know, come up with new tactics and experience them in a whole new way. Regardless of what the price is you’re going to feel your money’s well-spent.

You know all those drones you kids use to rain grim death upon your unfortunate friends in Modern Warfare 2? Well, according to an American University law professor’s Congressional testimony, they may be illegal under international law. Of course, they could be totally fine, too, it’s just that nobody really knows for sure. That’s probably not what the U.S. military wants to hear, given how much it has spent, and will spend, on drones.

The deal is that the U.S. government has never actually justified, on a legal basis, its use of drones. It has never written a memo, went in front of a Congressional committee, tweeted a quick thought—nothing. The question becomes, OK, at some point you’re going to have to explain the legality of these things, so what’s the hold up?

Or, in the words of the professor, one Kenneth Anderson:

[Lawyers] have not settled on what the rationales are, and I believe that at some point that ill serves an administration which is embracing this. Now, maybe the answer is: This is really terrible and illegal and anybody that does it should go off to the Hague. But if that’s the case, then we should not be having the president saying that this is the greatest thing since whatever. That seems like a bad idea.

Hmm, you’d think the government would have cleared that up before deploying all of those drones…

It gets better! It’s cool and all when the U.S. military has a monopoly on drone technology, but what happens when a proper rival gets a hold of them? Do we, as Americans, want to straddle this line of legality ad infinitum, then find out that Rival Country now has ‘em, too?

We occasionally write about drones because they’re quite neat: the amount of engineering and research and development that goes into drones is well worth any tech fan’s attention, if only for a moment.

Maybe by the time Modern Warfare 13: Still Fighting comes out, the legal status of drones would have been cleared up.

There’s no doubting it anymore: British TV is miles ahead of American TV. A show over there called, quite descriptively, “The Gadget Show,” pit a proper solider against the Xbox 360 controller-wielding host in a little Modern Warfare 2 showdown. I insist that you watch it.

Is it too early in the morning for senseless violence? If you’re American, it’s never too early for violence, senseless or otherwise! Anyhow, some dude, presumably named Michael Barnes, put together a legitimately good machinima of No Russian, that stupid level from Modern Warfare 2 I can’t embed it, so you’ll have to actually go to YouTube to see it. Ah, this brings back memories of last fall, when everyone was freaking out over the level. I eventually concluded that it was barbaric and plain ol’ not fun, but feel free to disagree. Fair warning: the video is quite violent, as you might expect.

There’s a new Modern Warfare 2 map pack coming this Spring, kids. The map pack, possible dubbed Stimulus Package, comes with five maps, with two of them being classic COD4 maps. Curious what they’re going to look like? You better hurry up and click through for the video preview hosted be Vimeo. Activision already pulled the YouTube version.

The press release claims that only “a handful of entertainment properties that have ever reached the $1 billion mark.” I would love to rattle off some of those properties here, but I’ve been so far unable to dig up any supporting data. Let’s assume for the sake of this post that the Sims, Half-Life 2, and one of the Mario games reached that mark. So much for that boycott, eh? I found the game amazing and plan on playing through it again starting today.

Spore was the most pirated game of 2008, but that needs to be viewed through the lens of EA wrapping the legitimate, retail copy of the game with all sorts of DRM nonsense that made it unplayable under certain situations. You know, like putting the disc in your drive and expecting it to work. It was easier to pirate it than play the copy you bought at the store. Insane, yes. Modern Warfare 2 was the most pirated game of 2009, also known as “this year,” primarily because it was backed by a zillion dollar marketing campaign. That, and people like shooting at each other, virtually.

TorrentFreak estimates that Modern Warfare 2 was downloaded some 4.1 million times this year via BitTorrent. There’s, at best, no way in hell to determine how many times the game was downloaded from Usenet, Rapidshare (and its equivalents), and burned once then passed around entire dorm room buildings on college campuses from San Diego to Stuttgart, from Pensacola to Pretoria.

That’s for the PC and Xbox 360 version, mind you. While it’s trivial to pirate a PC game, it takes slightly more wherewithal to pirate an Xbox 360 game, though no more than the average 16-year-old can attain in a few hours’ worth of forum-lurking.

You know Activision will be mightily upset to read this news, but you have to figure at least one guy on the Infinity Ward roster, perhaps a QA employee, is all, “Yes! You liked it! You really, really liked it!”

Meanwhile, anyone with a brain and a hankering for some multi-player FPS action is playing Team Fortress 2. That, or Quake III Arena.

Picture is unrelated because I’m tired of putting that same damn MW2 screenshots in every post about the game

You would have been foolish to assume that Modern Warfare 2 would treat foreign cultures with any sort of reverence. First there was the rubbish accents in the Rio de Janeiro level(s). Then there was “No Russian,” which, well you know what happened there. Now there’s this: there’s Arabic all over the Karachi multi-player level. Why is this an issue? Oh, only that Arabic isn’t spoken in Pakistan (Karachi is Pakistan’s largest city).

No, Arabic is not a main language of Pakistan. Realistically, there’s no reason why the Modern Warfare 2 representation of the game should be littered with Arabic language signs. And yet it is so!

The country has two official languages in Urdu and English. Urdu, like many other languages, in written using the Arabic alphabet. You know, just like how English and Italian and Spanish and German and French are all written with the same alphabet (the Latin alphabet) but are completely different languages. Same thing with Urdu and Arabic: just because they both use the same script doesn’t mean they’re the same language.

Not if you’re Infinity Ward, I guess.

Now, is this is big deal? To most people no, it patently isn’t, but you’d think big budget games like Modern Warfare 2 would try to be as authentic as possible.

How dumb would it look to be playing a game set in Paris with all the street signs in Dutchor Swedish? I mean really.

More importantly, what would we do without Wikipedia?

We’ve all seen MythBusters when there’s nothing else on TV, right? Right. Well here’s a video showing a Modern Warfare 2 several game myths either busted or confirmed. Well, mainly confirmed. Sorta reminds me of that Halo Warthog video.

Good news, people who play Modern Warfare 2 online multi-player. It seems Infinity Ward has fixed the dreaded “javelin exploit” that has plagued multi-player matches since the game’s launch.

This patch is for the Xbox 360 version (the PC and PS3 versions have already been patched), and brings the game up to version 1.06.

As a refresher, here’s the javelin exploit, complete with Benny Hill music. Can we let that song die already?

Modern Warfare 2, now censored in Japan. The game, which Square Enix publishes tomorrow, changes the way the level “No Russian” works. Here, killing civilians is a no-no.

Killing civilians inside the airport results in a game over. So, don’t do it!

The game’s text was also edited to read, “Kill ‘em, the Russians” instead of “Remember, no Russian.” Why that’s a better way to go about things, especially when you can’t kill your Russian partners either, I don’t know.

What else is there to say, really? Pretty sure y’all are sick of “No Russian” discussion, so I won’t bore you any more.