Mike Wing, who’s already crafted other off-beat apps like Steam Sale Simulator and Xbox 360 Messenger, uploaded Call of Duty Ambience to AppDrop, a site where developers can upload their own small applications. “Most people fall asleep to white noise… I fall asleep to grown men arguing in CoD lobbies,” Wing wrote as the app description. Supposedly, it can play CoD voice chats in a loop, and based on my testing, there’s a bunch of recordings for each game that you can select.
Black Ops 1, Black Ops 2, and Modern Warfare 2 – all part of what many consider to be CoD’s best era – are included via a dashboard which mimics Xbox 360’s, sound effects included. Once inside, you can even click around, though only the ‘back’ button actually works, taking you back to the starting menu. As for the voice chats themselves, expect a cacophony of slurs, colourful insults, strange anecdotes, and of course, background noise due to badly calibrated mics. This might sound alien (and problematic) to younger gamers, but there’s a weirdly nostalgic quality to it all.
New Call of Duty games are still among the largest online releases each year, but something was lost when persistent lobbies – game ‘rooms’ that weren’t disbanded after each match – were pushed aside. Last year’s (otherwise divisive) Black Ops 7 partially brought them back, yet that feeling of developing feuds and alliances with random players has been lost for the most part. Of course, other online shooters still work with dedicated servers and persistent lobbies, but it’s not surprising to see those still loyal to the largest military FPS series ever ask for a return to a better sense of community despite the normalised hostilities that maybe are better left behind.
For now, Black Ops 1 and 2 have made a return on PlayStation consoles with so-so ports that essentially work and behave like the original releases that were still playable on Xbox, so that might give Xbox and Activision a better sense of what the series’ core audience is looking for.
