When this game came out I hated it because I loved the original Call of Duty games that were super slow paced and more realistic. But eventually it became my main game playing till 4am on Xbox with friends. I miss the simplicity of COD MW.
Back when you'd hold positions and provide cover fire while someone would slowly push up or flank etc. It was a much different game before MW released.
I used to play this at gaming cafes in the early/mid 2000s with my buddies before we all had proper gaming computers alongside Battlefield 1942. Definitely not confusing it for Operation Flashpoint haha.
While I preferred MW2 to MW, I still really liked MW and thought it was better than all others besides MW2. I just got really good at cheesing certain class combos in MW2, which was the only way for me to be good at those games. I'm only OK at FPS games and was able to make use of things like the riot shield for holding points or heartbeat sensor and reload perks for C4 to get good K/D ratios. In MW I got a decent percentage of my kills from Danger Close because I died a lot, and goddamn that was a funny way to kill someone. I also felt MW2 was less sniper-friendly, and I suck both as a sniper and against snipers.
The original Call of Duty was my favorite. I didn't have a good computer so I played it at a LAN center for a good while. The game also kicked off a domino of events in my friends life when I gave him a CD key for it.
My friend got pretty good at the game and joined a competitive CAL-M team, and even played at a CPL championship tournament. Well after he graduated college one of the people he played with on the team and he started a company making websites. When he told me what he was doing, I told him just don't blow too much money on it.
They ended up pivoting from their original plan of making fitness blog sites, among other niche sites they felt could generate ad revenue to making flash game sites.
They did moderately well in their endeavors and scored some high ranking search results for a few categories of flash games. They were making hundreds of thousands each and he moved to another to save on income tax. In the new state he met a woman and they ended up getting married, so I was able to draw a direct path from me giving him a CD key for cod to him getting moderately wealthy and finding a wife.
Unfortunately the last domino hasn't fallen, and it turned out she was a lieing, money grubbing, cheating whore. Flash games died out but my friend moved on to other things. He is doing great, happily remarried and we both had our first kid within about a month of each other.