Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 closed out the story trilogy centered on Task Force 141 and Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Makarov. The campaign takes the player through New York, Berlin, Paris, Hamburg, and Dubai, and picks up directly from the end of Modern Warfare 2, including the aftermath of the invasion of the US on the American coast - and it's this very campaign in which the series lost one of its key characters, Sergeant Soap MacTavish. Alongside the action campaign, the game also offers the cooperative Spec Ops mode, expanded with a new wave-based Survival mode, and a full-fledged multiplayer with the Strike Packages reward system, which at the time underpinned much of the entire series' popularity.

On PlayStation 3, the game launched on the same day as on Xbox 360 and PC, and it's practically an identical title - the same engine, the same campaign, and the same multiplayer with no content cuts. The PS3 version was also, alone among the three main platforms, the only one to offer support for the PlayStation Move controller, which allowed aiming via hand movement instead of the classic analog stick, similar to Black Ops a year earlier. The main difference, however, lay behind the scenes: Activision had a deal with Microsoft for timed exclusivity on map packs (Content Collection 1-4), so PS3 owners received them with a delay of several weeks to a month compared to Xbox 360. Shortly after release, minor technical issues also surfaced - frame-rate drops in hectic firefights and somewhat longer loading times for multiplayer matches - which developers gradually fixed with patches.

In gameplay terms, then, the PS3 version is in no way inferior to its Xbox 360 counterpart, only the network infrastructure ran through PlayStation Network instead of Xbox Live, and access to new paid content was slower. For players who owned MW3 exclusively on a Sony console in 2011, this mainly meant having to wait a bit longer for new maps and possibly reaching for the Move controller, not a diminished experience of the game itself.

Why play it: For players who in 2011 owned only a Sony console, the PlayStation 3 version didn't offer a diminished experience - just a network running through PlayStation Network and a slower arrival of new maps.