Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread! I’m your host, Wolfman Jew, and I have a problem. One that’s pretty apparent in the header.

So I’ve been doing this series for all of 2024 where I play a game from 2009 a month and review it. One of the ones I felt I needed to do was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, given that it was the best-selling game of the year and is extremely culturally important. Forget the fact that I constantly call the franchise fascist and militarist and actively malicious. Late last year, I bought it and a few other games off Ebay (in this case, I think it was for about five dollars). I, somewhat foolishly, didn’t bother checking them, but that wasn’t a problem. The DVDs I got of Eat Lead, The Saboteur, and Wii Sports Resort all worked fine!

And then on Saturday, I pulled out the copy of Modern Warfare, stuck it in the Series X, and hoo boy was that thing in pain. It huffed and whined like it was horribly constipated, the game itself didn’t show up, and it was only after manually ejecting it that I see the problem: a big fucking crack that I should’ve seen before I put it in to begin with. I felt the need to give my Xbox a rub to help its stomach aches. I didn’t, to be clear. I decided to take the opportunity to finish Dead Space. It works just fine, as did a five or so second test of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, though maybe I should do some more tests to be sure.

I have since purchased another Ebay copy of MW2 for eight dollars, meaning that I own two copies of a blockbuster game that lets you shoot up an airport. It’s coming in over a week, which isn’t great for the turnaround time of this series but is mollified by the fact that these campaigns take barely any time. I should probably contact the first game’s seller, but you know me. I don’t want to make a scene. Though on a related note, I believe this is actually the very first time in my life that I’ve experienced a fully nonworking game. I’ve bought a ton of used games over the years, and all of them worked perfectly fine. But this just didn’t. And thus, my extremely personal prompt: have you ever bought a fully unusable game? Have you had to look at a CD with a crack this big, or bigger? Have you been stuck with an old game cartridge that doesn’t work at all? And is this experience making me think that I need to go back to my Wii U to make sure it’s still functional (yes. The answer to that one is yes)?

Anyway, as we marvel at this horrible disc, what did you play this weekend? And for you Americans in the Games Thread, happy Election Day and remember to vote!

Oh, and as a last minute edit, Lily Bones’ latest Game News Roundup is now out!