Call of Duty 4: Cinematic in a good way

When I finish playing a really good game, I don't want to do anything else right afterwards. I don't want to play the game some more - not right after experiencing the ending - but I don't want to rub the experience out of my mind by doing something else; I just want to let it sink in. I suppose you could judge how much I was blown away by the game by how long it takes for me to feel normal again. Normally it's just a few minuetes.

I finished Call of Duty 4 three quarters of an hour ago.

There are any number of things I could praise about that game, but one that struck me was that it was cinematic in ways that few games are.

It has no cutscenes in the conventional sense; it never takes control away and pretends to be a movie. (Okay, not never, but very rarely.) It never changes perspective from first-person.

The action of the game has setpiece after setpiece that makes it feel like a well-written action movie. It relies heavily on scripted events, some of which don't require the player's input to resolve them. But there are so many scripted events that they don't stand out. The whole game is scripted, but in such a way that I'm acting out the lead role, not watching.

Take the flashback sniper mission. I know it's impossible to kill my target in the flashback, because he's alive in the main timeline. I haven't experimented, but I'm assuming that as long as I aim approximately at the target I will get the same result - his arm gets blown off but he survives. Dialogue beforehand has told me that I have to compensate for wind and the coriolis effect when aiming over this distance - basically, that the bullet will not hit in the dead center of my sights. If it was possible to succeed, this dialogue would be telling me about complications to the normal gameplay challenge. What the dialogue is actually doing is providing an excuse for the bullet to go astray by a small amount in any direction, so that it can always hit in the same place the plot requres.

There is, basically, no gameplay challenge here at all. But how much more immersive it is than if I'd seen my character firing the gun in a cutscene!

The overall structure of the game also borrows from movies. There's a pre-credits sequence (pre-credits mission), and then there are the opening credits - but the opening credits are from a first-person perspective, and are even 'playable' in that you can move your head from side to side as your temporary character is manhandled about. Then Act 1 starts - the missions are divided into three acts - and you're in a different character and a different location, and it's not initially obvious how it relates to the opening sequence. I switch mission-by-mission between two main characters and a couple of minor ones, just like a movie might focus on different characters' overlapping stories. There is a sequence where my character has no possible way to succeed, but it's still playable and therefore immersive in a way that a non-interactive sequence could never be. There is a flashback, but it's a playable flashback. The end credits are probably the only non-interactive sequence of any length, and after that there is a playable post-credits cookie.

I'm rambling. I'm nowhere near understanding how it works, but its triumph is that it manages to be like a great movie without ever being less like a video game.