Last CoD game I bought was 4, because it was on PC and it was the game to play at the time. And I honestly did enjoy, both the single player and the multiplayer. Single player is pretty much worthless these days in shooters, unless it's Wolfenstein.
But I remember when all this shit started back with like.....CoD 2? I remember playing a demo, and being amazed at the non-stop enemies spawning atmospherically instead of popping into existence like most FPS had up to that point, if they had spawns at all. I remember the Saving Private Ryan grenade effects on your vision and hearing, and just the constant stream of dudes to mow down. One of the first things I did was march up to the spawn point and starting wasting dudes as they hopped over fences or through windows. All in all, I was pretty amazed how much faster and fluid and cinematic it was to the previous generation of shooters. I don't know if CoD was the first to do these things, but I think it was the first to do them really well, and smoothly, with none of the woodeness I remember out of Medal of Honor.
Fast forward...what....8 or 9 games now? And the same things that made it really interesting to me are now industry standard tropes in the genre, along with Tacticool, absurd doomsday storylines that all end the same way every time, an orgy of visuals and your occasionally controversial moment. On top of the game getting faster and more arcadey.
Maybe this is what it means to get old, and feel pretty disenfranchised from popular culture. I just can't really get into it anymore. The bombast just makes me want to laugh, and the amount of crap that's on your screen just makes me not to want play. I'm not really reserving this for CoD anymore either. I used to really like Battlefield and played it up to....hell I don't even know what version it's now. But sorta the same story. Ranking up. Unlocks. Perks. Kill streaks. Eh. I used to really like these things and the whole presentation, but of the last 3 or 4 years, I just don't get into it like I used to. I think I'm kinda waiting on the next evolution of shooters to get back into it again, because I want something fresh, not the desperately rehashed and re-used gameplay of the last 8 to 10 years.