What started out as a franchise that built its name on World War Two games has certainly diversified in the last ten years. The first several games, which came out between 2003 and 2006, all dealt with that conflict. From different perspectives, history buffs and historically disinterested FPS fans alike got to take part in some of the most epic battles our species has ever known.

2007 brought something different in Modern Warfare, and when that game became recognized as an instant classic, winning numerous awards and selling about 16 million copies (as of 2013), Activision realized that they could get creative and their franchise need not be restrained to World War Two. The last ten years have produced two more Modern Warfare games, a twist-and-turn thrill ride starting out in the Cold War and spanning all the way until decades from now in the Black Ops games, along with three futuristic standalone titles that produced mixed responses in GhostsAdvanced Warfare and Infinite Warfare. Later in 2017, we are all anticipating this series making a long-awaited return to World War Two.

For every great thing we can say about the franchise, there are inevitable glitches, issues, bugs, and of course ample "video game logic" that makes this series as fun to laugh at is it has been to play. Here are twenty Call of Duty memes that the true fans will understand.

20 Do You Even War?

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As a general rule, and this should go without saying, in the real world snipers do not sprint around in the field haphazardly trying to pick off their enemies on the run. In contrast, those wielding assault rifles and submachine guns generally don't hide out and wait for enemies to come to them. We aren't combat experts, but it doesn't take much to know that combat is about seizing the initiative and sitting around waiting for a hapless enemy to come around a corner is a great way to get your name in the losing side of the history books. Of course, CoD is a video game, and try as they might, they do not mimic real life nearly as closely as they would like. Quick-scoping is hilarious and one of the most infuriating things to be on the receiving end of.

19 Don't Lie About Your Zombies Chops

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Among friend groups, a person who is capable, resourceful and keeps a cool head will one day be invaluable in the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Since we aren't dealing with that right now, all we have is zombie games and the beloved Black Ops/World at War series of zombie game modes. Some people do like to play up their skills, bragging about how long they stick to knife attack to conserve ammo, or how they never settle for anything less than head shots. Talk is cheap and often a player who talks the most is the one throwing their controller through the wall and getting dropped by the second or third wave. Some lies can be kept up and drawn out, but those who spread falsehoods about their Zombies prowess are quickly found out and it is generally as hilarious as it is embarrassing.

18 Playing The Game Doesn't Make You A Warrior

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There are many themes in this article and one of them is Call of Duty versus real life. The games are amazing for the most part and Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer, and Treyarch have all gone to great lengths to achieve realism, and make us feel not like we're playing a game, but like we are there. But of course, there is only so much a game can do.

Playing a game is nothing like being an actual soldier. Playing this series involves sitting on a couch with a controller in your hand, likely with some friends around, and maybe some soda/beer and pizza. Being a soldier requires absurd discipline, more dedication than most people can get their hands on, ridiculous respect for authority (no matter how stupid that authority figure is) and an actual willingness to put your body and mind through hell. Marines can easily be CoD players, and lots of soldiers do game, but very few among the FPS players out there should ever sign papers to enter military service.

17 Frustration, Thy Name Is Random Grenades

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For those who don't have the best memories, "Wet Work" was a multiplayer map situated on a massive cargo ship in Modern Warfare. It was notorious for tight spaces between shipping containers which caused serious headaches for many players. It was a fun map to play, but if you were new to the game, didn't know where to watch for grenades, or were unfamiliar with how to properly bound through the ship's surface, checking corners and such, it was a nightmare.

Several other maps were awful for random grenade deaths, including "Rust" in MW2 and "Nuketown" in the Black Ops trilogy, just to name a couple of the most annoying. The propensity to just chuck a grenade at the start of a match or life, is a weird mix of experience, hopefulness, and just being that kind of a jerk.

16 We Expected So Much More From Ghosts

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I feel like I say this every time I write something about CoD: Ghosts, but while I enjoyed it personally, I can absolutely understand why so many other fans of the series couldn't stand it. The characters lacked any real development, the story was problematically unusual and at times hard to follow. While the addition of a dog sounds like it would be a good move to try out, Riley was a good boy, but his addition in the game didn't bring much to the experience. At the end of the day, this game was seriously oversold, and we ended up with a familiar and frankly disappointing Call of Duty story. The only difference was a dog we wish had played a bigger part (and actually had more charisma than any of the main characters).

15 Not Much Changes From Game to Game

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Gordon Ramsay memes are among the funniest on the internet and have been for a while. For those so obsessed with video games that they aren't sure what food is, Ramsay is a chef and restaurant owner known for his legendary wit and intense temper. Some of his best insults include "I wouldn't trust you to run a bath, let alone a restaurant," and "My gran could do better, and she's dead!" All these memes are about food and include gems like "this chicken is so poorly cooked that a good vet could still save it". Among the video game ones is another with the caption "this meal is so poorly prepped that EA is trying to publish it" and of course this masterpiece. It's true, every Call of Duty game is a rehashed shooter on wheels, but we won't complain too much, the product is usually good.

14 What Do CoD Fans Want?

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This goes without saying, but no game developer will ever be able to come out with a game that all of their fans absolutely love. Okay, there are a few exceptions.

But when you're making a game for a franchise like Call of Duty, in which every player and their neighbor has some new idea about where the series should go, it gets tough. For ages, fans were asking for more modern content, and then the last two BO games came out, along with the more recent Ghosts, Advanced Warfare and Infinite Warfare and everyone started shouting for another World War Two "boots on the ground" title. We got what we wanted and then proceeded to piss all over it. Hilarious meme, spot on.

13 Interesting Priorities, MW2

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Modern Warfare did something impressive, and brought a terrifying glimpse of what a massive invasion of the United States might look like. In this mission, entitled "Wolverines!" —a reference to Red Dawn (a Cold War classic that didn't need to be remade) — Private Ramirez and his Ranger squad were right in the thick of battle, taking on massive groups of Ultra-nationalist scum with everything from their rifles to Predator drones. While we can't argue with the results, as this was a fantastic mission, one of the best in the game, in fact, we do question the strategic importance of a burger joint (no matter how delicious their onion rings may be) and a gas station. Of course, it is more likely that these areas served as a line in the sand rather than areas of any tactical necessity, but the meme's message still stands.

12 "Man, These Guys Are Elusive!"

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This is a nasty feeling to have about one's teammates, but we've all had it before. You're feeling invincible in a round of multiplayer. You're making some good shots, you're checking around corners, and your enemies are dropping like stones. Your stats are through the roof, but somehow your team is losing. Finally, you die for the first time and notice that most of the players on your team have killed nobody, but have died six or seven times. It is heartbreaking to have your own efforts essentially declared meaningless due to the incompetence of others. But that is a lesson in life from Call of Duty, no matter how well you do, if you're working with a team, someone else will manage to screw it all up.

11 People Responded Really Negatively To IW

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Earlier we briefly touched on how the evolution of Call of Duty left some dedicated fans of the early games feeling somewhat left behind and alienated, as the gameplay shifted from raw, gritty, infantry-based shooters, to more futuristic and unrelatable stories. Many of the complaints against the more recent games, including Ghosts, Black Ops 2 and and, of course, Advanced Warfare simply pointed out that the games seemed like they were taking too heavily from other series rather than telling good CoD style narratives. The fans really let Activision know how they felt when the Infinite Warfare reveal came out, and it remains the second most disliked video on YouTube to this day. Moral of the story: don't piss off your fan base.

10 Price Is Immortal

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There are a couple of interesting (but poorly concocted) fan theories about this series of games that argue that many of the games are in the same universe. They treat Captain Price as a mythical figure like Wolverine, who just participates in whatever conflict he can regardless of the time in which he is living. Of course, it is more likely that these are different Captain Price's and that the name and facial hair have all been kept similar for these many years as a novelty for the fans. Either way, if he is the same guy, whatever magical potions he is drinking or whatever he's putting on his skin and beard, they are certainly working for him.

9 The Game Was Pretty Damn Good

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This meme obviously came out before Infinite Warfare hit the shelves, but the message is one that can be replicated for post-release. We'll repeat ourselves and say yes, we understand that the futuristic titles are not what many players wanted, but others were fed up with the same game over and over again, so Activision offered something different. We mentioned earlier how poorly received the trailer was, but the hate-train didn't stop there, with people infuriated by the idea of the game as if it were some global catastrophe.

Looking at the game now, it is not the best in the series by any means, and the missions spent flying space ships felt like they were out of another franchise, but the story and gameplay were gripping, and the cast of characters was varied and interesting. While Battlefield 1 was by far the superior game, Infinite Warfare was a very good experience in its own right.

8 If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It

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It is rare that a multiplayer map in any franchise or game can become as much of an icon as "Nuketown." While the scene was never actually present in Call of Duty: Black Ops, it became a fan favorite nonetheless, as many recognized it as a facade town built for nuclear weapon testing back during the Cold War. The map is a difficult one and one in which a player can rack up a brilliant kill streak or an embarrassing amount of deaths. The map was brought back to much fanfare in both sequels to the first Black Ops game, but there was a problem, they didn't leave it alone. The map outline was left more or less intact, but everything was updated to fit the time of each new game. Any real fan of this map knows the original was all we ever needed.

7 Math Sucks, Video Games Are Awesome

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One of the most interesting elements in the Black Ops series was the prominence of clandestine brainwashing operations and the conspiratorial nature of the overarching narrative. While the Rogue AI story in BO3 and the hunt for Menendez in BO2 were all great, Treyarch struck gold with the original story of Alex Mason's brainwashing in Vorkuta after the botched assassination of Fidel Castro. His frequent flashbacks, the hallucination of him pulling a gun on Kennedy and of course, his gradual meltdown from "THE NUMBERS" are parts of what made this game such an exciting ride. This meme is hilarious, and if you feel like your world is spinning out of control during advanced math classes, we get it, stick to video games — they're better anyway.

6 What If We're All Just Normal People?

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Not being able to see the player who just killed you or who you just killed makes it easier to belittle or demean them. We've all been there, you're absolutely mangling the other team in team deathmatch and you exclaim, "what a bunch of losers, they must all be (insert vulgar, racist, homophobic slur here)" On on the flip side, when you're losing "these pieces of *expletive*, they must all live in their mom's basement."

We all know the reality, these days tons of people from all walks of life are gaming, including females in increasing numbers. Of course, telling someone who just got killed 20 times in a match that their opponent might be an awesome person who is talented at gaming is a sure fire way to get bludgeoned with a controller.

5 Video Game Logic: Killstreaks

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Another great example of video game logic is the killstreak system. Under normal circumstances, real life battles that are going well (not that any of them really go well, what with the mass killing and bloodshed) do not require the kind of help that killstreaks provide. The reward system exists to motivate players as an extra challenge, but in real life, the idea of waiting for a single soldier or squad to get a certain number of kills before sending in support, whether it be helicopters, dogs, or even a tactical nuke is as stupid as it is funny. But then again, it all comes down to video games against real life, real life makes sense, video games make us entertained, logic is overrated.

4 That's An Impressive Knife

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This is a common theme in just about any first person shooter. Even looking back to GoldenEye 007, the chop (okay slap, whatever) was very overpowered, and it has only gotten more ridiculous over time. The melee attacks in Halo games were ridiculous, but then again, John is a cyborg and has an exo-suit that provides perks for strength. But nowhere is it more pronounced than in the Call of Duty games. Foes can survive multiple shots from a firearm shooting 5.56 rounds (also .308, 9mm, whatever you're packing), and some enemies won't drop from a shot from a Barrett .50 cal. That being said, if you so much as slice them anywhere with a knife, they will drop like a rock and you can move on. Then again, in multiplayer, if you can get close enough to someone to use the knife, that character deserves it.

3 This Is A Satisfying Feeling

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There is nothing more infuriating than a camper. We all do it from time to time, and it is a useful way to get an easy kill or two if you need to get a couple more for a killstreak, but anyone who has ever been the victim of a decent player who camps, it is a great feeling to be able to get back at that person. The image is from a Family Guy episode in which Lois Griffin is about to be killed by newscaster Diane Simmons. Stewie, the maniacal baby who is constantly trying to kill Lois, sees what is going on and takes out Diane, wanting to be the one who kills his mother. Call of Duty players are well versed with this feeling.

2 Online Smack Talk

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If you've been playing Call of Duty multiplayer since the beginning, you've probably heard a number of death threats that would make you nervous to sleep at night if you had heard them from someone you knew in real life. But in this case, the threats, taunts, and overall verbal abuse is generally coming from some faceless cretin we'll never meet who can't take the humiliation of being beaten in an online game. Many people claim it is only the immature twelve-year-olds, but it isn't too much of a stretch to say that many of these "quick-witted geniuses" have suspiciously low voices for twelve years old. We'd be willing to bet that plenty of guys in their 20s, 30s, and 40s have said horrible things to people online in a fit of rage.

1 Painfully True

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This is likely one of the most irritating realities of any first person shooter. While you're playing through the campaign, you're the Messiah, you're the be-all end-all of a magnificent warrior and can do no wrong. You see the enemy before they see you and you generally drop them before they even know you're there. Then you beat that campaign and think "alright, time to go dominate in multiplayer," only to realize that you're squared off against another legion of people, just like you, and some have been in multiplayer for a while. All of a sudden, the targets are moving faster and more elusively, and they are firing back with more accuracy. In the early stages of learning a new game's multiplayer maps, you may well feel like a useless stormtrooper, simply there for cannon fodder while your team's Darth Vader does the actual killing.