Well, I know this isn’t strictly IT, but as you may know, us techies need time off one in a while to play Xbox or watch Star Trek – and if I can’t rant here, I’ll only bore the folks down at the Commodore 64 club.
I generally only get round to blogging when I’ve been a bit annoyed by something, it’s a good release, and today my target is the horribly overly hyped COD7 Black ops. It sucks. Really. Badly. Truely.
I really wanted to enoy this game, I had it on pre-order for the princely sum of £42.00 and had eagerly been looking forward to it, having enjoyed the previous Modern Warfare 2. Modern warfare had such at atmospheric campaign, interesting maps, and an really good multi-player. It was however let down a *lot* by the lack of attention paid by the developers in fixing the boosting issues, who understandably, but annoyingly, preferred to focus on selling new maps instead.
I was kind of hoping Black Ops would be a fixed version of MW2 with new maps & some of the excellent team-play features pinched from BFBC2. Unfortunately Activision sacked the previous developers for some reason, and apparently found some guys in a pub who played a game once, so used them instead.
If you’re unfortunate enough to have parted with your money, The first thing to strike you will be the the visuals – the graphics are horrible – brightly lit, lots of primary colours that invoke no war-like atmosphere at all. Once you’ve died a few times for actually trying to explore the terrain rather than following the arrow in front of you, you might try some fun stuff – like throwing grenades that drop like lead, or firing shotguns that sound like.. well, quite unlike shotguns really.
The single player campign in MW2 was pretty epic – as well as the usual battles, there was some really edge-of-the-seat moments where you would sneak around in dim light or snowstorms to avoid alerting the enemy. COD 7 Has discarded with such subtleties in favour of gameplay not too far evolved from Duke Nukem. But with worse AI.
Delving into multiplayer is like a step back in time; A horrendous mixture of instantly-forgetable small maps, halo-style rollerskate gameplay. There are a few saving graces in the leveling system, currency etc, but theres no hiding quite what a stinker of & run & gunner this is.
and Zombies? – well yes, quite fun, for a bit – but a suitable replacement for Special Ops? …
Back to BFBC2 for me. Just roll on that Vietnam expansion.