LogFAQs > #948944616

BetrayedTangy posted...

Also if I can find a cheap copy of Black Ops on PS3 I'd be happy to play some Zombies after you beat the campaign

Sure, that sounds fun. I might be a bit of a liability in Zombies though.

ctesjbuvf posted...

Well...

Interesting. It will be a nice surprise if I'm proven wrong on that one.

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I started Black Ops today, and played up until the first mission where you control a Russian guy instead of the American protagonist. Judging by the mission select screen, that's about halfway through the game, so if I don't finish it next time I play I'll try and at least close it out on the next session after that.

Black Ops tells the story of a guy named Mason, who, along with a couple of buddies, is part of the worst Black Ops squad in the entire world. You'd expect things like secrecy and plausible deniability to come into Black Ops, but these guys never complete a mission without at least a few city-wide firefights. The game employs a slightly unorthodox narrative structure: a shadowy organization of some kind are interrogating Mason, and most of the game's events are flashbacks he has during this process, which reveal a kind of "greatest hits" of his career. First he gets captured trying to assassinate Fidel Castro (and, incidentally, the history of American attempts on Castro's life is absolutely hilarious and definitely worth reading up on. The CIA came up with some really crazy ideas to kill Castro. A more mundane example is trying to blow him up with an explosive cigar, but there was also a scheme to defame him by making his beard fall out,) he makes friends with a Russian revolutionary in a gulag, and he's around for both the Cuban Missile Crisis and the latter days of the Vietnam war. The real purpose of this whole storytelling device, though, is that it lets the game skip everything that happens to Mason besides explosive shoot-outs.

I've been playing on normal, but I turned off the game's very powerful auto-aim in the first mission because even I thought that made things too easy. I've still managed to die quite a few times because I'm just that bad at games. I guess the defining trait of the gameplay is that it's very linear. Halo gives you a decent amount of agency in terms of how you approach challenges and objectives. You can leave behind the vehicles when it offers them for example, but Call of Duty always has an exact itinerary for you to follow: you have to go where it tells you when it tells you, and it's always giving you exact instructions on how to complete every objective. There are some things like C4 explosives that I think are only usable in context-sensitive situations where the game forces you to use them and in an exact location. Most fights are really big with tons of enemies as well as allied NPCs, so as long as Mason doesn't die the game will sort of slowly complete itself for you even if you aren't doing much to help. It does lead to a lot of exciting set-pieces, like harpooning a helicopter or mowing down Russian prison guards with a minigun, but they're always very scripted.

This is another one of those games that makes me feel old. Disorientation and sensory overload are the defining feelings it evokes for me. Between the flashbacks constantly getting interrupted with missions ending or moving to new areas really abruptly and the game only really having the one mood in the form of full-tilt hyperactive battles with things exploding everywhere, it's just a little much for me. At one point during a major firefight in Vietnam I caught myself thinking "I want to go to bed."

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 13/129
Currently Playing: Call of Duty: Black Ops