First impressions of Call of Duty: Black Ops

I played a few hours of singleplayer last night on Hardened. While playing this game you immediately notice differences in style and storytelling from the Infinity Ward games. Specifically, in Black Ops your field of view isn’t always controlled by you. Sometimes it even goes into third person. Also your character speaks, a lot, without you really knowing what the conversation is about.

A non-interrupting interaction between the gamer and the story could be the best model for maintaining the illusion. Half-Life or even the Infinity Ward games (I know that getting into vehicles is involuntary, but i would imagine coding that shit is too complex to make look right.) could be said to employ this model.

But play Black Ops and after a while you sort of gain a respect for their intentional pointing of a camera at an object, like a careful picture director, more cinematic and symbolic that way. I just wish they had devised a cool way to influence you to make to point your camera at that object. Like I've seen in Half-Life, a bright light or violent destruction. Or an NPC will say to you “LOOK UP THERE! ITS THE GMAN!” I like to call this an auditory cue. Black Ops, when not forcing you to look or be in a certain place, uses LOTS of these auditory cues - during firefights especially, and they can be pretty creative and specific. I like that. The story arc is strict, but crafted thoughtfully.

the main menu screen in Black Ops

The action in this game is insane. So much so that you start to feel bad for the people you are killing – its just not really a fair fight when you are walking around blowing everybody’s shit up with a portable mini-gun and all they have are ak’s that don’t seem to ever hit shit. In almost every mission the action climaxes with the sudden and unexpected introduction of a new weapon that you are trying out for the very first time. So in this way you are rewarded for working through all these training-you-to-use-a-gun-for-later tasks. The payoff is huge. In lots of instances I was just shooting and laughing my ass off. In one scene you blow a dude’s legs off as you fly through a window at the end of your 100-yard zip-line. That shit was HILARIOUS.

blowing an arm off with spas-12 incendiaries

The game is fuckin beautiful. With anti-aliasing off for slower processors it looks good still. Many times I was just staring at the follicles coming out of the enemy's head. Haha. I was at about a [5] too so it was nice. My favorite "holy shit look at that awesome shit" moment so far was getting the incendiary spas-12 shotgun.