Black Ops is down. What did I think of this best-seller? Yeah, it was fun. It's even more stupidly action-packed than the previous one I played, which was Modern Warfare. The story is way more convoluted, involving brainwashing, flashbacks, multiple playable characters, tons of other story characters, 'Nam, historical fiction, and...zombies? I literally had no idea what was going on except for the biggest picture idea. The story seemed very pointless, as in, I'm sure it would make a good book, but since most of the story is explained in these fuzzy Saw, Clockwork Orange, Manhunt 2-esque cut scenes that mostly involve a lot of yelling and cursing, I was having a hard time paying attention and following it. The rest of the story unfolds during gameplay moments, and I preferred these because they fit nicely within the action context. I would have enjoyed a simpler story that didn't have to try and be so deep and twisting. The simpler story would allow the game to focus on what it's best at: action. The story as it is made the action infinitely more confusing, although still entertaining in and of itself.
Overall though, I enjoyed the single player campaign more than CoD 4. I have a feeling it's because of the way objectives were handled this time, and just the faster pacing of the levels. In each level, there are a lot of objectives, and constant waypoints, so you are constantly moving toward a small goal. It kept me very focused on what I was doing and how I was moving forward. I seemed to complete an objective every 5 minutes, and it felt like a big victory because this game I found to be more difficult than CoD 4. I died a lot, had to replay a lot, and despite the numerous objectives, had to do a good amount of trial and error in learning how to take down enemy helicopters (my biggest cause of death), learning how to push back enemy troops with barrels of napalm (the one I retried the most), and so on. I liked the difficulty. There are too many stupidly easy games out there. So, the objectives, and the NPCs that always accompany you, make each level and each moment very dynamic. I never really knew what was going to happen next and always felt right in the thick of things. That's another way this differed from CoD 4. In 4, you were always just with your squad, one squad or another. In Black Ops, your allies are way more varied. Sometimes it's you and one other person. Other times it's you and like an entire army. The flow of the levels and the presence of all the other characters just makes everything feel so right.
Black Ops had one stand-out level. That was when you, as one character, give RTS-like orders (move, attack, stand ground, etc.) to a squad on the ground from inside a helicopter. From time to time, for important acts, you take the role of one of the ground units that you were controlling, and you go clear out the barracks or whatever. Then the role shifts back to the sky, and you order the ground units around some more. I thought that was a very cool way to play a level, but the part was actually really short. Other than that, I didn't feel there were too many 'wow' moments where the game was doing something I hadn't seen before.
CoD, of course, is really a multiplayer game, and I've been having some fun there with James. We've been playing on Xbox Live every night, getting our asses kicked all over the internet. Alex leveled up James' profile since Christmas to level like 30 (out of 50), so the game thinks we're waaaay better than we actually are. Thus, we consistently bring our team down and are directly responsible for bad losses. It's pretty funny when we get matched as the 'high' ranked players on our team. It'll be like us two at 35, then a 30, 25, 15, 5, 5 vs like 50, 40, 30, 10, 10, 10 or something, and it's like...yeah, our two 35s are actually like 10s. But it's still a lot of fun. I really like some of the maps. One is called Nuketown, and it's a small map modeled for ABC street in suburbia with pastel houses, manicured lawns, picket fences, and mannequin white families. Another is Firing Range, which is a massive firing range with moving targets and a lot of tin-roofed buildings to run through. Really great multi-player levels.
I went back and played some CoD4 online in hopes of that helping me with Black Ops online performance, but it didn't really work. It's kind of hard to translate mouse and keyboard expertise to a gamepad. I did consistently better than James though, but that's not saying much. We found out that on hardcore mode (less health, no regeneration, no attachments, no radar, friendly fire on), that we could kill one another. That's after he shot me to death. I got him back with a knife, and then we called a truce. I also found out you get negative points for friendly kills.
But but but the coolest thing about Black Ops that I discovered tonight is the zombie survival mode. It begins with JFK, Robert Macnamara, Richard Nixon, and Fidel Castro all sitting around a table. The zombies start busting in and JFK yells something like "they're breaking in!" and Nixon responds something like "there's no break-in! what break-in?!" ha-ha. You begin with a pistol in a room. Zombies bust through windows and walls. You get points for shooting zombies and barricading broken windows and holes in the walls. You can spend points on weapons and on progressing through the level (500 points to open this door, 250 points to ride the elevator, etc.). I assume there's some goal at the end, but we never made it too far. We got as far as realizing we had to cut the power on in both the zombie levels, but never actually cut it on. It seems like a cool game mode though. Zombies aren't actually part of the story unless I missed something, so I guess they're just having fun with the zombie craze. Maybe the next CoD game will have vampires...
One final note is that the multiplayer is designed even better than CoD 4 to make you want to play forever. There are near endless things to upgrade. I can't imagine how much playtime it must take for people to acquire all the guns and all the attachments and stuff. Then now there are challenges to beat, and achievements to unlock, and all this stuff with each and every gun and each and every attachment. There are also contracts, endlessly repeatable money-rewarding tasks like Get 20 Kills in 40 Minutes or Win 3 Domination Matches, etc. ,etc. And there are the equivalent of daily quests every day, just randomized challenges that reward extra CoD points (to buy weapons and things). MMO design meets online FPS. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Considering I'm a rank 9 on CoD 4 after like 3 months, I don't think it matters to me personally, but shooters aren't my favorite thing. I suppose the more designers can figure out how to reward 'dailies' or just more play time, the more people are going to keep playing, if it's fun of course. I wouldn't be surprised to see the dailies idea popping up in more and more types of online, or even single-player, games in the future.
So, CoD, glad I played it, and I hope James is able to smoke me on Xbox Live next time I'm home.
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I'm not trying to make a ton of new entries and logs, but I'm sitting around at my mom's with not much else to do but read, watch TV, and play games, and so it's happening.
I've downloaded a lot of new music since I've been home this break and decided to open up Audiosurf to "ride" some of it. I've watched videos of Audiosurf, but playing it is better! I love how you can feel the track moving underneath you to the beat and tempo of the music. I tried out various oldies, metal, rock, techno, and acoustic stuff to get a feel for some different things. Audiosurf creates a unique track for each song. The point of the game is to navigate your ship left and right to stack blocks, 3 of a color, that come down the track to the beat. More intense parts of songs have "hot" colored blocks, and they come faster and are worth more points. Slower parts have cool colors like blue and purple and are easier to stack, but worth less. Syncopated beats make bumpy tracks, and things will speed up and slow down during stops and gos. I found that the most fun songs to play aren't just super fast ones, but ones that change tempos and beats because it makes the tracks quite dynamic. Super fast metal songs are fun and totally intense, and slow acoustic tracks are mellow, but the slow-fast-slow stuff, whatever you can find like that, is my favorite.
I am most surprised by all the different variations of gameplay. One mode you just match colored blocks and avoid gray ones. All these different modes are with different ships, so one you can rearrange the board to match colors, another you can grab a block and hold it to use later, another you can jump or spread out to cover all 3 lanes at once. It's pretty cool, but I had the most fun with just the basic "casual" modes. The others are just too insane for me to care about perfecting, but it's awesome that so many hardcore play styles are supported. I tried some technical death metal in Ironmode and I don't know how anyone could keep up! I definitely foresee playing this from time to time in the future. In a way, it makes me pay attention to the music more than I would if I were listening to stuff while doing something else since the music is wrapped up in the movement of the character.
I even showed it to my mom and she things it's neat. We did co-op Beatles songs for a while. The universal stat tracking is awesome too. I didn't play a single song that hadn't been played before, which surprised me. You can even hold top spots and it tells you you're in first place for some song. I imagine this game brings out the competitiveness of anyone who likes it, even if it's just a little competitiveness. I sure feel it! I'm going to tell some folks about it and see if I can't get friends to match scores with. Cool game. I will be riding some new music this week!
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Darwinia is a neat little game. If I have to pick a game that it reminds me of most, it's Lemmings, and if I have to pick a genre, it's RTS, yet it's very unique and only vaguely resembles the above. The goal of the game is to destroy these computer viruses that are taking over Darwinia, a computer program with little digital living beings called Darwinians. The scientist who created Darwinia guides you through the game, offering help and telling you what you need to do to help the Darwinians and eliminate the viruses.
Basically, it's a game about troop movement and capturing points on the map. Right now I can create 3 unit types: squads that shoot stuff, engineers that capture stuff, and generals (or commanders or something) that lead Darwinians to points on the map. The viruses are little Snake(the phone game)-like creatures, and then there are beefier ones that are like Centipede and some giant spider-like ones. You can tell the scientist to work on upgrading things like laser gun range, number of units in a squad, or number of "programs" you can run at once. When you begin a level, you run "programs," which are your units or groups of units. So at the beginning of the game, you have three available programs, and might choose two squads and an engineer. You run around the level and kill viruses with the squad, and the engineers can collect their souls, which are the souls of devoured Darwinians, and can turn the souls in at a particular building to produce Darwinians, which you then usually have to save by moving them somewhere using a leader-type Darwinian. The path-finding in the game can be annoying sometimes when units get stuck on some piece of geometry or walk into death walls and explode...but all other AI seems good so far. Using the general leader types to rally the Darwinians is also slow and boring because you have to move the leader near to the Darwinians to get them to move to the rally point, and Darwinians naturally drift apart, and running up mountains is slow, so you can spend a lot of time trying to grab the Darwinians, get them all moved to a certain point, and then by the time you do that, they've began drifting again. But I imagine I'll get faster at it.
So your squad goes and kills things, and your engineers come behind to capture power buildings. These will power satellites, the soul generator things that spit out Darwinians, and warp gates. If you open a warp gate, it opens up a new level. Satellites allow you to transport around the map. Then you can also pick up Research, which so far has netted me the ability to toss grenades and assign the general role. That's really about it. It's basic, but engrossing. I hope there will be some puzzles or something difficult that makes me think how to move forward.
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