Eating My Words: Call of Duty: Black Ops (PC)

As much as Butler wants to tear this game a new one, he just can't do it.  Find out more after the jump!

In case I didn't make it perfectly clear in my coverage of E3 this past summer, I could really not care less about the Call of Duty series.  As someone who looks for strong narrative in his games, the idea of playing as yet another gun-toting military mute who follows a ragtag group of jackasses to defend democracy from Germans (CoD), Arabs (Modern Warfare), us (Modern Warfare 2), etc. just didn't interest me.  The gunplay is always quite strong from title to title, but the games have simply never grabbed me enough to care.  I don't think I played either Modern Warfare game for more than 2 hours apiece because I just didn't get why I should care about anything I was doing in-game.  However, I found myself with some time to kill, having recently finally finished Fallout: NV, and figured that Black Ops would be a fun title to skewer while I waited for something I actually liked to come along.  I first realized how badly that plan had derailed this morning when I blew off all 4 hours I had allotted myself to get the day's homework done to play Black Ops instead.  I would have glanced over at my calendar to confirm that it isn't opposite day, but that would have required looking away from the screen.  It is literally all I can do to not stop writing this right now and go back to shooting people.  So what about this particular installment was it that gave me CoD fever?  A few factors:

Streamlining: Since, as I said, I didn't play Modern Warfare too much, I don't have the best comparison to go off of, but Black Ops feels less bloated than its predecessors, with special tactics generally only introduced situationally.  This may sound like the game is holding your hand, and to an extent, it's true, but I always consider it a plus to not have to juggle about 50 different potential strategies at once.  Since its assumed my character is a hard soldier-mans, it makes sense that he would know the proper situation to bust out special equipment, rather than me impotently clicking my radio at things only to find out that I can't call an airstrike in that area.

Your character actually has a personality: This may have been the single biggest failing of the series in my book.  At the end of the day, because my character did nothing more than silently follow whatever order he was given while his jackass squadmates hogged all the personality, I just could not have given two shits about the plot.  And yes, the role of army-man badass who breaks all the rules is kind of played out, but at least it's a god damned personality.

The Cold War is the exact right level of ambiguous for the plot to function well: Since the Cold War was a war with no actual fighting, simply a lot of tension, it works very well with the Black Ops nature of the missions.  They have total control over the details of the plot (it's not like there are documented Cold War skirmishes), while the time period provides the structure around which the insane conjectures of the writers can comfortably fit.  See, when they had to simply manufacture conflicts for modern times, I feel like the CoD team choked and simply decided to ape 24, resulting in a lot of xenophobic bullshit and the usual, now seemingly standard PMC's as bad guys.  Taking out "The Reds" to overthrow communism is pretty jingoistic, sure, but you know what? For these military plots to work and for me to want my character to succeed, ambiguity in your enemies is not a good thing, and since today's wars are all about ambiguity, Modern Warfare stumbled.  Fortunately, Black Ops seems to have caught the ball just in time.

Straight-up ridiculosity: I think it was around the time I was running through a burned out military base with a shotgun that shot flaming shells that the ridiculousness of this game really set in.  This was several sequences after I, for no ostensible reason, was handed a crossbow with exploding bolts to provide rooftop cover for my squadmates (why assault rifle I had been using until then was insufficient, I am unsure) before I ziplined into the adjacent building, crashed through the window, and shot every motherfucker in the place in the dome.  The game is absolutely loaded with sequences like this, to the point that every time the camera slows down I squeal with delight because I know I'm about to get to do something totally awesome.  Add to all of this the fact that the cutscenes are all your character (Alex Mason) being interrogated by an angry man with a voice scrambler, all while a string of seemingly random numbers flashes across the screen (or through Alex's brain), and about halfway through a brainwashing plot is introduced.  It is so over-the-top "80's spy movie" that you can't help but get swept away in the sheer ludicrousness of the narrative.

Now, I won't be so brash as to declare the game flawless.  The structure is still very obviously linear, there are plenty of corridors conveniently packed with waist-high walls, and some of the mission objectives (especially in the Vietnam levels) can be very frustratingly opaque.  Additionally, I failed missions multiple times because I "failed to stay with my team" despite never having been told I was supposed to stay with a specific group of jackoffs.  The stealth sequences also feel very contrived, as the game isn't really built for stealthy play, but the execution is just too cool to really criticize with any heart.  Even though they amount to little more than scripted quick-time events, nothing beats the feeling of say, swimming under a Vietcong boat, sliding up the side, and pulling a man underwater so no one hears him scream when you cut his throat open.  In closing, I officially apologize to any CoD fans miffed by my dismissal of the game in June.  Though I still haven't tried the multiplayer on account of the fact that, as well as Treyarch wrote and paced their campaign, they can't apply creative rewrites to internet shitheads or uninspired variations of capture the flag.

"I am like, 99% sure that 'Fag University' is not a real place, so I

find your claim that I attend it suspect.  Now can we please get

serious and play 'Acquire the Intel'?"