You know, I’m honestly not bothered who makes my games, I don’t mind who publishes them and I don’t think it’s a terrible thing if there are elements in them that have been ‘borrowed’ from other games. Some may think that to be completely ignorant or naive, but I don’t care; when I play a game, all I care about is if it’s fun. If there are moments in the trailers that look like moments I’d like to experience, or mentions of the type of thing that I generally get a kick out of, I‘ll happily pay £40 for it. If I’m not sure, I’ll stick it on my rental list. If it has nothing interesting to offer, I won’t buy it, and I would never berate others for doing so. The amount of time and level of enjoyment I get out of a game is how I decide if my money has been well spent, or thrown down the drain.
I’m not some well known, highly respected games journalist. I’m nobody. I’m a single mother of three from a tiny town in South Wales. Activision didn’t send me to some posh holiday resort and shower me with gifts while I previewed Black Ops so that I would leave with warm fuzzy feelings about them and gush all over the internet about how wonderful their new game is. I don’t even know if any PR types will ever get round to reading this one of hundreds of reviews and articles about their new release that are out there in the world, getting slated and defended by people who clearly take life far too seriously.
Writing a Black Ops review is probably one of the biggest wastes of my time that I can think of. What’s the point of putting a load of effort into detailing a game when every gamer out there has pretty much made up their mind on whether they’re going to buy it or not? Instead, I could be earning CoD points right now to save up for a shiny new gun.
Treyarch made CoD3, and it was shit: get over it. Then they made World at War, which was damn good, but nay-sayers and grudge holders wouldn’t even allow the thought that it was anything other than a pile of crap to enter their minds. The same goes for Black Ops. There was always going to be a blurry mess of strong opinions on this shooter, because of the history of the companies behind it.
If you like military shooters, interspersed with exciting yet cheesy, predictable, clichéd plot twists, where you play as a soldier, following orders to run down corridors towards an objective marker while dodging grenades and satisfyingly gunning down generic enemies; then running from cover to cover through a variety of wide open scenic levels, where explosions shake up your screen, flinging bodies through the air, as you run to your escape vehicle, get dramatically downed ten feet from it, then heroically dragged to safety by your allies, only to do it all over again – unless it’s a sniping level, there’s usually a sniping level – then you probably already have Black Ops. If you like the fact that Treyarch have taken fans’ comments into consideration and dealt with a lot of the problems that made Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer so unbalanced and frustrating on occasion and added challenging new game types, a theatre mode and detailed stat tracking, then you’re more than likely playing Black Ops online right now. But if you have a burning, undying love for Infinity Ward, that blinds you to anything the ‘other’ CoD makers turn out, then why not just go play MW2? And if you have a seething hatred of Activision that keeps you awake at night and cannot get over the fact that big companies like to make money then you probably shouldn’t buy anything, ever.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.