god bless bobby kotick

Activision is the new EA, ain't it?

are you really surprised it is COD i finished black ops last night and i was like this game is full of fail

I think I was on the second mission and I kept getting instant killed by Cuban soldiers when I was trying to flee to a non-existant boat along a river. Also the long, long, Loooooooooooooooong(cat) loading times. It was as if I was playing on a console and not on a PC, loaded with an SSD and RAM to the brim.

What? A Call of Duty game that's terrible?

I think they stopped being good altogether since 2 myself. That's to say, they've all been 2 since 2, but with shined graphics and less content.

From a narrative point of view I liked Call of Duty 2 but everything else is unmemorable or stepped in jingoism. That is pretty much how I treat the majority of FPS games now since the gameplay hasn't really evolved since the days of XBox and the original Halo.

And it wasn't expected? CoD hasn't been good since CoD4 and even then it wasn't the best.

I kinda expected the game to be free of gamebreaking bugs and somewhat optimized. I already know the gameplay is going to be like the last... six? games while the narrative will be a mind screw, either in a good, bad or ugly kind of way.

But you know a lot of people will buy because every single YouTube video has that same commercial. And that commercial with snipers is better than the game itself. Myself, I just love retro gaming, though it seems strange that the original "Halo" or "Super Mario Sunshine" can now be considered retro.

I can't consider either of those games retro. I wouldn't even consider most games in the mid and late 90s to be retro.

I think the depressing and very dark imagery of today's gamesmakes games for a different era to be retro. Now, I know the early-90s had Doom but that was an anomaly amongst all the kid-oriented titles. Now, a kiddie game is an anomaly amongst all the war simulators, zombie apocalypses, and space marine titles. Yes, I love retro gaming

It mimics the comicbook medium in that respect, where the light hearted golden/silver age of comics gave way to the 'dark' ages of comics, like Spawn.

I guess you're right in that regard. But I think it's become so generic to have a post-apocalyptic world with wars going on all the time. But I don't want people to think I'm any less masculine for saying so. But if I could play Pokemon without the threat of judgment, I would.

And yet, just like McDonalds, it has brand recognition now and people will still buy it.
Actually, McDonalds is a good analogy for COD games. It is the McDonalds of the gaming world.

That can be said for any popular series, whether it is Pokemon or Madden. Saying that, unlike McDonalds, Black Ops II is neither cheap (yet!) nor is its quality even reach passable.

Pokemon? Madden? Wendys and Burger King! Okay no.. Madden would not even register. It's like.. the greasy spoon.

But... but... the trailer seems so full of win! :O

Okay, I stopped at CoD 4 anyway.

Planetside 2 anyone? :E

I liked the original Planetside; kinda reminded me of Tribes 2. I'll try it out when I get back from the work site in a week or two.

Ugh... just got into a huge argumrnt with my mate over this.

He thinks it's the best CoD game.

Personally I thought the peak for me was Modern Warfare 2, and that is just from a narrative perspective alone. It is not a series that has evolved much since its humble beginnings on PC gameplay wise.

I played the first one, and United Offensive.

That's the only one I needed to play, because they're all exactly the fucking same -.=.-

How bad is it?

It is pretty terrible. A big part of it was that it is buggy for me but there were some gameplay segments that were, well, poorly executed. I only played the first two missions so far.

I got Halo 4 instead.

The story tried new things, and was better than 3, not 2 or ODST really, but MC talks and is an actual character so I can't complain. I was more disappointed by how it gave you cool things to do, the "30 seconds of fun", but it never lasted.

It's like 343 heard "30 seconds" and thought that meant everything had to last exactly 30 seconds before you went back to the crappy forerunner structures.

I was more pissed off by the fact that they cut out Firefight and made most everything unaccessible without Xbox live.

I bought and played through some of Halo 4 and all I could think was "I totally played this game before, and it was called Halo: Combat Evolved." The opening missions were kind of a turn off in that way, like someone tracing a picture and tidying it up in Photoshop. It looks nicer than the original but it is still a derivative work. I only got to the swamp mission making my way to the Infinity before I got impatient and went back to AC3 so I don't know if the game turns around any. I might play some more later tonight though, just because I like the Halo universe a lot.

Well, it sort of helps if you read Greg Bear's novels in the Halo universe, tells you all about the Didact, and why that's not technically him. That is, if you wanted the whole story.

I kind of hated Halo 3's plot, after Halo 2 and the Arbiter's character arc set the bar a bit higher.

But yeah, the the game's probably 343's attempt to one up Bungie. It starts to diverge a little when you get on a giant truck that could run over an Elephant from 3, and get access to an awesome target marker for the attached railgun for entirly too short a period of time. That's the problem most of the time, it assumes we have the attention spans of ADHD toddlers. "Here's a cool thing- GIVE IT BACK! You have to go run through some more forerunner corridors and self reviving bullet sponges."

You're right, it starts to do its own thing later on in the game. It does get a bit better and a bit worse in different ways. The forerunner enemies in Halo 4 suffered from the same problem that the Library level gave to the original Halo; Too much of one thing. It didn't help you had literal self reviving bullet sponges that had tiny, small, annoying things that can revive them as well. And catbots. Loads and loads and loads of catbots, like if the doors of crazy cat robo-lady burst open and exploded catbots all over the place. Ironically for a game centered around the Forerunner if they were cut out the game would have been better. I would have called it stale but you wouldn't have enemies that are more frustrating than challenging and put the feeling of dread through me every time I enter a Forerunner area.

I read the book series (Glasslands and Thursday War) by Karen Traviss and didn't mind them. I didn't have high expectations reading a novel based on a FPS game. But this is Halo and if there is one thing I can say about it is that the makers put some thought into this universe. Also, that and I really want to play a Halo game made in a similar vein as Mass Effect, where you go across the universe in a spaceship pimped out in Forerunner tech, trying to make sure the outer colonies don't go in open revolt and plunge humanity into another civil war.

Now that I think about that book series is pretty much Mass Effect in Halo.

Heh, crazy catbot lady. They're like the Flood without any of the unnerving body horror or gibs. Not that the flood were all that great, but they were at least more interesting to fight.

And the Forerunner weapons somehow come off like pimped out versions of the human weapons, only with a lot more suck. I remember carrying an MA5B through the whole Forerunner level, historically the worst Halo weapon both for it's poor performance and nonsensical design, but somehow it blew the doors off all the Forerunner guns. I'd be struggling with the light rifle, run out of ammo and pull my MA5, suddenly bitches fell like daisies.

It was actually too awesome to use, since I couldn't get more ammo. For that matter, how do the Forerunner weapons, which shoot light but aren't lasers, suck so much? The guys built a whole planet and yet all their weapons are awful.


But yeah, a Halo based version of Mass Effect might actually be awesome.