Repost from my personal blog : http://www.codemonkeyfoobar.com/?p=856

This review has been a long time coming, mainly due to my position of not writing reviews of games I haven’t played through. Tonight I finally finished up the single player campaign of Call of Duty: Black Ops (or Blops as I like to call it). The reason it’s taken me so long to play through the campaign is mainly due to the fact that the multiplayer facet of the game is so good. It seems every time I’ve gotten online to play video games, I’ve got friends that would like to play multiplayer with me. Tonight was finally a quiet night, so I sat down and finished the campaign.

Overall, Treyarch put out a quality game this installment of the Call of Duty (CoD) franchise. Their previous games in the CoD series left many gamers wanting for more. I was less than thrilled with CoD 5: World at War, mainly due to the inability to turn off mature language in the multiplayer portion of the game as well as the whole fact that it was yet another damned World War II themed game. I grew tired of WW2 games sometime in the mid 1990′s. This time however, they finally decided to move away from the WW2 theme, thanks in large part to the success of Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare games.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is based in the Cold War era, with gameplay taking place over a wide range of years and locations. During the course of the game, you play out battles in Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and the Soviet Union. In the game you play as Alex Mason, an elite soldier who is used for various covert operations. The game starts with you being interrogated by American intelligence in a dark room, with you strapped to machines and bright lights shining in your face. During the course of the interrogation you relive different missions as Alex Mason. The first mission you relive is with you going on an assassination mission in Cuba to take out Fidel Castro. When that mission fails and you are captured, you are shipped off to a Russian prison where you meet another prisoner, Viktor Reznov (voiced by Gary Oldman — great job, btw).

You continue to relive missions, explaining how you escaped from the gulag, went to work for the CIA in Vietnam, pursued Soviet scientists in Laos and Russia, and a whole host of other missions. They do take liberties with historical accuracy in regards to technology and weapons available, but the story plays out rather well, especially if you’re a fan of suspense spy thrillers.

The multiplayer part of the game is really the reason to own this game though. The graphics engine they use is an improved version of the Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare engine, built by Infinity Ward. Treyarch took the leveling and prestige design from Infinity Ward and improved it. I still wish there was more motivation to make me want to actually use the prestige mode. The killstreak rewards and custom class design is probably the best yet in the Call of Duty franchise. The gameplay is much more balanced than in previous games. The shift in what perks are available in your custom class design prevents such classes as the knife-build which dominated online multiplayer in Modern Warfare 2. My only real complaints are the lack of maps conducive to sniping and the poor networking code that makes the game sometimes unplayable if playing with friends spread across the country too far apart.

Unfortunately, Treyarch also decided to add in a zombies mode, falling victim to the zombie epidemic sweeping through video game studios the last few years. It seems everyone feels the need to have some form of zombies in their games. While I admit, many gamers out there thoroughly enjoyed the zombie game in Treyarch’s previous Call of Duty title, I have yet to find any zombie add-on game modes to be fun in the games I’ve played. Leave the zombies to actual zombie games (ex. Resident Evil, Left 4 Dead).

Overall though, this is a quality game and if you consider yourself an FPS gamer, you owe it to yourself to go out and pick up this title. I found this a much more enjoyable experience than I expected when I first heard it was another Treyarch CoD game, and I think you will too if you give it a go.

Jim Sterling recently posted a couple articles on Destructoid regarding piracy and to some extent gamers sense of entitlement.

I am completely with him on this issue. Why? Because when we buy a game we are casting a vote. We are telling that developer we want this game and are willing to pay their asking price for it. If the game does well they go on to make more or the industry takes notice and makes similar games. However, if the game is stolen they have no idea that game is doing well, to them it isn’t selling well and they abandon the course. So when people gripe about getting sequel after sequel to the same old shit they are partly to blame. Why should the games industry take a chance on a new idea? This happened with Machinarium. This was a really cool looking game and looked like a lot of fun but with a piracy rate of 90% why should they take chances? If people are stealing the game it is not generating money for the studio. Prices for video games have not changed in a long time, despite what some think. Super Metroid is listed in an old Nintendo Power I have with an MSRP of $60.

Piracy happens because some gamers have a sense of entitlement that I cannot even wrap my head around. They seem to forget that video games are an entertainment industry and are made as the developer sees fit. They cannot make everyone happy and they will make the game how they want to, if it is good then gamers will come. An example of this was the Diablo 3 petition. I would argue that some gamers now think they have to be catered to and if not, they will steal a game as a sign of protest. Congratulations, your reward to sticking it to the man is loss of profits and the possible closure of a studio and people could be put out of work. Was your sign of protest worth it?

Piracy also hurts people who buy games and aren’t doing anything wrong. To protect their investment some studios are incorporating DRM. This is to protect their investment. What ends up happening is two things that can hurt the developer. Some gamers will take offense and steal the game anyway as a sign of protest and legit gamers may be turned off to the fact that there is DRM and not buy a game. While the latter hasn’t stopped me yet it could depending on how much I want the game and the extent of the DRM.

Even if someone downloads a game to try it out it can be that much harder to justify shelling out the cash when you already have a copy. If you want the game, buy it new and if you can’t afford it then go without. I shop at Best Buy due in large part to their Reward Zone program. I get gift certificates which I then use to apply toward new game purchases. If you shop around a lot of times you can buy a new game for less than asking price.

Natural Selection 2 is a new PC game being developed by Unknown Worlds that spices up the first person shooter genre with real time strategy elements.  Unknown Worlds is a brand new development studio that was founded by the creator of the original Natural Selection, Charlie ‘Flayra’ Cleveland.  The original Natural Selection is a custom game mod for the original Half Life.  At its core, Natural Selection 2 is a multi-player first person shooter that pits fairly generic space marines against only slightly less generic aliens.  The space marines are called the Frontiersmen and might as well be the Colonial Marines from James Cameron’s movie Aliens.  The aliens, called the Kharaa, are more original but bear a strong resemblance to Starcraft’s Zerg.  Despite how generic the premise of each race is, the game itself looks extremely promising.  Natural Selection 2 incorporates real time strategy into first person shooting in innovative ways and has an exclusively multi-player focus.  The two races are generic but well differentiated and Unknown Worlds is working hard to make them balanced and fun to play.  The most promising aspect of Natural Selection 2 is that Unknown Worlds is embracing their modder roots by making their game extremely modder friendly.

Natural Selection 2 mixes first person shooting with real time strategy elements seamlessly by allowing any player to assume the role of a real time strategy commander at any time.  Assuming the command role is as simple as hopping into a command center.  The command center switches the player’s view from the first person to a top down view.  Once in the top down command view the player is responsible for building up infrastructure and managing the economy for the team.  The economy in Natural Selection 2 revolves around building resource gathering structures on resource nodes Dawn of War style.  The use of Dawn of War style resourcing works very well in a first person shooter game because every room with a resource node strategically important.  The resource nodes provide a strong incentive to take and hold more of the map rather than just camping out in the spawn area.  This reinforces the run and gun, team death match style of play rather than conflicting with it.  The resourcing system is also used to promote teamwork.  Taking a resource node provides both the individual players and the commander with resources.  This gives every player a strong incentive to work together with each other and the commander because everyone benefits from taking a resource node.  Of course, the commander uses command resources for different things than the individual players use personal resources for.  Natural selection 2 also uses the tech tree to reinforce the teamwork that the resource system promotes.  Each team climbs the tech tree by capturing command points and placing new command centers on them.  As more command points are captured the commander can spend command resources to unlock new weapons and upgrades for the rest of the team.  The rest of the team, in turn, spends their personal resources purchasing the gear that the commander unlocks.  As the respective tech tree are unlocked the differences between the Frontiersmen and the Kharaa become more pronounced.

Game play video of Marines.

The Frontiersmen play much like you would expect generic space marines to play.  It seems like a deliberate design decision to make both factions fairly generic so that it is easy for anyone with first person shooter experience to pick up and play Natural selection 2.  The Frontiersmen, naturally, focus on superior ranged weapons and feature decentralized infrastructure.  Frontiersmen weapons are first person shooter staples like shotguns, grenade launchers, and flamethrowers.  Even though the weapons are first person shooter staples they are tailored to fill specific roles.  The grenade launcher is tailored to take out infrastructure at range while the flamethrower is tailored to take out advanced Kharaa creatures.  The Frontiersmen use armories and infantry spawning portals to decentralize their infrastructure.  Both the spawn portals and the armories can be built anywhere on the map by the Frontiersmen commander.  This allows the Frontiersmen to turn any area into a base.  The ability to create bases anywhere seems essential to Frontiersmen strategy.  Unlike the Kharaa, the Frontiersmen will run out of ammo and move relatively slow, so they need to be able to get to armories easily to resupply.  This makes using the real time strategy elements to make the spawn portals and armories close to the action key to winning as the Frontiersmen.  On the other side of the arena, the Kharaa feature a centralized infrastructure and focus more on individual speed and melee combat than the Frontiersmen.

The Kharaa resemble the Starcraft’s Zerg by having a more centralized infrastructure, melee focus, and faster movement.  The basic Kharaa creature that every player starts as is a smaller, dog-like ankle biter called a Skulk.  The Skulk can take shortcuts through air vents by running along walls and ceilings.  This allows the basic Kharaa Skulk to be a fast, versatile bushwhacker and harasser.  Each player can evolve from the basic Skulk into a different creature at any time, anywhere by entering a short chrysalis phase and spending personal resources.  Three other creatures revealed so far are the flying Lerk, the teleporting Fade, and the defense building Gorge.  The Lerk is a flying creature with a variety of ranged attacks that include a rapid fire spike, a sniper spike, and area denial gas bombs.  This makes the Lerk one of the few Kharaa creature with any kind of standoff firepower.  The Fade, on the other hand, forgoes ranged weapons for the ability to teleport over short distances and a powerful melee attack.  The Fade’s teleport allows it to, ideally, teleport in, pick a marine off, and get back out before the Frontiersmen can react.  The Gorge rounds out the faster, more offensive creatures by being able to place static defenses.  The static defenses the Gorge places are flower looking things that shoot any marines that come close to them.  The Kharaa also feature a more centralized infrastructure that revolves around Hive nodes.  Hive nodes act as both command centers and spawning portals.  The Hive nodes must be placed on command points and each additional hive node unlocks another level of Kharaa technology.  The Hive nodes also create eggs at regular intervals that the team respawns from.  Making the Hive nodes both the command center and spawning portal centralizes the Kharaa economy and sets them apart from the Frontiersmen.  Both of these races promise an innovative blend of first person shooter and real time strategy with simple to understand but well differentiated factions that only scratches the surface of what Natural Selection 2 could become.

Game play video of aliens.

Unknown Worlds is promising to embrace its roots as a Half Life 2 custom mod by releasing an extensive suite of modding tools with their game.  An extensive modding suite will allow players to do whatever they like with the game.  This means that any player could come up with new weapons for the Frontiersmen, new creatures for the Kharaa or even whole new games.  The Natural Selection 2 community is already talking about making mods that pit Frontiersmen against Frontiersmen and Kharaa against Kharaa.  The community is also planning to make a classic team death match game that strips out the innovative real time strategy elements.  Those mods are just the beginning of what Natural Selection 2′s modding community will come up with.  Unknown Worlds is promising to support their community in their modding endeavors.  Unknown Worlds is making a very smart decision by supporting their modding community because the modders will invariably add a lot of replay value to their game.  There are a lot of examples of how a mod has added a lot of replay value to a game.  Warcraft 3′s modding community, for example, created the Defense of the Ancients mod which was the inspiration and proof of concept for both League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth.   Other examples of popular mods that that added a replay value to there respective games are Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, and the original Natural Selection.  Unknown Worlds support for its modders is a virtual guarantee that Natural Selection 2 will end up being much more than just what the developer publishes.  The promise of extensive modding makes an extremely promising game even more promising even though Natural Selection 2 is only in beta testing.

Unknown Worlds has not yet set a release date for Natural Selection 2.  There seems to be  little chance that it will release this year, but don’t despair.  If anyone wants to play Natural Selection 2 right now they can zip over to the Unknown Worlds website and buy a beta copy.  Everyone that thinks Natural Selection 2 will be an awesome game should go buy a beta copy because Unknown Worlds is using the revenue from selling beta copies to finish their game.  There is also the promise that anyone that spends buys a beta copy will get the full game when it releases.  I encourage everyone who can afford it to go and buy a beta copy because Natural Selection 2 has a lot of promise and I would hate to see it fail for lack of funds.

Duke Nukem Forever will be the most famous vaporware game ever until it is actually released.  Recently, it was announced that Duke Nukem Forever would be released on May 3rd of this year but 3D Realms, the original development studio, has announced release dates for Duke Nukem Forever many times before without ever releasing a game.  This release date is different because Gearbox Software, the developer of Borderlands, is announcing the release this time.  Gearbox Software took over the development of Duken Nukem Forever after 3D Realms collapsed 2009.  3D Realms had been working on Duke Nukem Forever for 12 years when they folded and Gearbox worked on it for at least another year.  Which begs the questions, why did it take 14 years to create Duke Nukem Forever and why did the original development studio go under?  The short answer is that Apogee and 3D Realms, the original publisher and developer respectively, monumentally screwed up Duke Nukem Forever’s development.  The development process was so bad that Apogee and 3D Realms became the butt of the games industry’s jokes for years. Zero Punctuation even got in on the fun and made a spoof episode on the nonexistent Duke Nukem Forever.

All jokes aside, there is much more to Apogee’s story than Duke Nukem Forever.  Apogee’s founder, Scott Miller, literally invented digital distribution and game demos back in the 1980s.  Those innovations propelled Apogee to a meteoric rise that was eventually brought down, in part, by failing to ever finish Duke Nukem Forever.  The Machinima series All Your History Are Belong To Us has chronicled the rise and fall of Apogee and Duke Nukem Forever very well.

The first episode of the four episode series by All Your History Are Belong To Us about Apogee Games and Duke Nukem shows how Apogee was started by Scott Miller and how that he revolutionized the game world by inventing digital distribution and game demos.

The second episode of All Your History Are Belong To Us’s four part series on Apogee Games shows how Apogee conspired to found Id Software.  Id Software was founded after Scott Miller convinced John Romero, John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack to leave the Softdisk corporation.  Once Id Software was founded they used Apogee’s digital distribution model to revolutionize gaming by creating the original first person shooter, Wolfenstein 3D.

The third episode shows how Apogee continued to rise with the release of Duke Nukem’s first 3D game, pithily titled Duke Nukem 3D, and how the seeds of Apogee’s fall were planted.

The fourth and final episode of the All Your History Are Belong To Us series shows how Apogee finally self destructed with its failure to ever release Duke Nukem Forever.

The story of Apogee and 3D Realms stands as a cautionary tale for other video game studios, and an example of how hubris can bring down even the mightiest developer.

Yay, box art

DC Universe Online the most unique massively multi-player online game that has come out recently.  What makes DC Universe Online unique is that it spites the World of Warcraft formula in favor of Crackdown style game play.  DCUO apes Crackdown and other open world games by including mini-games like race challenges and collectible orbs.  The WoW formula is further shunned by the combat being more involved than hitting the 1 through 6 keys in the right order.  The combat is more exciting than the standard WoW fare because DCUO has introduced button combos and a dodge roll.  The addition of button combos and a dodge roll makes the combat more like Crackdown or Prototype than WoW or City of Heroes.  The unique style of combat makes DCUO play more like a brawler and keeps the combat from feeling like the repetitive grind that plagues most other massively multi-player online games.  The other thing that sets DCUO apart from other MMOs is that all of the quest givers are fully voiced, recognizable DC characters.  Having the Joker or Batman as your main quest giver gives DCUO a lot of character that other MMOs lack and is a huge improvement over getting quests from random faceless NPCs.  Using the DC license to create memorable quest givers really brings the universe to life and makes getting a new quest into a treat.  The combination of good voice acting, recognizable characters, brawler style combat, and sandbox style mini-games puts DC Universe Online head and shoulders above the other massively multi-player online games on the market.

In inclusion of fully voiced DC characters as mentors makes the choice of mentor one of the most important choices in DC Universe Online.  The mentors are the main quest givers and every mentor has its own quest line.  Because every mentor is a well realized character from the DC universe the choice of mentor flavors the whole experience.  For example, having the Joker as your mentor is a much different experience than having Batman as your mentor.  The Joker brings a fun, if psychotic, flavor to the game while Batman is, well, an asshole.  In movies and comics it is fun to watch Batman be an asshole, but having your quest giver be a cold, distrustful asshole gives the game a much different flavor.  With that being said, you should definitely make a character with Batman as your mentor at some point because half the fun of DCUO is seeing what each mentor has to offer.  Each mentor gives every play through a different flavor and those flavors complement the varied combat styles to make every character that you create a unique experience.

Every weapon and power offers a wildly different play style.  The weapons range from pistols to bare handed brawling and each weapon offers unique moves and button combos to give each weapon a unique play style.  The weapons alone give the player a lot of incentive to make multiple characters until you find a weapon and power combo suits your individual play style, and with the amount of options to choose from there is a weapon that suits your play style perfectly.  The combination of weapons and powers breaks DC Universe Online’s character creation out of the tired mage, priest, fighter, and rogue rigmarole that so many other MMOs are stuck in.  The fun and unique combat play styles are made even more fun by the bosses being recognizable DC characters.  Every dungeon has a boss like any other MMO, but in DCUO the bosses are characters like Batman and Robin.  After figuring out what an asshole Batman really is it was a joy to have a chance to stick a knife in his codpiece.  Making the bosses recognizable DC characters makes beating up bosses much more fun than it should be.  I found myself looking forward to the end of each quest line to see what character I would get to beat up next, but if beating up Supergirl or Scarecrow ever gets dull there is a lot more that DCUO has to offer.

Batman is so much fun to shank

Like every other massively multi-player online game, DC Universe Online has Player vs Player combat but it mixes up the PvP formula up in interesting ways.  In addition to the standard Player vs Player arenas that every MMO has, this game uses the DC license to let you plays as iconic figures like Batman and the Joker in PvP arenas.  Each iconic DC character uses a different weapon and power and playing as Harley Quinn or Robin is a good way to try out new weapons and powers without having to invest time and effort into making a new character.  The Player vs Player arenas with iconic DC characters are fun, but if Player vs Player combat is not your bag DCUO also offers group cooperative Player vs Environment  instances.  The cooperative Player vs Environment instances are fun and easy to get a group for, but at time of writing they still need some balancing and debugging.  Go figure.  No big surprise that a new MMO still needs some balancing and debugging the first week of its launch.  Even with bugs and balance issues the instances are still fun and will be even better when they get properly balanced and debugged.  There are endgame raid and duo events as well but they require a max level character, so I have not gotten to play them yet.  If the group instances are any indication then it is safe to say that the raids and duos are basically fun but they still have some balance and bug issues.  Even if group Player vs Environment instances, Player vs Player arenas, or the chance to shank Batman is not your thing DCUO still has something to offer.

In addition to everything else, DC Universe Online offers the same simple pleasures that a sandbox game like Crackdown offers.  Like Crackdown, there are collectibles to find and races to win.  Of course, there is always the simple joy of climbing the tallest building in the game, the Lex Corp Tower in this case, and jumping off.  It even has an achievement system in place to keep track of how many races you have one or how many collectibles you have collected.  The best part of the achievement system is that when you complete enough of the achievements you are rewarded with an extra skill point.  It is good to have a practical reward for the fun dicking around that is bound to happen in a sandbox game anyway.  DC Universe Online has managed to mesh a sandbox style world, MMORPG elements, and brawler style combat into one of the best sandbox games that has come out recently.

DC Universe Online is a massively multi-player sandbox game with brawler style combat that uses the DC license to create a sense of style and character that other massively multi-player games struggle to achieve.  DCUO makes full use of the DC characters with its impressive voice acting and solid script for the mentors, and by creating bosses that are more fun and memorable than the usual MMO fare.  The DC license is even used to turn Metropolis and Gotham City into riotously fun sandbox cities.  All in all, DC Universe Online is an impressively fun game that promises to get better once the balance issues and bugs are worked out.  On a more personal note, DC Universe Online is the most fun I have ever had playing an MMO style game.  If you want to know more, check out the preview article on this site for some links to actual game play footage.