360 gaming blog.

It has taken a week but I think the gaming community is finally calming down after a hectic week playing Black Ops. I was lucky enough to get the game a day early as I ordered online and despite the reports that Activision were saying retailers were all told to not break the street date there were still around 250 000 people online on Monday. By Tuesday afternoon that figure rose to over 3.5 million, that’s just on the Xbox.

I’m sure you all know that the multiplayer is brilliant. It is just so balanced and a joy to play, cutting out many of the frustrations that players encountered whilst playing MW2. It’s so nice to actually see people playing properly, no teams of people using Interventions, dual wielding 1887s and sniping across the map with UMPs. Knifing is actually a skill now. While it’s true you can still knife through bullets there is no commando perk or tactical knifing, apparently the trick is to twist towards your enemy in the same motion as knifing.

So that’s everything altered that people hated right? Oh yeah and Kill streaks are no longer stackable. Whilst I loved getting a Harrier in MW2 then pretty much instantly getting an AC 130 it wasn’t fun if you were on the wrong side of it so the new system is much fairer on everyone. If you get a chopper gunner in Black Ops, you either got lucky in a care package or you really earned it. Plus noob tubes are now pretty much nonexistent; the only ones I have seen are the odd ones I have fired at people when I was trying them out.

There are a few issues that some people seem to be not too pleased about. The spawn system isn’t to some people’s liking but I haven’t had too much of a problem with that so far and also when you are in a party of 4 people or more it can be a struggle to get into a game. Treyarch have said they are committed to sorting out any issues the community has with the game, hopefully we will have an update sometime this month.

As for the single player, after what felt like a bit of a sluggish start it really does grow into a really compelling story with plenty of great twists. Some fresh game play elements really wowed me and the new weapons available in certain parts of the story really help this feel like a new experience. As for Veteran mode, so far my opinion is that it’s easier than World at War and much harder than MW2, it’s still very much a frustrating experience. I think CEG Idoit CS has finished it on Veteran so I’m sure he knows best.

And finally some news I’ve been looking forward to, there is a Double XP weekend from November 26-29 (Thanksgiving weekend?)

Arctic Hydra 87