Call of Duty: Black Ops

Call of Dooty: Black Ops

Yeah, another Call of Duty, I can't help but go after all the recent games in this series.  They're all shit.  Their intense popularity pisses me off because it reminds me of how stupid the general masses are.  It doesn't matter if it's the same game every year, if they market it hard enough, people will buy.  If they sold Black Ops with a big black dick that raped you every time you opened the case, people would still buy it.  At least Black Ops has one thing going for it; it's not as hilariously retarded as its predecessor, Modern Warfare 2.  But it's still pretty fucking stupid.

I'm not going to waste much of my time with the multiplayer or core gameplay.  If you don't know/think it's the same game as Call of Duty 4, World at War, and Modern Warfare 2, then you've had your head up your ass for a long time.  The multiplayer is the same exact thing as Modern Warfare with its (mostly) tiny maps and lack of team coordination.  You can roll now.  Woo-fucking-hoo.  Black Ops is a linear corridor shooter like the previous games, with rehashed mission design and a load of pointless set-pieces.

 Guess which orifice I'm going to stick this in.

The game starts off with the main character in an interrogation room, and you'll have to put up with this shit in between many of the missions.  Then you find him going to attempt an assassination of Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs.  Mason seemingly succeeds in assassinating Castro, but of course it was actually a double.  Then Mason gets captured and sent to the Soviet Union where he's thrown in prison and befriends some Soviet guy named Reznov.  The Soviet guy just happens to be a former partner of the men that tortured Mason after his capture.  What a coincidence.  They start a prisoner revolt and Mason is able to fight his way out despite the presence of Soviet troops (lmao).

Mason and a few other men go to the Soviet Union to fuck up the Soviet space program, led by Dragovich.  They blow up a spaceship (pretty awesome, actually) but Dragovich escapes.  Then they go to Vietnam, and after fucking up some squints, they meet up with a Russian defector who happens to be... you'll never guess... Reznov (or... appears to be Reznov...).  They go to Laos to find a wrecked plane, but are overwhelmed by commie bastards.  Mason and Reznov are the lucky two to escape. Hudson and Weaver, other dudes accompanying Mason, are fighting elsewhere and discover some plot to release poison in America, or some shit like that.  They need to find some station and stop the broadcast of.. instructions?.. that would release the poison.  How convenient that the Soviets had no other way of releasing the poisons.

 Fuck you, Legos.

Well, it ends up that Mason was brainwashed the whole time, Reznov was dead, and a whole bunch of other shit that I don't even want to try to comprehend because it's so goddamn stupid.  Hudson and Weaver had Mason strapped up to the chair in the game's present time, though it also ends up that Reznov had brainwashed Mason to kill the Soviet guys.  The numbers base is underwater and they go there and kill Dragovich, and America wins.  It's implied that Mason assassinates JFK.  Why can't we just have a regular Vietnam shooter without all the brainwashing, secret poison, space ship, conspiracy BULLSHIT?  Even World at War blows this inane garbage out of the water. 

5/10

Mass Effect

Pass Defect.

Mass Effect is yet another game I just had to buy because everyone said it was one of the greatest games of this generation.  I really need to stop listening to people and just rent before I buy.  The second game in the Mass Effect series might be one of the greatest games of this generation, but this one is a big nasty fart.  First of all, Mass Effect is NOT an RPG.  It's a TPS with RPG elements.  If you think it's an RPG, then you either didn't PC game during the glory years of the PC RPGs, or you've only been around for the last two generations.

Since Mass Effect is a TPS, the first thing to complain about is the god-awful combat.  It's very similar to Gears of War, but the shooting mechanics (even if your character is an expert with the gun you're using) are slightly off, and the aiming isn't nearly as tight as in Gears.  The cool thing about the guns is that they don't have to reload and instead need to cool down if fired too much, an interesting change.  But that's the only positive feature about the combat.  Your characters' movements are nearly as loose as the aiming, and the cover system sucks total balls.  Shepard automatically moves behind cover, and when enemies are swarming, you'll get pelted from every which way as you try to maneuver the crap controls for a shot (no blind fire).  Your AI partners are worth shit as well, and typically you'll find yourself telling them to find cover far behind the battle so they don't all get slaughtered instantaneously.  If you don't tell them to hide, they rarely find cover themselves and stand out in the open, soaking everything the enemy throws at them.  Talk about a royal pain in the ass.

Play your cards right, and you might get some alien booty.

Often, whether in the main quest or side quests, you'll find yourself driving the Mako, the most durable ground vehicle ever made.  This thing can take a lot of missiles, and is not affected by gravity whatsoever.  Another fact BioWare never seemed aware of: there's no way a planet many times the size of earth should have the same gravity as the moon.  What the hell were they even thinking?  You'll see the Mako going up mountains at near-90 degree angles or rolling off them to little effect.  The Mako combat is also atrocious; wait until the Thresher Maul gets a hold of you.  It will show exactly how loose and unmanageable the vehicle controls are.  For side quests, the planets you can drive on are sparse with little to do, and finding your objective can be extremely tedious.  There's little variety in the environments outside of sometimes finding a very cold or very hot world.  And the side quests are so mind-numbingly repetitive that you'll probably quit doing them after only a few.

Then there's the actual quests in the main storyline.  There's a lot of exploring and dialogue followed by periods of combat. While some of the exploration is cool and there are some neat environments, the main storyline missions can be awfully drawn-out and boring.  Like the side quests, these can get annoyingly repetitive as well.  As for the dialogue, I can say BioWare at the very least did better here than they did with Dragon Age later on.  You'll probably need to work on paragon, but Shepard sounds like such a pussy that way.  Still far beats out his dialogue as a renegade though.  He doesn't sound like a badass at all, more like an immature dad at a high school soccer game.  I guess guys that work on video games would have no idea what badass is though, so I can give them a pass.

 Shepard.. I.. I am your father.

The story is highly overrated like the rest of the game.  It's similar to the many B-rated sci-fi movies you could see over the years.  Humans are colonizing large portions of the galaxy, there are aliens and politics, and then a huge threat appears that is likely going to destroy everything.  Hopelessly outmanned and outgunned, it's up to a human and his crew to stop the invasion of machines.  Whatever.  The problem is that your choices mean virtually nothing, other than potentially losing some of your crew along the way.  At the end, you can choose to save the Council or not, that's the extent of your choice and consequence.  Oh, and before I forget, this game just looks average, with constant visual glitches (like screen tearing) and slow-downs.  Not impressive considering that this game isn't even that detailed.

6.5/10

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

Why.. just why, Nintendo?

Once upon a time, handheld The Legend of Zelda was anticipated with similar fervor to the console behemoths.  This was seen as recently as 2005, when The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap was released.  That might never again be an issue, thanks in large part to Phantom Hourglass.  Despite raving reviews (though, as has been alluded to on here time and again, it's not difficult for games to receive universal acclaim anymore), Phantom Hourglass was a joke from the very beginning, for an assortment of reasons.  The first being that it just sucked.

The first thing you'll notice about Phantom Hourglass (outside of the fact that it looks like shit) is that you have to control Link by using the stylus.  You poke where you want him to walk and constantly poke everything to make him do stuff.  While it works, at times, it's a total pain in the ass compared to traditional controls.  Especially when you have to do stuff really quickly and Link is slowly reacting to your pokes.  Not to mention your hand will probably get stiff within a half hour, which sucks ass when you're playing a long(ish) adventure game that takes time to get through.  Why couldn't they even give you a fucking CHOICE as to which control method you would use, what the FUCK?  And about the only innovation we actually get from this is the ability to write notes in the dungeon.  That's about it.

Decisions, decisions...

Phantom Hourglass follows soon after the events of the epic GameCube Zelda, The Wind Waker.  You'd think that maybe they could draw from the excellent storyline we experienced then to craft this game's plot, but you'd be horribly disappointed.  Nothing about this game is remotely memorable, and I had to look on Wikipedia to even remember what happened in this game.  After reading it, I have again forgotten exactly what the fuck happened.  Let's see, they come across a ghost ship and Tetra (retard) jumps on board and something happens.  Link ends up on some island, and there's a fairy or some shit, and then he meets Linedick, who is a total pussy.

Tetra is somehow turned to stone and needs to be rescued (surprise), and Linedick leans against her frozen form and nearly breaks her (which would've been fucking hilarious and made the game so much more interesting).  While there are many dungeons for you to complete, you constantly have to return to the same goddamn dungeon over and over and do the same puzzles over and over again.  Why a Zelda game needs such filler is unknown, as the games already have a shitload of puzzles.  Anyway, some plant thing is behind all the evils, and Link has to kill it.  Then Nintendo fakes us out with a Link's Awakening it-was-all-a-dream ending before showing Linedick's ship and proving that it actually did happen.  Assholes.

If only....

What really pisses me off about the game is that they cut out almost all of the adventuring that made The Wind Waker so awesome.  A lot of fans (retards) complained that the sailing was too drawn-out and boring in The Wind Waker, so they decided to let you draw out the path of your ship in Phantom Hourglass and let it move on its own, effectively leaving the game to play itself.  You get to shoot a cannon some.  A grand adventure, right?  Most of the islands are fairly worthless though, so you won't even find yourself free-roaming much anyway, because Nintendo apparently thinks its fans are too stupid to figure out where to go if they're not given a straight path all the time. 

Linedick forces a favor from our hero.

Phanton Hourglass also follows many of the recent games in the series in that there is nothing remotely difficult about this game whatsoever.  The bosses don't take much thought, nor many hits to kill, and they certainly don't do much damage to Link (which is really pathetic because even that pussy Linedick rapes Link, as pictured above).  The puzzles are a breeze, save for perhaps some of the ones in the annoying Temple of the Ocean King.  We do, however, get The Legend of Zelda's first-ever competitive online multiplayer mode.  Which is pretty fun, but suffers from the same weakness as most DS online multiplayers: there is no punishment for quitting mid-match, and you're not awarded for your opponent's rage-quit.  Therefore, most of your wins will never count because just before victory, your opponent disconnects, meaning the match never happened.  Get with the fucking times, Nintendo.

5/10