As of right now, Call of Duty: Black Ops is officially a thing. Did you go to a midnight launch to get your copy? Did you get one in advance? Is it any good? I’m most intrigued about the latter. As much as I like Modern Warfare 1 and 2, I’m avoiding anything made by Treyarch until they prove to me that they can make a game that doesn’t suck.
In the meantime, I’ll be keeping an eye out on any coverage that may sway my opinion. The following glitch isn’t helping me change my mind.
October 2010 was another monumental month for In Third Person. Despite not being featured on the WordPress.com home page this month, traffic to In Third Person in October still surpassed the September 2010 figures by a wide margin. What I find most crazy is that In Third Person has a new most viewed post of all-time, and it didn’t need to be featured on the WordPress.com homepage to reach that milestone.
Without further ado, here are the top 5 In Third Person posts of October 2010.
Last year, my 7 year-old cousin at the time discovered Modern Warfare 2 through my 12 year-old cousin. Ever since that day, my now 8 year-old cousin has become enamored with the Mature-rated Call of Duty series. For him, Modern Warfare 2 was his Mortal Kombat; it was his gateway drug to Mature-rated games. As of now, he owns Conflict: Denied Ops and Sniper: Ghost Warrior, which he brags about being M-rated all the time.
I didn’t bring this anecdote up to talk about parenting. I don’t approve of him playing content I would deem inappropriate for him and I do what I can to keep that stuff away. The reason I bring this up though, is because my 8 year-old cousin now views that M rating as a symbol of cool. He loves the fact that he owns games that he knows he’s too young to be playing. They’re his forbidden fruit and he’ll take anything he can get at this point.
All of this made me think about my video game collection and how it relates to the ESRB. Once upon a time, the Mortal Kombat series was my forbidden fruit. Did my catalogue of games evolve in relation to the ESRB guidelines or did I overdose on forbidden fruit? I do the math to answer these questions and highlight any insights regarding gaming as I grew up.
Call of Duty: Black Ops is set for release in the next few weeks and based on the pre-order numbers alone it’s almost certain to be a monsterous success. Could it outsell the Infinity Ward developed Modern Warfare 2? It wouldn’t necessarily be out of the realm of possibility.
Will I be jumping in on day one, contributing to its success? Ha. I really enjoyed Modern Warfare 2, but that game was awesome thanks to the developers at Infinity Ward (before 1/3rd of the company bailed). Call of Duty: Black Ops is being made by Treyarch, who made Call of Duty: World at War, which I was less than impressed by.
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Because I write In Third Person solely as a personal outlet of gaming nerdiness, I don’t pay much attention to my analytics. Even if no one in the world were to ever see this blog, I would continue writing in it anyway, just to get these gaming-related thoughts out of my head and onto something a bit more tangible. Well, as tangible as the Internet can be. If you or anyone else decides they want to read my musings, power to you.
And read my musings you have. Sure, my traffic may not rival the Craigslist posting your mom put up to promote your family garage sale, but there are a consistent number of people that frequent my site, according to my numbers. Thank you to everyone that has ever read my blog and a special thanks to everyone who checks in regularly.
Whether you’re a regular reader or just found my blog on a whim, I’m going to present to you the five most popular posts on my site. I was actually kind of surprised by the results. Click through to find out what the hottest content is on In Third Person.
For a game series I keep saying I have no interest in playing, I’ve done a terrible job of avoiding them. During a rash of cheap game buying, I ended up picking up the every Call of Duty game on the XBOX 360 that I didn’t already own (which was everything but Modern Warfare 2). My first experience was Modern Warfare 2, which has made enough of an impact on me to try out the rest of the series.
It just turns out that I’m working backwards from Modern Warfare 2. I felt that World at War at its best was pretty good, but it oftentimes felt like a knockoff of Modern Warfare 2 and at its worst, infuriated me to the point that I don’t want to play it ever again. I know that World at War was made by the Call of Duty “B-team”, so I was looking forward to playing the Infinity Ward game that first took the world by storm.
Call of Duty: World at War was a game that, even after Modern Warfare 2 blew my mind, I had no interest in going back for. It had two major hurdles: it was a World War II shooter and it was made by Treyarch, whom I’ve been lead to believe made the “not-so-good” Call of Duty games.
Well, I decided to give World at War a shot when I saw it on sale at a price I couldn’t refuse. Did it earn a Purple Heart, or make me wish I was killed in action? After finishing the solo campaign, I would say a little from column A, a little from column B.
(SPOILER ALERT: This post will discuss major plot points in Modern Warfare 2 and Prince of Persia)
The terrorist scene in Modern Warfare 2 has been dissected from every conceivable angle by now. Odds are if you’re a fan of reading niche video game blogs like mine, you’ve probably played this sequence and have already come to your own conclusions about it.
For the record, I hate it. I hate it for a number of reasons, but for the sake of this discussion, I’m only going to get into one reason why I dislike this scene. I don’t hate it for the fact that you get to shoot innocent people. I applaud Infinity Ward for leaving that option open. However, that entire scenario is fundamentally broken because of the people you can’t shoot.
During the early days of the World War II shooter (early 2000s), controlling a character from first person and shooting dudes was not really something I wanted to do. After games like Perfect Dark and Goldeneye sucked away hundreds of hours of my life, there wasn’t really anything out there like it that I wanted to play. None of the FPS games of that generation appealed to me and I couldn’t get a handle on playing these styles of games using dual analog sticks. Yes, that means I even missed Halo 1 and 2 in their prime. In the case of Call of Duty, I couldn’t handle a dual stick FPS and I didn’t want anything to do with WWII. Both of those elements combined for a series I had 0 interest in ever playing.
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