Call of Duty: Black Ops vs Modern Warfare 2

This comparison review is a follow on from my full review of Black Ops, and again focuses purely on the single player experience. After finishing Black Ops last week I returned to Modern Warfare 2 after a break of nearly twelve months. The game was a Christmas pressie last year which I played and completed disappointingly quickly but found very enjoyable. So how does the older game stack up against it's younger rival?

If ever there was a way to prove how average and overhyped Black Ops is, it's to go back and play MW2 again. It's a considerably better experience in almost every way. The presentation is far better - the story interludes are a fictional computer user interface that projects satellite tracking information onto maps, while narration in the background explains the story. It's very professional and polished, although at times it can be a bit difficult to follow the story as it jumps around the globe and frequently changes from one character to another.

Amazingly, the graphics are signficantly better than Black Ops. The second mission in particular (cliffhanger) demonstrates some superb blizzard effects that reduce visibility, and in general this part of the game looks gorgeous all round. Throughout the entire game, enemy characters look better drawn and more detailed, and the splatter of blood when they take a hit provides an effective confirmation that your shot has hit the target - something that I found lacking in Black Ops.

The overall flow of the game is far better - scripted sequences integrate well with the main action and feel less jarring than some of the Black Ops equivalents. One standout sequence has you exiting a dry deck shelter on a US submarine and using an SDV to rise up underneath an oil rig and take it by force. Brilliant stuff.

My main criticism of Black Ops was the hopeless enemy AI, and while MW2 doesn't compare to the very best examples out there such as the Halo franchise, it is good enough to not draw attention to itself and provides a satisfying challenge, with enemies hiding in cover properly and ambushing you during some of the missions.

Although I can't comment on the multiplayer element, MW2 is a much better single player game. Black Ops had so much promise because of the inspired setting - the Cold War era is rich in opportunities to provide compelling missions, but this time round I can't help feeling it was a slightly wasted opportunity.

Call of Duty: Black Ops campaign mode review

I’ve just completed the Black Ops campaign mode and here’s a review of my experiences. This review focuses entirely on the single player aspect of the game as played on the Xbox 360.

Black Ops is developed by Treyarch who are I tend to think of as the B-team of CoD development. So far they've delivered CoD3, CoD WaW and a number of Wii ports of the Inifinity Ward titles. With Black Ops they seem to have made a particular effort to deliver a first-class CoD experience, especially with the storyline of the single player mode. The framework of the story is clever - your character is seemingly being interrogated and asked to provide information on various events that took place in the American Cold War campaign to contain the spread of Communism across the globe.

The game starts with a very small introductory mission in Cuba. You battle through a street and then dive into a car to escape. The car controls are bizarre - you appear to control forward and reverse movements but not the steering. This heavily scripted scene feels jarring - wouldn't it have been more believable if the player character had simply jumped into a passenger seat rather half-controlling the car?

The first half of the game feels particularly weak to me. The missions are dull and rely almost entirely on frenetic pace to provide excitement. Khe Sanh in particular is a bad mission. The gameplay is tedious and the colour scheme makes the visuals look badly dated - it reminded me very much of CoD 3 graphically. A big issue with Khe Sanh currently being discussed in various forums on the web is that you need to kick some barrels of napalm, but the game doesn’t prompt you properly to do this. Given the highly linear nature of CoD games and lack of interactivity with the environment, I think this is a very valid criticism. Unaware of what I had to do, my solution was to run like hell and get shot up badly, but eventually I made it to a checkpoint that triggered the next part of the mission.

As I reached the half-way mark in the game, every mission had been a big disappointment. It was so rare that any kind of strategy element was brought into play. You are bombarded by unrealistic numbers of enemies, but they are all spectacularly dumb. To add to this, the turkey shoot is ruined by your computer-controlled allies almost always running ahead and getting in the way of your firing line. They often occupy the only decent cover points as well, leaving me to regularly lurk behind them in a cowardly manner - which isn't in keeping with the way the game portrays your character as something of a badass!

Just as things looked dire, I embarked upon a mission that flashed back to end of the Second World War, base on the memories of the Victor Reznov character. At this point my experiences of the game improved dramatically. The snowy colour scheme of the Arctic circle setting really lifts the visuals and the smaller (but more open) playing area with lots of cover is fun to sneak through. The references to Nazis and the presence of V2 rockets at the site really adds a historical weight to the story. It gets even better as the second part of the mission involves repelling an attack from the British Secret Service. Pitted against their snipers I had to pick up a sniper rifle myself, a welcome relief from the close range combat of the rest of the game.

A particular highlight of the later parts of the game for me are two helicopter control missions, which are far from gimmicky sub-games - the helicopter control is nice and the destruction you can wreak makes for lots of fun. The final mission which involves an assault on a ship (and more which I won't ruin the surprise of) is also excellent stuff, and features the return of the helicopter.

The final twist in the in the plot is signposted in the last few missions, and then rammed home really hard in the final scenes. It draws upon the plot of a number of films (Fight Club is a primary example) but works reasonably well.

Summary
This applies to all of the CoD games I've played, but I would much rather have a smaller but more intelligent set of opponents in every standoff. A room of six intelligent, well dug-in opponents would have been far more tense and enjoyable than a constant barrage of enemies arriving from a respawn point. Consider Halo where the computer controller characters will change from attacking to retreating if you switch to a particularly devastating weapon - that type of intelligence is desperately needed in CoD.

Compared to a title like Halo Reach, I found the visuals very disappointing in places, and almost certainly a backwards step from Modern Warfare 2. The notable exception is the character animation in cutscenes - face renderings are excellent.

The Call of Duty franchise has become a series of fairly average games which are overhyped to a point where they are purchased regardless of quality. I'd like to see a minor reboot of the franchise to become a more intelligent and strategic game, with more genuine tension.

If you strike me down...

That classic old line from Star Wars popped into my head as I read this week’s story about how a new unofficial LimeWire client called LimeWire Pirate Edition has been released to the public. The firm behind the official client and P2P network took a battering in court recently from the record labels, and was ordered to withdraw the software and take steps to disable the network as well – basically, kill the whole platform. LimeWire was dead, but a fortnight later some enterprising individuals have brought it back to life. And this time it's going to be a lot harder to kill - just like Obi Wan. Despite the fact that I think artists should get paid something for their works rather than us all ripping their work off for free, I can’t help but smile. This was always going to happen.

Can’t we all be friends?

As Techdirt points out, Limewire actually tried to work with the music industry. Just like Napster and others did before it. Many of the early platforms that tried to work with the music industry to go legitimate are dead. iTunes and Amazon are rare examples of successful operations, but of course they have big names behind them.

Now that we have established legal download services, why has a non-legal platform been resurrected so quickly? The simple and obvious answer is demand. iTunes is starting to look expensive - the record labels pushed through a new pricing scheme recently which was supposed to charge a little more for new songs, but less for older songs. In almost every case I’ve looked at, per song prices have gone up. Regardless of the recent increase, the service already felt too expensive. The average price of an album seems to be 7.99UKP. For what? The right to download some files using our own connection and store them at our cost as well. We now do half of the distribution function ourselves, yet we still end up paying pretty much what a physical CD costs to buy in a shop these days. Given the massively lower overheads of online sales, we’re being ripped off again, just like we were back in the late 90’s paying 14.99 UKP for a CD.

History repeats itself

Another demand generator for non-legal download services is films. Broadband speeds have made it possible to download movies over the Internet, even spectacular high definition versions. And instead of legal download services being there ready to take up that demand, we’re in the same situation as we were in with music in the Napster era. Legal options are few and far between, and inferior to the free options. Torrents have plenty of DRM-free high quality 1080p movies, yet legal movie download services such as iTunes only offers highly compressed 720p files with restrictions on what you can do with them.

In its heyday I was a Napster user, but I now buy music legally through iTunes. Not because of some moral obligation but because the quality is always good and it’s far less hassle than using P2P networks. With the iPhone I can download music at any time - even at work or on the train - which has increased the amount I spend.

Will we ever get to this point with movies? Or will the gatekeepers continue to try and battle non-legal services rather than compete with them? Well one little known fact is that  in some parts of the world they do try to compete. R5 DVD releases are versions of new films that are released early and cheap to combat rampant piracy. The quality of the copy is not quite up to the same levels as the final DVD/BluRay releases we get in the rest of the world, but the fact remains that they exist to compete with pirate copies. Meanwhile the rest of the world has the same old options – wait forever for the DVD/BluRay release and get ripped off (especially BluRay) or get it earlier, for free.

Where we’re headed

People want high quality, low cost, DRM-free, easily available media online - it’s that simple. And they will pay for it as long as the price is fair. There is no alternative, even if corporations and certain lobbied-up governments think there is. It's clear already that people will find ways to make it happen. We live in interesting times where a small group of people can hack together a content distribution platform that can be used by millions. The arrogance of large media corporations in thinking they are owed a living and can gouge prices forever is staggering, as is their refusal to compete with free. How much longer can the situation continue?

Software design matters #2: The Apollo 11 Moon landing

Kick-started by John F Kennedy's legendary speech, the Apollo space programme was the incredible story of the efforts of over 400,000 people, all aligned towards achieving the goal of landing a man on the moon. We always remember the massive Saturn rockets (still the most powerful space rockets ever produced) and the skill and dedication of the Apollo astronauts who piloted these machines. Yet at the pivotal moment of the first moon landing on the Apollo 11 mission, it was ingenious software design that allowed the systems to cope with the unexpected and continue to function.

On the 20th July 1969, as the lunar lander descended towards the surface, Armstrong and Aldrin had left the rendezvous radar switched on. This was smart astronaut thinking - it meant they could abort the landing and quickly reacquire the orbiting command module if something went wrong. The radar was generating data and sending it to the guidance computer as a steady stream of interrupts. Normally this would be fine, but during this critical part of the mission the guidance computer was maxed out trying to manage navigation and the descent engine.

Unable to cope with it's tasks, the computer system overloaded and issued a 1202 program alarm. This flashed up on the astronauts display and a warning buzzer sounded in the cabin, no doubt significantly raising the stress levels of the astronauts who already had the expectations of the world on their shoulders. During this tense time the astronauts had to wait for Mission Control to interpret the error code and decide whether it was a threat to the mission. The error code was looked up to mean 'Executive Overflow'. The problem was completely unexpected because although the astronauts had followed exactly the same procedure in the simulators back on the ground, the rendezvous radar switch was a dummy - no radar was actually connected so the computer didn't receive data, preventing it from becoming overloaded.

So how did the guidance computer software save the say? Well, it was written using a revolutionary scheduling system that could not only multi-task but understood the priority of the tasks it was assigned. In the event of an overload, it could ignore lower priority tasks and focus on what was essential. Lower priority tasks could be flushed and restarted when CPU time became available again. This is precisely what the Apollo 11 guidance computer did - essentially it self-recovered. NASA took a calculated risk that the landing would not be put in danger, and despite the 1202 error occurring a few more times during the descent, the guidance computer continued to do it's job, and shortly afterwards Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were walking on the surface of the moon.

The technology aspect of this story sounds familiar because today pretty much every computer and even smartphone has well executed multi-tasking, but this software was written in the mid-sixties at a time when programs had to be stored on core rope memory - or lol memory as NASA used to call it!

It would be twenty years later before the ground-breaking Commodore Amiga brought multi-tasking into peoples homes with it's AmigaDOS OS and Workbench GUI. The Amiga was famous for being able to run multiple simultaneous tasks at once while remaining highly response to the end user; often more so than modern day Window machines. Stay tuned for an Amiga post coming soon :)

Previously in this series: Apple capitalises on NextStep in a big way

R3PLAY - 6th November 2010

I attended R3PLAY today and had a great time. As well as all the pure fun that was to be had playing the  games on a seriously impressive range of systems, it was the overall buzz of the show that really resonated. How? Well:

Brilliant atmosphere - rare systems like the Japan-only NeoGeo and NEC PC-FX  - machines that I read about in cool games magazines as a teenager, the Atari Mega ST, the cult vector-graphic Vectrex and various Sega/CBM/Sinclair/Acorn machines were all there. These beauties were not just on display, but ready to play by anybody who sat down in front of them. If you put your drink down on the table near the machines as you played, no-one told you off for your "dangerous" behavior. Some systems had loads of spare carts available for you to choose from, just spread across the table. As you changed cartridges and played your game, never once was there a sense of being watched: that sense of "looking out for bad behaviour" that you so often get in this country. The organisers and equipment owners assumed that you weren't some monster there to steal stuff or knock drinks over the expensive/vintage equipment.

Open-minded scene - something obvious from attending the show is that the retro scene isn't consumed with arguments about about new vs. old. To use an analogy, I used to drive an MG (a modern one) and it was clear that some folks in the owners club didn't accept these cars as true MG's. This isn't the case in the retrogaming scene - the hall was full of PS3's and Xbox 360's as well as retro. There was the chance to sample some of the latest games, including the Wii GoldenEye that's not even released yet.

Jeff - later in the afternoon I entered a room and barely noticed the Llamasoft sign outside. Looking around, it soon became obvious that each of the varied systems was running Revenge of the Mutant Camels or similar. Then I became aware of a guy stood in the corner - it was THE Jeff Minter! I chuckled as I heard a guy talking to him say "yeah so I sent you a friend request on Facebook yesterday, if you wouldn't mind accepting it?". The guy has groupies!!!!

Pinball is still huge - in a wide side corridor there was a fairly large collection of pinball tables. Before arriving at the venue I was looking forward to getting onto these beauties and satisfying an unrequited pinball addiction, but it seemed that the almost total removal of pinball tables from pubs and other venues across the country had others feeling the same way - the tables were jammed up almost all day. When I did get chance to to have a quick game it was on a basic table with very tired flippers - getting power behind a shot was impossible.

History - the show was definitely not without depth - the British Computer Museum from Bletchley Park were in attendance and had some very interesting exhibits. The partially dismantled Digital PDP system they had was amazing. The mainboard had hundrens of pins and a massively complex loom of hand-crafted wires running across it; it just goes to show how difficult it was in the 1960's and 70's to build any kind of computer.

Games played today included Crazy Taxi, Streetfigher IV, Speedball 2, Afterburner Climax, Wii GoldenEye, F-Zero, Vectrex Scramble, Outrun, Outrun 2. Of the two player games we played my parter in crime Chris B managed to thrash me at everything except for my surprising turn of form at IK+ on the Amiga. Green belt rules!

Xbox 360 Kinect

I’m starting to get worried about the Xbox 360. It's a superb piece of kit but the Kinect – Microsoft’s attempt at motion control – seems too clever for its own good. And it’s starting to attract some criticism. Nintendo and Sony have developed systems that are at the same time simpler and more flexible, particularly at the moment when we’re in a transition period between gamepad games and motion control games.

The technical brilliance of Kinect is the crux of the problem – it relies 100% on motion detection and this means you have no wand or any other type of controller in your hand. This means you have no physical buttons at all.  It’s an amazing piece of technology but in terms of the games it can support, it seems incredibly limited. The early Kinect version of Forza 3 under development allows you to steer the car using your arms, but they haven’t figured out how to do acceleration and braking yet.

Consider a Kinect version of any modern game and the lack of buttons always seems to be a problem. How do you fire a gun? How do you switch weapons? Or throw a grenade? So it’s not going to work for first person shooters.

Maybe Kinect isn’t intended to bring motion control to existing games – perhaps the idea is to bring in a whole new genre of game that is designed with pure motion control in mind right from the start. It might just take some time for developers to get the hang of it. Meanwhile, the PS3 is already getting patches to existing games that can take advantage of their Move system straight away. The more conventional system integrates much more easily with existing titles.

It’s funny how the PS3 was always hyped to be more powerful than the 360, and when this didn't materialise into the games released the argument was that it would take time for developers to harness the power. I’m not convinced by this – they haven’t managed it even now and although the theoretical processing power is higher, it seems like in the reality of game design it’s just not accessible. With motion control, Microsoft look to be heading down the same path – it will take time for developers to get to grips with Kinect – question is – will they ever?