I’ve started to notice a camp of gamers that happen to be greater fans of the Treyarch Call of Duty games than the Infinity Ward ones. This concept is foreign to me, but then again I am also not a competitive gamer. I go in there for story mode, and if I want zombies in my multiplayer I’ll just drop in Left 4 Dead. Yet it seems there is a whole group that holds Treyarch up high for being able to have fewer bugs or glitches than Infinity Ward.
 
Well let’s paint the picture. Infinity Ward builds the new technology, but has to get it out within two years. This technology is shared with Treyarch halfway through development, and thus Treyarch gets a bonus year to wor k with the finished but glitched technology. Gee, I wonder which package is going to seem more polished in retrospect?
 
Yet I could care less for this as well, as it usually has more to do with exploits. I played the demo for World at War and it was…missing something. I read about the “grim and gritty” scene where a prisoner of war is killed and blood splatters the tent and I rolled my eyes with a deep sigh. Yet I decided I’d give Black Ops a try, particularly since this was supposedly the best campaign and story yet.
 
I’d like to extend my middle finger to the universe for that, thank you very much.
 
I guess I’ve always had suspicion, but it seems to me that Treyarch is just a group of guys that ar e too busy thinking Fight Club is a movie about fighting do anything worthwhile and with purpose. Infinity Ward has stated before they don’t go for realism but authenticity as they are building entertainment, but there is still a goal in mind. They want to portray a frightening image of what modern world war could look like. There is a reason the team stuck with World War II for a while. It was a horrific time and could be measured as humanity at its worst (and yet, at the same time, best). Seeing what such a conflict might look like with even more powerful weapons and advanced equipment is done out of a sort of child-like giddiness, and yet simultaneously Infinity Ward has tried to approach it with the sophisticated maturity of an adult.
 
Of course, this has completely failed in the second game, but I’m willing to give the team the benefit of the doubt when they say Activision rushed them (though let’s be honest, there is no excuse for making Russia the villain again. Can’t we just leave the Cold War behind? Or are we afraid Kim Jong Il is just so insane that he’ll think a video game is a declaration of war?). Still, I can appreciate what they are doing with their story because they are trying to treat the player to the tremendous capabilities the modern world powers have, and how easily the end of the world can come from itchy trigger fingers.
 
Then I played Black Ops, this game everyone told me was “so good”, and…well, in truth I was pretty stumped. I’ve tried to write this review many times before, and each time all I could type was “Call of Duty: Black Ops is a stupid game”. I could think of no better way to put it. The game just feels as if it is coated with idiocy, duct-taped together by a group of manlike boys that think Full Metal Jacket is so awesome because of that scene in the helicopter. You know, the “How can you kill women and children?” “Easy! You don’t lead ‘em so much!” Instead of getting any value of “war is horrible” from it the team thought “dude, dude…dude…war is fuckin’ awesome yo!” and figured grim and gritty makes everything adult.
 
I feel absolutely no authenticity from Black Ops. It feels like Treyarch just decided that Modern Warfare 2 had snowmobiles, so they had to shove in a motorcycle segment. No Russian had you kill civilians, so Black Ops will allow you to shove glass in a guy’s mouth and punch him in the jaw. All the while that guy from Saw

Modern Warfare 2. They had ideas for a bunch of levels and just strung together a cheap narrative to tie it all together somehow. All care for authenticity is forgotten, however, what with red dot sights being equipped on guns during Vietnam and all.
 
The best reason Black Ops is in any way playable is because it is built off of Infinity Ward’s technology. The physics? Infinity Ward’s. The guns? Infinity Ward’s. The A.I.? Infinity Ward’s. It is all trying to play imitation to what Infinity Ward has made without understanding why any of it works. At best this game is fun because it’s simply universally enjoyable to gun fake people down (come off it, everyone has wanted to release their frustration in ridiculous over the top ways, including the gunning of random assholes down. If they fire back then that means you’re justified!).
 
Yet even here, where all the grunt work is done for them, Treyarch screws up. Maps are completely linear with hardly any chances to flank foes and approach them from multiple angles. The way you’ll do things the first time will pretty much be the way you do it the second, and third, and fourth (if you can stomach that much, at least). For whatever reason Treyarch also decided that Black Ops needed to revive the art of the endless respawn. Instead of artfully recreating Vietnam with clever level design and foes surrounding the player, hidden amongst the backdrop of the foliage, that throwing numbers of enemies at you over and over would feel enough like Vietnam. The whole reason players wanted to try different ti me periods was so the gameplay could be modified, and here Treyarch is pulling a technique that was annoying in Call of Duty 2.
 
The game is careless, it is rushed, and it completely counts on the gullibility of gamers to buy it. I cannot comprehend how many people told me this was the best story, campaign, everything in the series when it is missing even a hint of the artistic merit that Infinity Ward placed into the series. It’s like calling a coloring of Ronald McDonald done by an art student in High School as provocative as the Mona Lisa.
 
Maybe this is just a sign that I shouldn’t label myself a gamer anymore. When something like Black Ops, one of the lamest titles I’ve touched this year and by far the dumbest game (and may I remind you I played Damnation this y ear), is capable of winning a slew of awards at the industry’s biggest sham event, I can only imagine that I’m not a gamer anymore. What can I call myself? I don’t know. Maybe something like “Electronic Entertainment Enthusiast”, or maybe just “Games Enthusiast” to simplify. That way I can have just as pretentious a title as I act.
 
Call of Duty: Black Ops is single-handedly the dumbest game I played in 2010.

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