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jp's Call of Duty: Black Ops (DS)

[January 17, 2022 02:11:25 PM]

I played this a while back for (undisclosed) research purposes, but this is the first time I've sat down with the game to play it for fun/academic interest. I think I briefly played the original Black Ops on PS3 for all of 30 minutes or something like that and I get the impression that this game is supposed to be the DS version of that one - so, the same characters and general storyline. I think.

The game starts and you're sort of in the middle of an operation in the 60s in Cuba things go south, you were supposed to be there in the first place, and so on. I was surprised that the game has live voice (compression must have gotten quite good, I also wonder what the capacity is on DS carts, I've assumed a few hundred MBs, but I have no basis for that really at the moment) (Just checked, they ranged quite a bit, reaching GB range, so full voice makes a lot more sense now, especially for games late in the handhelds life).

I've recently played a few FPS games on the DS and this one is neither worse nor better in terms of controls. Things are still a bit awkward, but they work well enough. At least when playing on medium - I'm curious how much fine precision is needed for aiming and whatnot.

It's interesting to see how this game IS a call of duty game in that it has two things that are hallmarks(?) (tropes?) of the series - they're not interesting now, but they were earlier in the series history:

(a) First is the use of the AI companion - follows along with you, often giving orderes and pointing out things. The most "famous"(?) are those moments where you sneak up on some unsuspecting guards (two of them) and your AI teammate says something like "you take out the one on the left and I'll take the other one" and then "fire when ready" and two guards go down at roughly the same time (assuming you don't miss). So, I was pleasantly surprised to see this moment come up... it's very CoD.

(b) The second is a bigger picture feature - rather than a designed moment in the game - and is the zombie mode, where you fight off waves of zombies, spend money buying better weapons and unlocking areas, and hopefully don't die. I played a few rounds of this and my only complaint is that you die too quickly - and often from behind without warning (as far as I could tell).

I won't be playing more of this - but I did see that there are additional (typical) features - collectables (stars in a level you must shoot to obtain) and also "mini-game" type activities. I just played one where I had to rotate two radio dials in order to tune into the frequency such that I could then hear orders from my boss/commander...

From the screenshots on the back of the box it looks like there's some additional (fighter jet sorties?) things - but, my hands were getting a bit too cramped to want to finish the campaign.