Black Ops Declassified - Treyarch Actually Did It!

Early Concept Art for Treyarch's Latest

Following up on my previous blog post "I Hear the Call" I have to say it's official: Treyarch has finally grown up into a legitimately awesome video game developer. I've put a solid 12 hours or so into Black Ops already and I have to say that they did a fantastic job at both balancing and reinvigorating an already superb multiplayer experience. Modern Warfare 2 was and is still a great game but it faltered in many ways as I believe I mentioned previously. This missteps seem to have been carefully analyzed and repaired in almost every way in Black Ops. Maybe I'm just still caught up in the hype, but the amount of content - the ridiculously customizable options, numerous stats/charts/ratios, and sheer amount of weaponry - have blown me away. Most important of all though - its actually fun.



On the single-player front I've only managed to get through the first two missions or so. This is in no way due to the fact that they are not compelling (because I'm pretty sure riding on the back of a Harley while firing off a model 1887 shotgun at communist soldiers is the flippin definition of compelling) but rather that I can't pry myself away from the addictive multiplayer. If that wasn't enough there's also the incredibly popular Zombies mode and a secret (and very addictive) top-down classic shooter in the vein of Robotron: 2084 called Dead Ops Arcade.

I should also mention the fact that there were about 3 million people playing online after the first day and the title has already apparently reached 5.6 million copies sold.

Anywho, I have class in five minutes so I guess that's all for now. If you've played Black Ops and/or any other Call of Duty games let me know what you think. I'll try to talk a bit more about Black Ops campaign later on (though I've already said that about Kirby's Epic Yarn and Super Meat Boy and haven't gotten to those yet... oops).

~Ben