I finished Lost Planet 2's campaign, checked out the multiplayer and wrote a review. Overall it was fun as a co-op game but awful as a singleplayer one. The multiplayer had some interesting ideas but there is essentially no community at all, which is a shame. The game also has fantastic graphics, and runs unbelievably well considering how good it looks. It was also super stable and quite polished, not one crash or frame rate hitch.

Which brings me to Call of Duty: Black Ops. First off I'll say that gameplay wise black ops seems like a big step up from MW 2, and the campaign was actually very good (I managed to finish it in the brief time that I had the game running well). The only problem is that the game is broken.

RANT INCOMING

I played Call of Duty 1 on my 2001 Toshiba satellite laptop that had a 30gb hard drive, a 1.8ghz Celeron CPU, 256mb of ram and a 16mb ATI graphics card. Once I turned the settings down a bit, the game ran fine.

I played Call of Duty 2 on my 2004 Dell desktop that had 512mb of ram, a 2.8GHZ P4 CPU, and a Ati X300 graphics card. It ran fine in direct x 7 mode.

I played Call of Duty 4 on the same Dell desktop but with upgraded ram (1.5 gigs) and a upgraded GPU (8600GT). It ran perfectly on the highest settings with at 1280x1024 with 4xAA and anistrophic filtering on.

Call of Duty: World at War and MW 2 I played on my current rig, although the former I played with a 9800GT and the latter with my current ATI 5850 (the game came with the card). Both games ran flawlessly.

Even though the Call of Duty games do nothing remarkable in terms of gameplay, the series had a legacy of performing well on modest rigs with total stability and sharp, clean controls. This makes the series very appealing since you just start the game and play without hassle.

Along comes Call of Duty: Black Ops, the worst game launch that I have ever taken part in; it takes this well earned reputation and singlehandedly destroys it. This is the most poorly tested, and one of the most poorly supported, releases I have ever known. The problems with this game make the launch issues with Bad Company 2 and New Vegas look like nothing.

My experience with the game can be found in this post:

I got the game working ok after the first patch, but the second patch re-broke it.

I've tried Validating the game files, turning off steam community and cloud in game, re-installing Direct x, rolling back to an older version of direct x, making tweaks to the config file (many many tweaks, every single one listed in the steam forums and on various websites), deleting the config files and starting fresh, matching the sound quality of my sound device to the game's sound quality, changing the game's priority in the task manager, trying different sound and video drivers, cleaning my computers registry, turning all of the settings to max in order to take load off my CPU, turning off the MS DNS client, typing "/sns_restart" into the console at the beginning of every match... basically every single fix that has been posted since the game was released.

The game still crashes in MP every 10 minutes, and stutters like mad unless I turn shadows off and Vysnc on, then I get input lag and the game still stutters occasionally in singleplayer.

This is the single worst game launch I have ever seen.

For reference, I've been able to play every single previous COD perfectly, and have played almost every single major PC release, including the infamously buggy New Vegas, and the CPU intensive BC 2 and Metro 2033, absolutely perfectly on the highest, or at least high, settings.

Broken game is broken.

with_teeth26

So basically the game is more broken now than it was at launch. I now get great frame rates, but they come at the cost of constant crashing in multiplayer, terrible, terrible stuttering, and sound looping. After making claims about fixing the game, and releasing a couple of useless patches that probably passed QA on the rigs that weren't having any problems in the first place, those of us who are still having problems with the game have been left high and dry with only vague comments about the game updating cycle as to whether more fixes are on the way. Really Treyarch, how hard can it be to take a game engine that has worked flawlessly with oh, what is it, 4 games, and just do THE EXACT SAME THING? You know, make it work?

I know my computer isn't top of the line, and I expect to have some minor difficulties in CPU intensive games like GTA IV and Bad Company 2, but a static, graphically unimpressive game like Black Ops? I'm sorry, but this is unacceptable. I also heard that Treyarch employees were given a 1 week holiday for thanks giving while the emails concerning their broken failure of a release continue to flood their inboxes, and the game itself continues to sell like some kind of Christ-endorsed piece of immortality granting software.

Well Treyarch you have lost my already dubious respect and earned my middle finger with this malfunctioning piece of horribly written code. I'm giving this game a 1/10 until Treyarch fixes it, the longer that takes, the lower my final score will be.

I think i'm going to uninstall it until the next patch comes out. My patience has run out, my optimism has turned into rage and remorse. I'll go back to Bad Company 2 in the mean time, a game that is superior to Black Ops both in optimization and in depth of gameplay.

/Rant

I've continued playing Fallout: New Vegas, I'm about 30 hours in to my first playthrough and will probably finish the game soon. Easily my favourite game this year, I encountered next to no issues, and the depth and number of ways you can complete the main quest is staggering. I'm going to be replaying this game for sure.

I also talked a couple of friends into getting L4D 2 so i've been playing that a fair bit with them, Versus in a friends only game is a blast especially if you can round up 8 players, I've gotten a lot better since I started playing and now if there only a few of us playing its usually 2 vs 1 against me, and I almost always win by a huge margin. I'll be sure to keep playing it, the problems I was having with playing with random people have been eliminated as I have gotten better, although there are still stupid people here and there. Only difference is now I'm the one doing the vote kicking.