Black Ops shines where Bad Company 2 fails.

I give CoD a really hard time. The gameplay is shitty and recycled. The visuals are mediocre by today's standards and the overall appeal of the game is kind of bleh. Activision spends more time counting cash than adding fun and interesting new features to their games. I did take a shot with Black Ops over the free weekend and it really surprised me. Bad Company 2 on the other hand, has managed to continual disappoint.

I gave Black Ops a chance to win me over during this last free weekend on Steam and it almost did the trick. The gameplay is a lot of fun and it really reminds me a lot of CS. It has a lot of new features, but it builds on that part of the genre, as opposed to shitting all over it. Don't get me wrong, the game still shits on a lot of other stuff. While playing Black Ops I immediately found things I both loved and hated. I hated the shitty matchmaking system and fail attempt at balancing. I haven't play BlOps since the start, so I was immediately faceraped by people who knew the best camping spots or memorized all of the objectives. This... isn't a lot of fun. I've always been an early adopted to the games I am good and end up playing for any length. This made the game pretty unbearable. I gave it a few tries and found it unsatisfactory over and over again. People who seemed flawless, hosts having clear advantages and crap pings/performance all kept me from having a good time.

Then... THEN I discovered that I can play "offline" and do Combat Training. Wow! What a blast. Killing the bots and running around the maps was a lot of fun. I scaled up the difficulty during the weekend so I didn't just pound asses and feel cool. It was actually a ton of fun and since I never get to play with my friends, seeing their names all over the place was a lot of fun, too. This feature seems pretty cool and it really made me miss it in BFBC2. After my renewed lust for PC FPS games I decided to give BFBC2 another whirl...... it wasn't pretty.

I fired the game up and was expecting to be blown away. I've always regarded the BF series as far superior to CoD. Thus far, they hadn't let me down. Upon entering my very first game I was greeted with epic baserape. After giving up all hope I moved on to another server where I was throttled by people who were outrageous ranks. I've not played the game a whole lot for a multitude of reasons: it feels like I'm running in sludge, there are constant ping issues when I play (I don't know if it's the game, the way I disabled my Nagle, or the fact that when I play at night I'm playing on Euro servers), and the gap between the newbies and the badasses is HUGE. These were all my original gripes with the game and this being the second time I've given it a real shot, I was quite saddened.

I have the game... twice. I bought it once nearly at release and then picked it up on Steam after misplacing my other copy (turns out I loaned it to someone). I gave the copy on Steam a shot and found the same issues. I didn't expect much better, but I thought maybe my install sucked or something.

I know, I know. I should feel like a dick for praising BF and giving CoD such a hard time, but let's be honest... BF is still better. Sure my old and dated PC computer can't run such an awesome game as well, but it runs BlOps pretty smoothly. The physics and destructible environments in BF make it way better. The custom kits and interesting ranking procedure are fun in both. I hope that new FPS games really shake things up in this genre. With a new MW3 looking to be more of the same and the new BF3 looking to be FUCKING AWESOME... I sure hope I'm ready.