Better late than never, but earlier than anticipated

So I was able to get my hands on a copy of Black Ops a few weeks before I had decided to get it and I was totally stoked about it. I bought the DVD version as oppose to the online because I couldn’t use my gift cards online due to not having enough on a single card to buy the game and Steam would not allow multiple cards to be used at once to pay the game in full, so Walmart was my next option.

Although many would rather have the game downloaded rather than a disk due to possibility of the disk getting scratched or lost. I don’t have a problem with this as I make image copies of the games for back up purposes and store the originals away to avoid damage. I only pull them out if necessary but will use the images to install them if need be. To date I have almost all of the Call of Duty PC games on disk with the exception of Modern Warfare 2 and all in excellent conditions. One thing I can say I did not have to worry about the long wait for downloading and then installing. It only took 15 minutes from the disk and I was ready to rock everyone’s online world.

First Impressions: First day

Well, before I even bought there game there were complaints already posted on the Steam forums about lag issues. Some of my clan friends mentioned having some problems with lag but this kinda depended on what server they were on but they most had a smooth gameplay. The story was that these seems to be a memory leak somewhere in the game which is causing the lag. Hopefully they will have an update soon to fix this.

Once I got the game installed last night it started up on the single player and man did it lag just on the video sequence alone. Bare in mind I don’t have a state of the art, top of the line PC but according to Activition’s hardware requirements my PC is good enough to play it decently.

> Mainboard : MSI K9N6PGM-F (MS-7309)
> Processor : AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ @ 2700MHz
> Physical Memory : 4096MB (2 x 2048 DDR2-SDRAM )
> Video Card : NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
> Hard Disk : Western Digital WD50 00AAKS-00TMA SCSI Disk Device (500GB)
> Network Card : NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller
> Operating System : Windows 7 Professional Professional Media Center 6.01.7600 (32-bit)
> DirectX : Version 11.00
> Windows Performance Index : 5.7 on 7.9

I decided to try the multiplayer first as my friends were already playing and I wanted to join them. It felt a little strange, like every game does at first. Some of the buttons were out of place so I had to set a few to match Modern Warfare 2 as I’ve been playing it for a while. I had a bit of lag but nothing to serious. The game play is not as smooth as Modern Warfare 2 but then it’s not the same game in a sense. It took some getting use to but I guess this has something to do with not having modern weapons and all the cool add-ons I’m use to. There are a few things about this game I find rather strange, stupid and/or pointless and some things different from Modern Warfare 2 that I can understand why they are different.

For 1 thing I don’t understand the point of having to earn the right to wear you clans tag. Who’s idea was it to put this as an unlockable feature? Why should have I have to unlock such a thing? It’s just a tag and people only have it if they belong to a clan and from what I have seen not everyone belongs to one so this is sorta useless to those who are not part of one. I found it strange that my name did not have the brackets [] around m clan tag while some of my friends did until they told me why although they joked around saying I would have to buy this feature with my COD money. Talk about taking rewards a bit too far. What’s next, turn picking my name into a reward? I’ll show up as player ABC123 till I reach a certain level? Come one, this is stupid and pointless.

I also found it strange how I could not join my friends on a server unless I was invited even though the is an option to join them thru the friend menu but it’s always grayed out. I don’t know why but it would be nice to figure out how to join them. Well, I did not play the game for an hour or 2 so I did not have much time to try it all out.

I did find the concept of having to purchase just about everything a bit strange, especially without having to get it in a specific order like in Modern Warfare 2 but then I can appreciate not having to wait for certain perks or equipment to unlock at a specific level and I can always ignore the ones I don’t really use much. I am curious though and wonder if the prices will change one we prestige because I found it a bit easy to get the perks and equipment although I have not level up enough to unlock the better weapons so unlocking weapons may make some of prices go up somehow.

One thing I noticed they did was that although the perk on Black Ops are pretty much the same as those on Modern Warfare 2 (with some very noticeable exceptions) there were some that were moved around that will not allow you to combine certain perks like Modern Warfare 2 does. For example, I have what I call my running class where I use weapons that are easy to shoot when running around the map as oppose to sniping or being tactical. On this class I have the following perks: Marathon Pro, Light Weight Pro, Ninja Pro. This allows me to move really fast on any map and knife people or get behind them and even dodge bullets. Many people found this truly annoying although I don’t think there was anything on MW2 that someone did not find annoying. Black Ops on the other hand kinda denies me the chance to create a similar class as they bunched Ninja and Marathon on the same slot so I either run for long periods of time or I run silently but I can’t do both on Black Ops. Oh well.

There were a few others things I found a bit confusing or annoying on this game. For one thing I could not join my friends in a server, i could only get invited. Gotta wonder what the hell they were thinking that they did not have this feature active even though it was there. I also found setting up the classes very tedious but I guess once I get use to it I probably won’t even notice it. But what really annoyed me was having purchase weapons as oppose to getting them once they unlock. So not only do I have to wait to unlock it, I also have to have enough money to buy it too. I think they took the whole money concept a bit too far for my taste, but I guess like MW2, I’ll eventually ignore it or deal with it even if it upsets me. So far these are my first impression the first day of trying the game out for a little over an hour. I have yet to try the zombie mode, maybe this weekend when I have more time.

Day Two: First Impressions don’t always matter

As fun as the game may be, as cool as some of the new stuff may be and as interesting as the game play may be; all is pointless because of that one issue I mentioned above which is that dam lag problem the game has. So far I have heard of some updates but have yet to see anything to indicate the game has been updated. Not even shutting down and restarting Steam several times will show any updates. Playing the game last night was so frustrating I eventually went back to playing MW 2. My clan’s server lag was so bad slow motion seemed fast as I kept trying to move and ended up back where I started and getting the “no connection” msg on the screen. Even other servers were somewhat laggy, enough to keep me from barely taking  a shot at anyone before I was hitting the ground. Never had I had a 4 to 1 death to kill ratio on any COD game. I sure hope this gets resolved soon or I will be skipping Black Ops till I hear things have improved. The real downside is that there are very few people playing MW 2 now that it takes a while to get into games. I guess I’ll be dusting off the other COD games to kill time till Black Ops improves this lag issue.