Video Game Vintage Title: Call Of Duty: Black Ops

Call Of Duty: Black Ops

Call of Duty: Black Ops is a 2010 first-person shooter video game. The game was developed by Treyarch, published by Activision, and released worldwide on November 9, 2010 for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii consoles, with a separate version for Nintendo DS developed by n-Space. Announced on April 30, 2010, the game is the seventh installment of the Call of Duty series. It is also the first to be set in the Cold War and the fifth to be set in World War II. It is the third in the series to be developed by Treyarch, and is connected to the developer's Call of Duty: World at War.

Within 24 hours of going on sale, the game had sold more than 5.6 million copies, 4.2 million in the U.S. and 1.4 million in the UK, breaking the record set by its predecessor Modern Warfare 2 by some 2.3 million copies. Capcom released a subtitled version in Japan on November 18, 2010 and later a Japanese-dubbed version on December 16, 2010. After six weeks on release, Activision reported that Black Ops had exceeded $1 billion in sales. On August 3, 2011, Activision confirmed that the game had sold over 25 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling games of all time in the US, UK and Europe. A sequel, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, was released on November 13, 2012.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops Plot

On February 25, 1968, SOG operative Alex Mason is strapped to a chair in an interrogation room, bombarded with questions by his unseen captors about the location of a numbers station. Mason then recalls several events, as an attempt to answer their questions.

In 1961, Mason, Woods, and Bowman take part in Operation 40 to assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs. Mason apparently succeeds and stays behind to protect the extraction plane from an oncoming blocade, before being captured by the real Castro, having shot a double. Handed over to General Nikita Dragovich to be held captive at Vorkuta Gulag, Mason befriends inmate Viktor Reznov, the former Red Army soldier. Reznov recounts to Mason the identities of his enemies, the same people involved in Mason�s torture: Nikita Dragovich, his right-hand man Lev Kravchenko, and ex-Nazi scientist Friedrich Steiner, who defected to the Soviet Union.

In October 1945, Reznov and Dimitri Petrenko were sent to extract Steiner from a Nazi base in the Arctic. Dragovich later betrayed them by testing Steiner's creation, a nerve agent known as "Nova-6", on Petrenko and other soldiers in a ship. Reznov was spared the same fate when British commandos, also attempting to acquire Nova-6, attacked the Soviets. During the confusion, Reznov destroyed the Nova-6 and escaped. However, the Soviets recreated it using Steiner and a British scientist, Daniel Clarke. Mason and Reznov later spark a prisoner uprising to escape the gulag, but only Mason escapes and Reznov is captured. One month later, President John F. Kennedy meets Mason and authorizes a mission to assassinate Dragovich. Mason briefly envisions aiming his side arm at Kennedy.

In November 1963, Mason, Woods, Bowman and Weaver are dispatched to Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakh SSR to disrupt the Soviet space program and eliminate members of "Ascension", a Soviet program giving sanctuary to Nazi scientists in exchange for their knowledge. Weaver is captured and Kravchenko stabs out his left eye. Mason and his team rescue him and destroy the Soyuz spacecraft, while Woods apparently kills Dragovich, though Mason believes him to be alive.

In 1968, the team is sent to Vietnam. After defending Khe Sanh, they recover a dossier on Dragovich from a Russian defector in Hue during the Tet Offensive. Mason finds the defector is none other than Reznov. They then penetrate Laos to recover a Nova-6 shipment from a downed Soviet plane. At the crash site the plane collapses and they are captured by Viet Cong and Spetznaz infiltrators. Bowman is executed, while Woods and Mason hijack an Mi-24 Hind and rescue Reznov at Kravchenko's base before confronting Kravchenko himself. Woods stabs Kravchenko, gaining the upper hand. But then as Kravchenko pulls the pins off four grenades strapped to his chest, Woods sacrifices himself by pushing Kravchenko and himself out a window. In a huge explosion, Mason presumes the two dead.

Meanwhile, Hudson and Weaver interrogate Clarke in Kowloon. Clarke reveals the location of a hidden facility in Mount Yamantau before being killed by Dragovich's men. Hudson and Weaver move to destroy the facility and receive a transmission from Steiner requesting to meet at Rebirth Island, as Dragovich has begun killing loose ends. Mason and Reznov head there to assassinate Steiner at the same time, succeeding just as Hudson and Weaver arrive. Mason is adamant that Reznov executed Steiner, but Hudson had witnessed Mason carrying out the act alone.

At this point, Hudson and Weaver are revealed as Mason's interrogators. Dragovich has communist sleeper cells placed all over the United States which, when ordered by the numbers broadcast, will release the Nova-6 gas. As a result, the U.S. is preparing a retaliatory strike on the Soviet Union, which will lead to a full scale war. Hudson needed Steiner to abort the gas launch but after his death only Mason has any knowledge of the numbers station. Hudson reveals that Dragovich brainwashed Mason to understand the numbers broadcasts, effectively making him a Soviet sleeper agent. It is revealed that the real Reznov never escaped and died during the Vorkuta break out, and that the Soviet defector was later dead in Hue. Mason�s visions of Reznov are a result of a dissociative disorder caused by the traumatic brainwashing program. Prior to the Vorkuta breakout, Reznov had secretly met and reprogrammed Mason to assassinate Dragovich, Kravchenko and Steiner for what they did to him and for killing Petrenko and his comrades, instead of Mason's original aim to kill the U.S. President. Mason finally remembers the location of the station: a Russian cargo ship called Rusalka off the coast of Cuba.

An assault on the Rusalka begins, with Mason and Hudson infiltrating the underwater submarine and broadcast station protected by the ship, intended to be used for an invasion of the U.S. after the planned Nova-6 attack. Confirming that the Rusalka is the numbers station, Hudson calls in the US Navy to destroy the ship and its underwater base. Mason and Hudson finally confront Dragovich in the lower levels of the facility. Dragovich taunts Mason and hints at his hand in assassinating Kennedy but Mason drowns him and escapes.

Archive footage of President Kennedy prior to his assassination is shown, revealing Mason in the crowd, implicitly suggesting that Mason may have carried out his initial programming.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops Gameplay

Black Ops is a first-person shooter, retaining the same gameplay mechanics as previous Call of Duty titles. The player assumes the role of a foot soldier who can wield various firearms (only two of which can be carried at once), throw grenades and other explosives, and use other equipment as weapons. A player close enough to an enemy can kill with one knife blow. A character can take three stances: standing, crouching or prone. Each affects rate of movement, accuracy, and stealth. The player can drop to the prone stance from the standing stance while running, and can momentarily sprint before having to stop. The screen glows red to indicate damage to a player's health, which regenerates over time. When the character is within the blast radius of a live grenade, an on-screen marker indicates where it is in relation to the player, helping the player to move away or to throw it back. Among the weapons new to the series in Black Ops are crossbows with bolts and explosive ammunition, Dragon's Breath rounds and ballistic knives.

The player assumes the role of various characters during the single-player campaign, changing perspectives throughout the story. The playable characters are special forces operatives conducting black operations behind enemy lines. In this way, the player's characters have their own traits such as voices and shadows. Each mission features a series of objectives that are displayed on the heads-up display, which marks the direction and distance towards and from such objectives as it has been in the earlier versions. The player is accompanied by friendly troops throughout the game. Although primarily a first-person shooter, certain levels feature sequences where the player pilots a Hind helicopter and guides friendly troops from a SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft. The campaign features several scripted cinematic moments. One of them is a bullet time effect during the "Victor Charlie" level, activated when the player fires toward the last enemy of a Viet Cong squad.

Reception
Call of Duty: Black Ops has received generally positive reviews from critics. GameSpot awarded it 9.0 out of ten and wrote "Call of Duty: Black Ops bears the series' standard superbly, delivering an engrossing campaign and exciting competitive multiplayer." Edge magazine was less positive, giving it a 7/10, writing that "As polished and pretty and fun as Black Ops often is, it feels more like a yearly update than a sequel isn't distinct from its predecessors in any important way". Several reviewers also complained that the game felt too much like a rail shooter, with PC Gamer branding it "barely interactive".

Reviewers also noted that the PC version of the game was buggy and had "a number of frustrating problems", including a lag in multiplayer modes which for some players rendered the game almost "unplayable". Players have also reported serious bugs with the PlayStation 3 version, including compatibility issues with 3D televisions. PC World magazine noted that user reviews of the game were much less positive than those of critics. As of November 12, 2010, three days after the release, PS3, Xbox 360, and PC versions of the game held average user ratings of 3.1, 3.1, and 1.8 stars on Amazon.com, respectively (on a 1 to 5 scale), with many PC users complaining about lag, stuttering and bugs.

In January 2011, to a player complaining about the remaining connection problems for the game on PlayStation 3, an Activision customer service representative threatened that they could shut down the servers for the game for the PlayStation Network at any time. After some days and following some game media heat, Dan Amrich, Activision Social Media Manager, declared that even if they could kill the servers, they did not plan currently to do it. The Daily Telegraph praised Black Ops as a superb experience of gameplay, "the meaty kick of the guns, the blistering pace of the action and the sterling soundtrack of explosions, gunshots and whistling bullets all serve to quicken the player's pulse and tighten their grip on the controller", and mentioned, it is beyond the overwhelming, chaotic action in the game's major gun battles, offers among other things, a stealthy infiltration of a substation in the snow-capped steppes, in which the slow down in action is compensated for by nail-shredding tension and creepy atmosphere.

Official Nintendo Magazine awarded the Wii version 90% and said "Black Ops on Wii is a fantastic shooter packed with all the features of its HD brothers, with the only exception being split-screen multiplayer." Martin Gaston at videogamer.com gave the Wii version 6 out of 10, complaining of Treyarch's reworking of in-game sequences as movies, poor AI, and gameplay problems from lower-resolution graphics.

In February 2011, the Xbox 360 version was named the Xbox Live's top title of 2010 by GameSpot.