Call of Duty: Black Ops Redefines Modern Warfare

Black Ops slips players into the counter-espionage and abiding fear of the Cold War, while serving as a powerful link between the World War II games that came before it and the likely countless modern shooters that will come in its wake.

Developer Treyarch's first Call of Duty set outside World War II is a gripping experience that uses the story of one special forces operative and his forays into Cuba, Russia and Vietnam to examine the nature of a world living in the shadow of a constant threat of global genocide. More than any Call of Duty before it, Black Ops manages to provide both an intense game playing experience and a provocative story without watering down either. Black Ops reminds us that games should be an exploration of the unusual, a chance to do what hasn't been done before, either in real life or other video games.

Adult shooter fans looking for a carefully paced story threaded with an intriguing plot and backed up by surprisingly robust multiplayer offerings.

Since Infinity Ward's wildly popular Call of Duty: Modern Warfare hit in 2007, Treyarch has become the "other" Call of Duty developer. They're the studio that makes the Call of Duty games that hit between Modern Warfare releases; the studio that has never pushed the franchise beyond the well-tread battles of World War II. Black Ops is a chance for Treyarch to remind gamers that they're not here to just fill the gaps between Infinity Ward's games, and to prove that the Cold War is fertile ground for gamers to explore.

So this isn't a Call of Duty from the people who made Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2? What kind of shooter is it?

A superb one. Infinity Ward makes great shooters, but so does Treyarch, they proved that with their last game: Call of Duty: World at War. This time Treyarch manages to do what even the original Modern Warfare fell short of, deliver a game that is as engaging as a movie without making it feel like you're not in control of what happens. From the scene that opens with you strapped to an interrogation table through to the end, the game plucks at your attention with the twin desires to learn what happens and survive what's thrown at you next. This is as good as, perhaps better than, anything Infinity Ward has made.

Does stepping away from a modern shooter to return to historic engagements take away from the experience?

Had Black Ops focused on the regular battles and wars that occurred in the 60s I'm sure it would have, but instead this latest Call of Duty has you playing through covert operations using weapons you've likely never seen before. While you don't have modern guns to shoot in the campaign, you do get to take out enemies with fire-spewing shotguns, crossbows armed with explosive bolts and a pump-action grenade launcher.

How is that any different from every other shooter out there?

Black Ops strips away most of the padding and endless gun battles found in many shooters, opting instead to dramatically cut in and out of the game's 15 or so missions. Instead of forcing you to walk through the set up that explains an engagement, or deal with the dull moments between battles, Black Ops throws you face first into brutal battle after brutal battle. There's no time to breathe.

That sounds intense.

It is the most adult game I've ever played and not just because it has you killing and avoiding being killed. The intensity of the game is only matched by how vicious those moments between battles can be. The action, the torment, the kills are so brutal at times that you'll want to look away from the screen. If you're worried that it's too much for you, you can go into settings and tone down the game's brutality. Doing so doesn't just turn red blood to green or remove curse words, it changes the cut scenes, removing the overt torture and gore without changing the story.

This sounds amazing. Is there anything you didn't like about the game?

There was a moment, a particular mission, about a third of the way through the five hour or so game when I felt like I was playing an old World War II game from Treyarch. Suddenly I was throwing myself headfirst into what seemed to be a never-ending stream of bad guys. Tactics and timing went out the window and instead I had to inch down the map, one life, one foot, at a time. It was an annoying, albeit relatively short, reminder of what Treyarch left behind with their World War II games.

How does the multiplayer hold up?

Multiplayer in Black Ops is largely the same as the core experience found in Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer. You still rank up, unlocking new abilities, weapons and looks. Instead of starting from scratch, Treyarch built on top of what came before it, giving you some new tweaks, modes and maps. The biggest change, though, is the addition of Wager Match, which allows you to bet the COD points you've earned. These points are what you use to unlock things in the game. Losing or winning them can be a pretty big deal and the added level of intensity is a welcome addition to multiplayer. There's enough here to render Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer obsolete.

What about zombies, are they back?

This time around you can drop right into zombie survival matches from the main menu without having the beat the game. The zombie mode of Black Ops comes with new maps, weapons and zombie types as well as a neat new cast of playable, political characters. It's a beefy enough game to feel close to something that could have been sold on its own. There's also a surprise top-down retro shooter hidden the game that plays like Smash TV, but with zombies.

Anything else?

There's a ton of neat additions to the franchise stuffed into Black Ops. The game now includes Combat Training which lets you practice against AI in free-for-all and deathmatch modes on any of the maps. You can also play online split-screen again, and you can even use two Xbox Live Gold accounts on one Xbox 360 at the same time. Finally, the game has a theater mode that lets you create your own clips from gameplay and upload them to the web. These may sound like a bunch of small additions, but they fill a lot of gaps historically missing from the Call of Duty games.

These videos contain scenes from the game that you may not want to see until you play it.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is a powerful story. The game's missions explore a fascinating time in history, take us to places we've likely never been and put us in situations unusual and captivating, even for a video game. But what it does best, through both narrative and gameplay, is tell a story. As the game progressed I found myself anticipating the cut-scenes as much as I did the tightly crafted levels. Thinking back, I can easily forget whether the last absorbing moments of the game were played by me or for me. This is what video games should be, a confusion of interaction and story-telling, of graphics and camera movement, of play and parable.

Call of Duty: Black Ops was developed by Treyarch and published by Activision for the PC, PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii, released on Nov. 9. Retails for $59.99 USD. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played through the entire single-player campaign on the Xbox 360, spent hours playing Zombie mode on multiple maps and played online and offline, split-screen multiplayer. Played hidden game DOA.

Via Gizmodo

How to Build Your Ultimate Gaming PC, Step by Step

How do you know when it’s time to replace your gaming rig? When you’ve turned down all of the game settings to minimum and you still have to play at 1024x768. Or you’ve just completed the Steam hardware survey and Valve rejects your score because it’ll drag down the curve. Of course, if you’re asking the question in the first place....

In specting this year’s gaming build, we decided to restrict ourselves to a budget of approximately $1,400. This would provide a nice challenge, but would still give us enough cash to build a powerful and feature-filled machine. If you’ve ever tried to squeeze high-end performance into this price point, you already know that the road to our final configuration wasn’t clear, obvious, or easy.

The truth is that there are many ways to skin a Tribble, and there is no single right config for everyone. To give you some insight into how we arrived at our final destination, we’re going to walk you through our decision-making process.

Initially, we decided the foundation for our configuration should be an LGA1366 board with a Core i7-930. We reasoned this would give us the ability to run a quad-core now, and then upgrade to a hexa-core in the future.When we pondered this a little more, however, we reasoned that maybe the LGA1366/i7-930 route wasn’t the best choice for a balanced gaming system. The CPU costs nearly $300, and you have to pay for a third DIMM to keep its tri-channel memory stoked. Furthermore, LGA1366 boards tend to cost $50 to $100 more than LGA1156 mobos. The final blow? As much as we love six-core computing, it’s not essential for gaming. Not yet, at least.

With this in mind, we shifted our focus toward Intel’s LGA1156 platform, which permits a much wider range of processor choices that scale all the way down to $113 Core i3 CPUs. Our first inclination was Intel’s 2.93GHz Core i7-870 chip. Recent price cuts from $562 to $294 make this powerful quad-core with Hyper-Threading mighty appealing. In raw performance it actually comes surprisingly close to Intel’s original Extreme Edition chip, which sold for $999.

Cooler Master's special edition HAF 922 is a great DIY case, and it looks nice, too.

The more we considered the possibilities, however, the more we started to wonder: Given the gaming orientation of this rig, did we really need to pay for Hyper-Threading? Probably not. If you look at any survey of gaming hardware, the vast majority of users are still happily humming along with dual-cores. (We actually considered making this rig a dual-core at one point, but hey, even gamers like to occasionally transcode videos.)

In the end, we picked Intel’s new 2.8GHz Core i5-760. AT $205, the chip gives us four cores but lacks Hyper-Threading. We’re going to pull extra value out of the CPU by overclocking the crap out of it.

Trimming the hundred bucks from our CPU cost and going with LGA1156, gave us more money to play with, which allowed us to do something we’ve never done in a budget gaming rig: add an SSD.

Why SSD? If you haven’t kept up with current events, the simple answer is that they absolutely kick ass. System builders and upgraders who make the leap are shocked at the speedy boot times, and SSDs are ideal for gaming because they shorten level load times to near-zero.

Corsair's Force F60 gives our rig the responsiveness of an SSD.

Of course, the $1,400 question is: How much SSD can you fit into a budget gaming rig? About 60GB. That’s what we got with Corsair’s Force F60 and it only set us back $160. The drive uses the much-beloved SandForce controller, which enables performance that pretty much tops out the SATA 3Gb/s interface. The SSD isn’t the only storage in the system, of course—we also include a 1TB Seagate 7200.12. It’s pretty fast itself, and is a perfect storage drive.As always, we double-checked our decision. Did SSD really make sense? After all, couldn’t we take that $160 from the SSD and put it toward the fattest GPU possible? Well… yes and no. A balanced system isn’t about one single component. We could have, say, poured a ton of the budget into the CPU or GPU. But that would have been a bit like putting a big-block motor into a Miata.

In the end, the GeForce GTX 470 fits our needs well. At $289 before a $20 mail-in rebate, Asus’s ENGTX470 is one hell of a deal. Why not a single GTX 460 1GB? As fantastic as that card is for the money, we’re getting a lot more videocard for just $50 more. We also considered two GTX 460s in SLI but that would have meant spending almost a third of our budget on graphics alone.

That doesn’t mean we weren’t biting our lips over our decisions. For example, we could have actually saved coinage by selecting the black Cooler Master HAF 922 and the bundled 600-watt PSU. On the street, this power supply sells for $160, but it lacks the juice to run SLI’d GTX 470 parts. In fact, it lacks the ability to even run SLI’d GTX 460 components. Better to pay for a quality PSU like Corsair’s TX750. This gets you approved SLI support for GTX 460 and GTX 470 cards.

Yes, we opted to pay more for a red case. That might seem a little frivolous after all our deliberating over parts. At the end of the day though, we decided that even though we were building a budget box, we still wanted a little panache. Something to let fellow gamers know that we didn’t just pick the lowest-price box and click “add to cart.” Call us reckless and irresponsible, but we went crazy and splurged $50 on the special edition red HAF 922. The case’s two-tone red and black design is a head turner, and it’s also a gem of a case to build in.

Budget and gaming go together like oil and water but we’re happy with our gaming rig. You get one of the most powerful DirectX 11 cards out today, an upgrade path that supports SLI (with a PSU to run it), and the responsiveness of a SandForce-based SSD.

Cooler Master's Hyper 212+ has long been a Maximum PC favorite for giving us cooling performance that rivals heatsinks twice its price. Even though our Core i5-760 CPU came with a cooler, we’re ditching it for the Hyper 212+ so we can achieve higher stable overclocks.

The Corsair TX750 can be easily found for less than $100 and is rated by Nvidia to run two GTX 470 cards in SLI. That gives us a solid upgrade path for a second GPU when prices drop. We oriented the TX750 so that its bottom-mounted fan sucks air in and vents it directly out the back.

Some P55 boards in multi-card mode are known to have issues with SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0, but Asus’s P7P55D-E Pro should be less problematic. That’s because the P7P55D-E Pro uses a chip to help alleviate congestion in the P55 chipset.

Tucked into the hard drive tray is Corsair’s F60, a SandForce-based SSD that makes you smile at drive access times.

The special-edition red Cooler Master HAF 922 case was an extra expense, but we decided that its striking two-tone look and spacious interior made it worth the stretch.