Games I’ve Been Playing Lately

Starting off a new series for writing is pretty hard. Sometimes you have to have a genesis of an idea that takes a long time to come up with. Other times the idea comes to you while you’re doing something trivial like playing video games.

So this will be a bi-monthly series about what games I’m playing recently. I’ll even include games I’ve bought recently for retro and current systems. The systems I play the most in my gaming life happen to be Microsoft’s consoles. Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. It’s just something about the controllers to me. They feel right in your hand. Unless it’s the original Xbox’s “Duke” controller. So let’s get this started, shall we?

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has been out since last October. It was a hyped up return to form for the series. My history in Call of Duty games starts with Call of Duty: Big Red One on the Playstation 2. That game was a single-player first person shooter that was a bit of an experience for an eleven year old to play. It was my first taste of World War 2 shooters and I loved it. Fast forward two years to the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Infinity Ward changed the game with this shooter. Call of Duty would never be the same after that game, and neither would I. The gameplay and multiplayer experience of that game shaped how Call of Duty would look for the next twelve years.

Modern Warfare “OG” as I’ll refer to it, was also the first online game that I got an Xbox 360 and Xbox Live to play with. All my friends in 7th and 8th grade had the game. It was a big party after school with everyone hopping on instead of doing their homework. Modern Warfare 2 came out two years later and the Call of Duty boom was off. Activision was raking in money left and right. The series could do no wrong.

Actual Black Ops 4 Talk

This was a lot of buildup to get to why I’m still playing Black Ops 4, but the short version is: I left playing Call of Duty games after Modern Warfare 3. The series’ magic seemed to have dried up and the games were feeling formulaic at that point. On a whim on a rainy October night in Southern California, I bought Black Ops 4. What followed was an entire night of updating the damn game and I didn’t even get to hop on. It took a couple weeks but I was hooked.

Fast forward to yesterday. This is the most I’ve played a Call of Duty game before. I missed all the games in between Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty: WW2. Specialists in the multiplayer were a new exciting thing to me. The fire to play the game was back with this latest installment. Some might have horrid things to say about how Treyarch runs their Call of Duty games. I tend to err on the side of, “the developer knows what they’re doing a little bit”. Treyarch took a game that was supposedly 50-60% finished and has made it playable. That takes real work on their part. So I don’t blame them for the bumps in the road that got us to this point.

I’ll be playing Black Ops 4 until the beta for Modern Warfare starts up in September.