- Visiting Martin with Mikkel G, I played a few levels of Dead Ops Arcade with Marius. It is a Smash T.V. clone with the unique feature of having first-person sequences based on a power-up. We also played a few rounds of bot matches - it was fun, but a little too similar to previous games.
- The game is free for us PS Plus dudes.
- First I wanted to check out some bot matches. This game is very impressive in its scope. The number of modes and options is overwhelming. You can play bot matches solo or split-screen, which seems like it could be great.
- Next up was the Zombie Mode. It features Ron Pearlman, Jeff Goldblum, and Robert Picardo.
- The Zombie Mode video was 'blocked in all countries' by YouTube. I can't even view it myself. That sucks.
- I wanted to try some of the bonus modes, and started out with 'Dead Ops Arcade 2: Cyber's Avengening', which is a real dumb name for a minigame, but the game itself is also pretty dumb, so I guess that's OK. It's a Smash T.V. clone with bad graphics and the ability to go into first-person, which makes it way harder. In the middle of the minigame, you play a mini-minigame, which is a tiny car racing game, similar to Super Off Road. Only Black Ops has minigames with minigames in them. Holy shit.
- After playing through the Mirror's Edge-style running track, I started Nightmare Mode, which was a bit of a mystery initially. It is a full campaign with zombies, which is fine, but it was a weird cocktail of pretty cool, very large levels and weird cutscenes without voice acting, and a incoherent story told as a voice-over. First, I thought it was a case of production problems where the original voice recordings were too bad to use, but the more I played, the more weird it seemed. The gap between the production value of the visuals and the awful storytelling was more and more apparent. But then it dawned on me: this mode is a remix of the Black Ops III Campaign, with a zombie-story crudely mashed into it, which explains why everything looks and plays great, but the story feels so out of place.
- I must say, this is some of the best feeling FPS controls I have ever experienced in a game. You've got to hand it to Treyarch, they know how to make a first person shooter.
- I started playing the Campaign. It's not bad, it starts out with some Terminator stuff with robot crafts hovering over a desolate battlefield, and turns into a RoboCop-style cyberpunk thing. I like all of those things. Also, the movement and shooting is great.
- Anders and I tried some Zombie mode, but it was a bit confusing and messy playing in splitscreen.
- Some VR training and then some real firefights (which are probably still in VR).
- Shooting dudes and robots in Singapore.
- The Hell-version of Singapore looks really cool. I wish the story was told in a more elegant way, the setting and overall design is pretty cool.
- I'm very happy I invested in the robot control cybernetics, I can clean up entire areas by remote-controlling a single arial drone, it almost seems too good.
- I wanted to show this to Erik and Nabaz, and Erik and I played a bit of Zombie Mode. I'm not crazy about how it looks and sounds in splitscreen.
- Cutscenes in this particular section of the game was blocked by Activation on YouTube. I had to edit around it by splitting the video into two.
- Finally, back in Cairo! It's not how I remember it, it's distincly more cyber and also there is a war going on.
- The ending doesn't live up to the mystery of the rest of the game. I enjoyed seeing Robert Picardo as Sebastian Krueger a lot. His 3D counterpart was spot on, I had no doubt as to who he was.
- Completed the game on Regular difficulty (Campaign).
- This is just about as much fun as I've ever had with a Call of Duty campaign. Exciting locations, lots of cliche but entertaining cyberpunk tropes, remote controlling turrets and drones, WWII flashbacks, a tiny Zombie Mode embedded in a campaign sequence, weapon and cybernetic upgrades, Robert Picardo - there is a lot of good stuff here, and I almost wasn't annoyed by all the dumb army bro stuff. Most of the time, you have a large area with non-respawning enemies, only very few sequences had the super annoying 'run forward to proceed, infinite respawn' structure that I hate from this series.
- Bjørk, Erik, Malu, and I played some 4-player split-screen. We tried Team Deathmatch and Hardpoint, but personally I ended up having the most fun with 4-player Free-for-all with no bots. Very intense and fun.
2016-07-23
2018-06-21
2018-06-24
Bot Match 12018-06-25
2018-06-28
2018-06-29
2018-06-30
2018-07-02
2020-01-18
