For seventy million users of Sony's PlayStation Network, this is a weird time — one in which they're being simultaneously deprived of the shoot-em-ups they crave and used as pawns in an epic conflagration between Sony and a shadowy, wily opponent. It started on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th, when a post on Sony's PSN blog noted that the PlayStation Network and Qriocity service — which the PlayStation 3 console relies on for multiplayer PlayStation 3 games, movies, and music — were out of commission. A day later, another post estimated that it might be a day or two before they returned. Then one announced that Sony had detected an "external intrusion" and had intentionally taken the services offline to fortify them....
I never play games twice. But Call of Duty: Black Ops has made a very happy liar out of me .As soon as I finished Black Ops the other night on my PC, I got up, walked out of my computer den, went into the living room, fired up my Xbox 360, plopped down in my big, overstuffed chair and started all over again.
I wanted to try to assassinate Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion again. And break out of a Soviet prison camp in the Arctic again. And pilot a gunboat through the Mekong Delta again, shooting up sampans while listening to “Sympathy for the Devil.” Black Ops glistens with such moments. The cold war was never so much fun.
Exciting, intense and engrossing, Black Ops has immediately become the definitive contemporary first-person shooter (although if you want to shoot aliens rather than Russians, Halo: Reach is your game). Black Ops, published by Activision, does not really innovate, but it doesn’t have to. Rather, it reflects a keen intelligence and a rigorous, disciplined understanding of each individual element of modern game design and production. Just as important, it then executes and delivers on each of those elements in a way that demonstrates how well oiled a game-making machine Robert A. Kotick, Activision’s chief executive, has created.
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