1248 Sorcery.

The other day the Teen and I went to Gamestop and she asked for a couple of older games. The remastered God Of War 1 & 2, and Call Of Duty: Black Ops. I’m not a fan of GOW, but I let her play my old Playstation copy of the first one and she liked it. Rather than mess with hooking up a PS2 every time she randomly wants to play I just spent the 8 bucks so she could use her PS3. The COD game was purchased so we could play different zombie maps than the ones on Black Ops 2 and whatever the first one is called. It is my considered opinion that they should just split the series into separate franchises. The real world shooting stuff just bores me endlessly, so it goes unplayed. I understand that they make you unlock the zombie mode in the first game. That would have been torturous. Luckily the Teen’s brother did it for her long before she came to live with us.

My biggest problem with the zombie stuff is the lack of match options. It varies from title to title, but I’d rather there were more things you could tweak. In 2 you can turn off hellhounds. Up until the other night I’d never even seen one, but I know, instinctively, that something called a hellhound is not a thing I want to face with my shooting skills. We always turned them off, but you can’t in Black Ops 1, so we faced our first round of them. It went better than expected considering I had a 2 shot shotgun and had to run around reloading while the Teen shot wildly in all directions while literally screaming.

She reacts very strongly to imaginary danger…

Ultimately the lack of an easy mode, and the inclusion of hounds from hell, cut out round progression by half. The maps are really cool though. Cooler than the ones in BO2, in my opinion. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate them, but I’d like to that that game engine and apply it to these older maps. I feel like we’d have more fun that way.

I actually convinced the Teen to play a few rounds of Tranzit with me. For those who aren’t familiar, Tranzit is kind of the story mode for the zombies in Black Ops 2. You have to complete various tasks then… do something. I don’t actually know what exactly the end game is for it. We can only survive 20 rounds at best, so it’s never come up. At this point we can turn on the power, which summons a lightning boss, and have located the gun upgrade machine. By that point things are pretty much over. This last time, however, we did manage to defeat the boss. I think it keeps respawning no matter how often you kill it, but we did manage to take it out once. In spite of a lot of screaming and running around. Our gameplay style (particularly the Teen’s) is just a notch shy of frenzied panic, so I think we’ve made a lot of progress, all things considered.

I’d like to see a more Smash brothers style match creation system. Turn of shitty guns, lower the point cost of them, that sort of thing. Of course I’m not a hardcore FPS guy. I just want to shoot things and wander around a bit.

We’ve only played a little bit online because other player don’t seem to have each others backs. They just kind of run around, whereas the Teen and I stake out defendable locations with a clear escape plan for when we get overwhelmed. Typically we find a place where each of us can watch a side and put a window, or hole to our backs where nothing spawns. When things start to go south we jump out and run to an agreed upon location that is equally defensible. This is the only way we’ve managed to survive because as soon as we start to stray it inevitable ends with one of us frantically trying to revive the other, while being swarmed by undead. Honestly, I don’t know what the preferred tactics are for those kinds of games, we just sort of learned what works for us and stuck with it.