Nuketown: NUKED!

Ok, so this is nothing new, but I only now got around to griping publicly about it.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is not a great game, despite what all the expensive advertising (Kobe Bryant and Jimmy Kimmel like it--it must be good!) will try to tell you. And all the pro gaming mags and sites. 9/10? Ridiculous. The game is NOWHERE as good as Modern Warfare 2. Like, it's not even close.

It doesn't look as good. The characters have big heads in the single player campaign. In multiplayer, you get this sense that you're controlling toy soldiers on a play battlefield. That's not good.

More importantly, the single player campaign is hella boring. Surely this is due in small part to my playing too many of these sorts of games in a short space of time. Might be all "FPS'ed out." Might be.

But it's mostly because the campaign is a disjointed mess with characters I don't care about, fraught with bad accents and plagued with moments where the game wants you to do something, but doesn't tell you what.

Multiplayer isn't wonderful, but it has a few crazy fun maps, and unlike in MW2, you can actually vote to play the map you just finished with again. And again. And again.

And that map was Nuketown. Most folks loved it, and so you might find yourself playing it ten times in succession. Of course, if you got tired of it, or if Nuketown wasn't your thing to begin with, you could just exit the lobby and go back in.

Treyarch didn't like you having to do that. So they crippled their own voting system. It seems as though too many were having too much fun with Nuketown, and so Treyarch saw fit to do two things: 1. make the occurrences of Nuketown coming up as a map extremely rare, and 2. when it does come up, you can't play it more than twice in a row.

Listen, I understand you made other maps. And I understand that Nuketown is ridiculously simple. I won't get into the argument I've seen some having about 'intelligence level' as if it has something to do with wanting to play a manic level over a more sprawling map. God knows Nuketown isn't perfect, with its crazy spawn points and whatever else elitists want to cite as making the map beneath them.

The fact of the matter is: most people loved the hell out of it. They voted to play it over and over, because they loved it. Others could opt out if they didn't love it. What's the issue? Contrary to what some 'purists' have claimed, players murdering one map did not and would not 'break' the online experience; eventually, Nuketown lovers would calm down a bit and move on to other maps (or other games). Yes, the interest would not stay at the level it was at initially, forever. Really!

The fact that Treyarch felt the need to step in and abort what seemed to almost universally be considered the best thing about their new game is pretty sad.

My own obsessive interest in Nuketown had already started to die down before the infamous patch was forced upon me. I would have played it less often. Now I can barely play it at all, and the other maps are almost all whitebread. Time to play some Modern Warfare again.