I was going to email but I'll post here instead so others can see.
In response to what you said in the other thread, I actually was not a forum member so had no idea what kind of criticisms were being leveled against my reviews. I only knew that some kind of criticisms were being leveled because my reviews are still terrible, and I saw referral links from your forums in my site stats.
Anyway, the problems with that original review were pretty obvious as Worm pointed out. I was definitely writing like an artfag at the time. I had never actually played the artfag games when that review was written, because I thought they looked stupid, but I was aware of no alternative viewpoints (e.g. Insomnia). So, I did what anyone ignorant of the state of games journalism could have done, and simply started to imitate their style just so I had a place to start with my little game-reviewing experiment.
There might still be little threads of that style left in me which I'm trying to iron out for you. The objections you've leveled against my latest revision would certainly suggest that I still haven't completely eradicated it.
The stuff I said about the game being a guilt trip, being castrated (sorry,
castigated) for playing a violent game, etc., were all the experience that I had playing the modern Call of Duty games. They may not apply to everybody. I can give definite examples but the review was already getting disproportionately long on the aesthetic side, so I was hoping readers would have at least been familiar with the "No Russian" level in Modern Warfare 2. By referencing the No Russian level and briefly mentioning the problems with it, I hoped to quickly and easily encompass the whole aesthetic problem with the modern series.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a video of the beginning of that level:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NMnnMRWJ-0
You may not be able to tell, but the player is FORCED not to run or even walk very quickly. You have to walk through the whole thing until you get outside. That's what I mean when I said this part was being drawn out -- you have to sit through it. The game gives you people to kill here and there (especially at the beginning of course), but by limiting your movement so severely, the game is basically trying to prevent you from really going crazy with the opportunity it gives you. There's all these people running away that I wanted to chase down and brutally slaughter. You can't do that. Fun is not allowed.*
So the experience from the player's side of this, at least in my opinion, is that this level is a severe
indictment. It's not impossible that it was even inspired by the artfag movement in trying to convey some kind of meaning. That's the impression I got, certainly. It beat me over the head with the idea that
it wants you to experience this level as non-fun, while you simultaneously witness an extraordinarily photo-realistic simulation of an airport slaughter. Naturally this kind of scenario could result in feelings of guilt -- and therefore non-fun -- hence why I said the game was moralizing.
But that's Modern Warfare 2, not Black Ops. Black Ops copies Modern Warfare 2's mannerisms but Treyarch has always lived in Infinity Ward's shadow; the examples of what makes Black Ops the way I'm describing it are much smaller -- such tiny little moments I think hardly anyone would remember them if they're not playing the game right now. I'd have to go through the game again to find them again.
So that's where my concerns about the photo-realistic aesthetic came in. The pseudo-realism has worked in the past for the series, such as in the original Modern Warfare. Artfags argued that the game was art because of the level where you're shooting people from an airplane, coupled with how incredibly realistic it looked compared with video footage from America's wars going on right now. They would argue that it's "saying something" about war -- that it has, you know, a "message." I wonder if Infinity Ward tried cashing in on the artfags with this kind of thinking when they made Modern Warfare 2.
There is more to this problem -- I could go on and on about how Deus Ex doesn't beat me over the head with any of these guilt trips even though my country's government is fictionally implicated in all manner of nefarious deeds, in contrast to Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops where much less severe things are said about America's CIA, and yet they somehow manage to crucify me for being an American, all through their aesthetic choices. The modern Call of Duty games are, in a few words, the most pretentious shooters I've ever played.
But you know what: everything I just said may simply be not what you're looking for. I have no qualms about removing that material if you want to keep the review more concrete and less experiential. No doubt I will have to revise it again no matter what because it simply isn't clear what I'm saying, which has always been my biggest flaw in these reviews.
Also you mentioned in your email, "Why shouldn't the story be there? Without the story we are regressing to pre-Half-Life standards..." I was exaggerating when I said the story shouldn't be there. What I meant by those words was that the player shouldn't notice that the story is there, that the player should should simply regard the story as a given. Of course there is a story in Black Ops and a story in Half-Life, but Half-Life immerses you in its story effortlessly. Black Ops beats you with it harder than any previous game in the series.
* On that note, there was a problem in Bulletstorm that was kind of like this, but it was more on the mechanical side (I think). If I remember my review correctly I probably mentioned the points system. The whole implication of the points system is that you're only allowed to have rationed fun. You won't necessarily be rewarded for going crazy if the developers couldn't
specifically anticipate those behaviors. So again, when you don't get the reward you're expecting, the points system psychologically causes you to feel like it's a reprimand in the same way that if a dog is rewarded for certain behaviors and not for others he will avoid the unrewarded behaviors. It is the complete opposite of the infinitely more fun tactically-open-ended approach of my go-to game for good ideas, Deus Ex. In my Bulletstorm revision I will use this more specific line of reasoning and comparison if you think it's good.
