November 15, 2010
I have to say I am not the biggest fan of First Person Shooters, when asked what my favorite FPS is I jokingly say, Duck Hunt. However that is in my top five. Truth is I never had a gaming PC growing up so I missed out on the real genesis of the FPS. Sure I had played Doom at a friend's a few times, but that was about it. Then as time went by I got a Nintendo 64, and of course I got GoldenEye, cause who didn't have that game? But the FPS just weren't my style, I'm more of an Action/Adventure, RPG kind of guy, and I slowly moved away from the genre.
However in the past recent years the Call of Duty series has overtaken the video gameing scene like nothing I ever seen before, and with release of the latest game in the series, Call of Duty: Black Ops, I'm actually considering picking it up.
Black Ops is just so loaded with so much game. It has an actually intriguing single player game which is the rarity in a genre that seems to care primarily on the multiplayer aspect of the game. That isn't to say the multiplayer isn't intriguing as well. I personally don't care that much about things like that, but the Zombie Survival mode with, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Fidel Castro and Robert McNamera sounds just so randomly awesome it warrents a purchase. But there is something even more randomly awesome hidden inside of Black Ops, something I'm sure almost the entire core audience has never played, let alone heard of, and that is Zork, what is Zork? I'll tell you what Zork is!
Zork is a DOS text only adventure game from 1980, something a gamer raised on millions of polygons, 60 prames a second and real lime lighting and shading effects would never think to play. Well I'll play it damn it!
You see Zork has a special place in my heart. as a child I attended a summer camp for the visually impaired. It was an odd experience for me since I never really met any other people my age with similar visual disabilities, and what was more strange for me was that I actually had some of the best vision amoung the kids at the camp, but I digress. At the camp they had a computer set up that would speak everything on the screen when prompted. It was mostly for word processing, but it did have a few games on it, and what better game for someone who is blind to play than one with no graphics? On that computer Zork didn't feel like you were playing a game, it felt more like you were writing your own story as the computer read it aloud to you, and It was a memory that really stuck with me.
As I said before, I didn't really have a gaming PC growing up, but I do now. And looking back on the games I played in my youth that are now free to download, I skipped Doom and Quake, but went straight for Zork. So yeah, Call of Duty: Black Ops. You've sold millions of copies in your first week alone, nice, good for you. You're getting rave reviews about your single player and multiplayer game modes, that's awesome and all, but multiplayer isn't really my thing. Thing is you're just the latest in what seems like a never ending chain of First Person Shooters that are oversaturating the market, but you do all of that, and have Zork hidden inside your code? I'm sold.
Also in one week, that's 7 days, it returns.
