Black Ops "Superman" Glitch

The how-to:

From Crysis to Calamity

A leaked and "feature complete" PC DirectX 9 build of Crysis 2 is on many, many hard drives it shouldn't be. Also leaked: the Solidshield DRM master keys that handle online authentication. The game hasn't gone gold yet, but it was due for release at the end of March.

The story originally broke on the Facepunch forums, and has since spread to every corner of the interwebs. EA has already sent out "take down" notices for the YouTube vids, but it doesn't seem to have affected the iframe embeds on other sites (such as this one). No telling how long that will last, so watch while you can, if you must.  (EDIT: nvm, that one's gone.)

We here at IUN implore you, our billions of loyal readers: don't fucking do it. 

Section 8: Prejudice trailer

Sadly, it's a GWFL title:

Rant ON

Steam tells me that I've logged 145.2 hours in Black Ops since its release on November 9, 2010. That means I've spent a shade over 15% of my life over the last three months playing this one game. The proportion is nothing compared to the three years I spent playing United Offensive, but it does provide me with a degree of perspective.

It comes and goes, but the ability to acquire a target and fire in a fraction of a second is a skill I developed during the six years I've been playing shooters. It's a less important skill than being able to anticipate player migration (or the lack of it) around a map, but twitch-shooting virtuosity is obviously worth leveraging when you can. Fast reflexes make up for a lot of tactical stupidity.

Call of Duty games used to be built for that: the maps were generally close-quarters environments that inexorably separated the quick from the dead. Players were funneled into short engagement ranges, and a combination of vision, speed, and accuracy determined the outcome of most encounters.  There were other variables – like grenades and friendly fire – that came into play, but the calculus of relative skill was preeminent. Mastery of the mouse and keyboard assured a respectable performance, as long as you didn't play like an idiot.

Then came Call of Duty 4. We got ranks, and weapon unlocks, and perks, and killstreaks.  What we didn't get was a level playing field. Anyone that had unlocked the P90 had a distinct advantage over anyone that hadn't.  It was the same with the "stopping power" and "juggernaut" perks, and it was the same with the claymores.  Everyone ranked up to 55 eventually, of course, but you still had to play for 20 hours just to negate the equipment advantage.

CoD4 also introduced the Cobra helicopter killstreak. The theory was that if a player was good enough (or lucky enough, or camped enough) to get a handful of kills without dying, he would be rewarded with another handful of kills in the act of doing absolutely nothing. Everyone on the other team was forced to change their tactics while the chopper was up, not because they were being forced to react to a player, but because they were being forced to react to a flying aimbot. In other words, players spent a portion of every round playing against the game, instead of playing against each other.

These new afflictions were amplified with Modern Warfare 2 into a full-blown handicapping system. Infinity Ward not only increased the number of available killstreaks by 12 (including the "tactical [abortion]" that wiped out everyone on the server, and ended the round), they also dreamed up rewards for players who were getting their asses kicked, in the form of "deathstreaks." Fully nine of the new killstreaks are death-from-above affairs that once again have players fighting the game's systems rather than other players. The tenth – an automated sentry gun – is the same insult at ground level. There are, to be sure, other perks and streak rewards that are designed to counter the rest, but the result is the same: movement, aiming, and shooting all take a back seat to the RPG-esque metagame of choosing perks, equipment, and streak rewards before the round even starts.

These "innovations" in the series, up to and including Black Ops, have conspired to make the camper king. Instead of encouraging players to improve their skills through direct engagement, the developers have seduced them into exploiting various peripheral systems in order to maximize their KDR's. A balanced menu of equipment – once limited to guns and short radius explosives – has given way to wildly unbalanced force multipliers, 15 levels of masturbatory "prestige," and fucking face paint. Call of Duty has thus devolved from a game that once glorified the art of movement, into one that punishes those that were hoping to play a shooter.

The most galling part of all this is that, with its massive earnings over the course of the last four games, the majority of FPS developers have tried to mimic Call of Duty's ideology to one degree or another. Be it Bad Company 2 or Medal of Honor on the lower end, or Crysis 2 on the bleeding edge of outright theft (see the post below), all shooters are inviting players to confuse stats with skill, and to disengage as much as possible from other players in the server. While the run-and-gunners, the sneaky-bastard-flankers, and the objective-taking-obsessives don't need to be coddled, it's a travesty that they've all been subordinated to the sedentary systems whores who can't be assed to actually fight anyone.

Rant OFF

(There is another game on the horizon, however, that might just make me whole again. I'll talk about that in another post.)

Crysis 2 Multiplayer Progression Part 1

The Nanosuit:

"A new generation of multiplayer game."  That's what the guy said.  If someone can explain to me how Crytek's summary of all the ways they've replicated Call of Duty's systems shows how innovative they are, I'd like to hear it. 

Ultimate aimbot

Yay 4 pachez!

Welcome to CoD:BO 1.06: