I have stupid opinions

Before I start talking about what games I'm currently wasting all my spare time with, here's some lizard:

Followed by even more lizard:

Anyway, back to business.

When it comes to fairly reviewing a game, I may quite possibly be the worst games critic around. Take World of Tanks, for example. That game is more popular than tits right now and its active player count is higher than the population of a small country. Back when they released the first beta version of this game, I've been asked to review this thing and I've cancelled the job halfway through my play session. I told them the game was so unbelievably dull, boring and downright shit, we simply shouldn't waste our valuable magazine space reviewing this garbage.
I still hate it. I guess it's basically Counter-Strike with tanks? I was stupid not to see how hugely popular this shit would become.

I'm looking at them, but there's absolutely nothing happening in my pants.

Here's another fun example: The War Z, now rebranded to... I dunno, Infestation: Survivor Stories or some shit. Awful DayZ-ripoff. I never played DayZ. I don't like zombie games. I don't like zombies. They asked me to play The War Z. And I gave it a relatively high review score. I dunno, 68, maybe 76 percent or so? Again, I didn't have any experience with the game it was ripping off and my experience with The War Z was actually quite fascinating.

I started the game with nothing but a flashlight and a candy bar, walked around for a bit, avoided zombies, eventually ran into another player and figured our lives would be easier if we tried to survive as a team. He, on the other hand, decided it would be that much more fun to crack open my skull with his fucking flashlight. Then he took my candy bar. Asshole.

This never happened. It's one of many staged screenshots showing off gameplay, which doesn't exist.

I played the game some more, got eaten by zombies on the next character, eventually ended up avoiding just about everything that moved and finally survived long enough to gather some basic weapons and equipment. Eventually, I stopped trusting anyone around me and watched myself become a murdering asshat, who would trick friendly players into believing I'm harmless, then loot their corpses.
It wasn't great, there were bugs, the AI and visuals were a bit shit, but it was an early beta, my first impression was decent, I gave it an okay-ish review score based upon my adventures on there. And then a whole truckload of 5-10% reviews rained down on that game, it turned out half of their assets were stolen, the official screenshots on the website were staged and the whole thing was just a huge cash grab and I looked like a complete idiot, giving the developers the benefit of the doubt and handing out a good review score because I genuinely had fun. And not a clue, apparently.

Next-Gen racing = Moist cars

To my defense, I am funny, reliable and a decent writer. And everyone ends up handing out a bogus review score, eventually. Like the guys who rated the PC-version of NFS: Rivals 80% and up. There's no new Need for Speed this year and the team that developed Rivals has since been dissolved. I like to believe it's all because Rivals was so shit. I have no way of knowing whether it is because of that, but the thought gives me pleasure. TB made a "Let's not Play" video about it, highlighting pretty much everything that is wrong with this game in a few minutes. Stuff, which most paying customers agreed with, yet none of the professional reviews ever mentioned. In other words: Professional metascore of 76, user score of 3.1 on Metacritic. And then critics wonder (do they still?) why nobody trusts them anymore and lots of readers are convinced that certain high review scores were simply bought. Who could blame them?

And all of this leads me to Call of Duty: Ghosts, which racked up an amazing user score of 1.9 ("Overwhelming dislike") on metacritic. Again, magazines were a lot more forgiving (and, quite frankly, a tad more realistic), but damn, I hated this game. With a passion.
Notice the past tense there? Scary, huh? Yeah, I had another look at it the other day and I'm actually doin' alright on there on occasion.

29/2 and then the match ended. Boo!

When Ghosts came out, it was a laggy, stuttering, unplayable mess. The lousy optimization was rather surprising, considering how Ghosts simply doesn't look all that "next gen". Then there was the usual amount of hacks, cheats and exploits, as Ghosts launched with no anti cheat measures whatsoever. Top it off with a community manager, who addressed upset users on twitter as crybabies and you get an incredibly bad game with a hugely disappointed community.
None of this should happen in an overhyped AAA title. There is no excuse for this and, while most of these issues have been resolved at last, there's a lot of annoyed CoD fans, who will never touch this game again. And I can't really blame them after all the hype, stupid-ass release events with RL marines playing the game, Eminem performing a trailer song and tons of other stupid PR crap like that.

It's no surprise that all my friends went back to the previous title of the series, Black Ops 2, never to take another look at Ghosts again. Back then, Black Ops 2 was superior in pretty much every way. Today? Well, if you ask my friends, Black Ops 2 is still ten times better than Ghosts, but I had a look at both games and, surprisingly enough, I disagree. I have spent a few hours playing both of these games in their current state and, while my "results" are based heavily upon my stupid opinion, I now consider Ghosts to be the better (multiplayer) game out of these two.
Below, I'm going to do a side by side comparison on various aspects of the games and tell you which game I believe is better - and why. If you disagree, please go to the comments section and tell me your opinion, so I can delete it.

Visuals
Yes, Ghosts is still using the same old engine CoD has been running for eons and it shows. "We have tweaked and added so much stuff, it's practically a whole new engine" is nice PR-babble, but reality looks a bit different. Or doesn't, for that matter. It looks like the same old game. Still, you can't deny that Ghosts comes out on top when you directly compare the two of them, if only by a little. And I refuse to take into account those heavily-staged PR shots you find all over google, which show at least half a dozen players, five massive explosions and three epic killstreak rewards on every single screen. That shit is heavily edited and never happens ingame. But at the end of the day, Black Ops 2 looks like this:

And Ghosts looks like that:

I'm not here to argue whether or not Ghosts looks good enough to be called "next gen" or how much better Battlefield looks. I'm not comparing Ghosts to fucking Battlefield, I'm comparing it to Black Ops 2. And Ghosts has the better graphics, plain and simple.

Performance
While Ghosts may look slightly less dated, getting it to run at an acceptable frame rate without reducing visual quality to a pixellated mess is difficult, annoying and too complicated. What exactly does the terrain detail setting do? I can set it to normal, extra and off, the former two settings causing severe hiccups and stuttering, whilst providing no obvious graphical improvement whatsoever. What the fuck does distortion do? Why does the game not explain this? Why does changing the image quality setting to anything other than "extra" make my game look like I'm trying to emulate it on a Nintendo DS?
Black Ops 2 may not look as pretty as Ghosts, but it runs at solid, stable frame rates, even on mediocre hardware. Ghosts? You wish. This round goes to Black Ops 2.

Maps
Black Ops 2 multiplayer has exactly four maps: Nuketown, Hijacked, Siege and MORE FUCKING NUKETOWN. Yes, I know, you do occasionally get different maps in the rotation, but people will always and always and fucking always choose Nuketown over absolutely everything else, followed by Hijacked. Heck, there's a Nuketown only game mode, where you can start shooting people the second you spawn, without even having to move, because THE MAP IS TOO FUCKING TINY AND THE GOD DAMN SPAWNS ARE BROKEN! Black Ops 2 has some really nice maps, which support various play styles from fast-paced run&gun to camping and sniping like a pussy. There is also a god-awful map in the fucking desert, which is so massive, you'll run around for ten minutes not finding anyone to shoot and then you get killed by a guy, who is taking a nap on top of a crashed airplane with his sniper rifle. Fun.
Ghosts is an equally mixed bag. Some of the original maps the game launched with were far too big, causing matched to feel tedious, slow-paced and boring. I mean, do I really need a map, which consists of a multi-story car park, a multi-story office building, a cafe, some ruined buildings and a dozen fucking side-corridors and shit for 6on6 matchups? You could put 24 people on there and you'd still be running around for ten minutes trying to find an enemy. And then get shot by that one asshole who just sits in the corner all day and waits for random players to walk by. Ghosts has received several new maps over the past six months, most of which are absolutely great and make a regular appearance in the rotation. But those fun new maps only make the bad original maps look even more shit in comparison. No winner!

Players camp inside the castle and its towers, the cottages in the background and inside a bunch of old ruins not shown on this screenshot. And some just lie in the grass and watch the clouds go by.

Guns
Maybe I should have put this higher up the list. After all, CoD is all about dem guns, right? Anyhow... the guns in Black Ops 2 are fun to shoot, because they're ridiculously easy to use. You can press and hold that trigger on your light machine gun, fire round after round after round with pinpoint accuracy and there is no recoil, no shaking, the damn thing just does its job. There are a few exceptions here and there, such as the Scorpion SMG with its insanely high rate of fire, which kicks like the proverbial horse, but for the most part, the weapons have little to no recoil, they're incredibly accurate and, aside from sniper rifles, surprisingly weak. You can shoot a guy and shoot him and then shoot him some more and he'll shoot you right back and then you'll circle-strafe around for a while until one of you finally runs out of HP and dies. Players in Black Ops 2 are fucking bullet sponges and can take a comical amount of hits.

They've been firing at that guy for three whole minutes and he just won't die.

Guns in Ghosts kill much faster than they do in Black Ops 2. When the game was released, people complained that it felt like playing hardcore mode, because they usually died in only two or three hits. The really powerful weapons in Ghosts also come with more recoil. There are weapons, which are incredibly accurate, but require more hits to kill an opponent, particularly over large distance. And when you try to shoot a guy on the other end of the map, you'll notice how your assault rifle sways back and forth ever so slightly as you aim down the sights, making it even more difficult to hit your target. It's still far from being a simulation, but the guns are both deadlier and more difficult to use than before. Now, whether you prefer the toy guns in Black Ops 2 or the deadly guns in Ghosts is a matter of personal preference. Two guys crab-walking back and forth for 10 seconds until one of them finally dies is a bit silly, though, so to me, this point goes to Ghosts.

Customization
Both Black Ops 2 and Ghosts give you tons of options to customize your weapons, perks and kill streaks. Wanna run faster, longer, like a ninja and without making a noise? There are perks for that. Wanna use two primary weapons or three attachments on a single gun? Perks, perks, more perks. Wanna change the appearance of your character, their body armor, headgear, skin tone or even their gender? Well, that's where Ghosts has got you covered, while Black Ops 2 takes all the visual customization away from you. With one exception: Your character will appear "lighter" or "heavier" depending on your weapon of choice. A machine gunner will usually carry some heavy body armor, snipers get a hood for some reason, but that's about all the influence you get on your character's appearance in Black Ops 2. And if you think that being able to play a female character in Call of Duty is a pointless, unneccessary feature, then Mrs. Kitten will strongly disagree with you.

Claire doesn't like being forced to play male characters all the time.

On top of that, Ghosts also has more, better, cooler killstreak rewards. Yes, Riley (the dog) was hugely oversold and overrated, but guard dogs are cool in multiplayer. Support streaks, which allow inexperienced players to provide their team with ballistic vests and other goodies even when they die a lot are a great feature. Some people complain a lot about how the dogs are supposedly too strong, for noobs, too hard to kill and what have you. Look, unless you walk around a corner and bump right into an enemy dog, at least you have a chance to shoot the mutt first or run away. Now try that with a hunter killer drone in Black Ops 2, which is in every way as easy to obtain for "noobs" and kills you out of nowhere, with even less of a chance for you to do anything about it.
Point for Ghosts.

Player Count
Black Ops 2 peaked at nearly 10k players today, Ghosts only had about 6k. They're both somewhere around the 1-1.5k mark after midnight, which is far from spectacular when you compare it to CSGO's whopping 150k players, but there are enough folks around to play the most popular game modes with. If you're into obscure hardcore modes, you might be out of luck on both games. Still, Black Ops 2 has a slightly higher player count, even though it's a year older, so it gets a point.

Cheaters
I refuse to refer to them as "hackers", because the aimbotters on CoD are simply a bunch of asshats using 3rd party hacks and tools, written and sold to them by actual hackers. Spending 20 Quid on a program, which does all the aiming for you doesn't make you a hacker, it makes you a complete tool and a moron. Anyway.
Ghosts had so much blatant, shameless cheating, wallhacking and aimbotting going on, it sometimes felt like the few players without those dirty little helpers were in the minority. VAC didn't support Ghosts, cheaters didn't get banned and the leaderboards were topped by folks, who had supposedly racked up several billion kills. That was a half year ago. Cheaters now get VAC-banned and the forums show the usual amount of allegedly innocent victims. Of course you also get threads started by paranoid (crappy) players, who call absolutely everyone around them a cheater and insist that there's at least a dozen of them in every match. But when you look at the lobby leaderboards before the start of a match, you'll rarely ever find a player, whose average K/D is at or above 1.0. When Claire and I played last night, we had only one obvious cheater, who followed and shot people through walls and didn't really care much to hide what he was doing. There was the occasional round where somebody had an insane K/D of 10 or more, but when you looked at their stats, their average K/D was somewhere around 0.96 - which, by the way, applies to me, as well. See hat 29/2 screenshot I at the beginning of this post? My average is just below 1.

For every amazing run like this one I get three equally shit ones.

Here's the thing, though: We also played a whole lot of Black Ops 2. Again, we only had one painfully obvious cheater last night, whose crosshairs jumped from one enemy player's head to the next at machine precision, without the tiniest bit of swaying or oversteering and through walls and obstacles. Perhaps he was just insanely good and blessed with the gift of second sight, but then again, his screen probably looked like this:

This shit happens in just about every competitive online game.

Both games have cheaters. They're not running rampant like lots of people suggest, they're not fucking everywhere and many of them are stupid enough to get banned. You will always get a fair handful of assholes, who just can't play by the rules and have to download their "skill", but you get those in every CoD. No points here.

Now, if this whole thing were dead serious and we were counting points, then Ghosts would win by a small, biased margin.
Look, I get it. Just because I think the killstreaks are cooler on Ghosts doesn't mean they're cooler for everybody. Just because I think both games have a mix of great and sucky maps doesn't mean you can't clearly prefer one game or the other. The point I'm trying to make here is that there isn't one horrible, awful, broken Call of Duty and one that is insanely good, vastly superior one, which blows the other completely out of the water. They're simply not that different!
Of course they fucking aren't, that's what everyone had been criticizing about the whole fucking series since, I dunno, Modern Warfare 2?

In conclusion
CoD: Ghosts is no longer the unplayable, broken mess it was at launch. If you hated the game for the way the guns handled, for its visuals and for its design and gameplay, then you're still going to hate it. They didn't turn it into an entirely new game - they just added a bit of anticheat support, ironed out the performance issues to an extent and added new maps and guns. They made it playable, nothing more. It looks a bit prettier than Black Ops 2, the guns are a bit deadlier and some of them are harder to handle. I happen to like it that way, others prefer the "run around each other for a minute and fill each other with bullets until someone finally dies" type of gameplay from the earlier games of the series. It's all a matter of preference. But you get people with 30something kills and 2 deaths in both games, whether they're just really good or maybe using 3rd party helpers. You get the god-awful community in both games. You get a few maps you absolutely fucking hate in both games and some people will use weapons, perks or killstreaks you consider stupid and OP in both games. Because no matter how you look at it, it's still all the same old Call of Duty. Now what a surprise that is. :P

-Cat