Bravely Camelot Black Street Fighting Ops ARGH

There's so much gaming for me to do right now, I'm having a hard time getting all of this shit in order. Let's start with the fact that I'm now getting paid to play free 3DS games. I started playing Bravely Second a couple days before anyone actually buying the game and it was totally worth it. Okay, the story is a bit weaker than Bravely Default's, my favourite character is pretty much gone, the new music isn't anywhere near as good (new composer) and 50 percent of the game is recycled bosses, monsters, dungeons and classes from part one. So it's really Bravely Default 1.5, but it's still worth playing, because duh, more Bravely.

Also, I'm going through this phase again where I, despite never wanting to play another MMO again, am kinda hyped for an MMO. Camelot Unchained. In my defense, it's strictly pvp-based, features super complex character development, shitloads of awesome races and classes and zero raids, quests, dungeon tokens, reputation, experience or the grinding  thereof. Imagine TESO or GW2 without any of the pve content, but with large-scale battles actually being playable. Early alpha tests supposedly ran with some 2000 participants in one huge battle. I'll believe it when I see it - which I will, once the game goes into beta. I wrote an early preview about the game and then this happened:

Strangely, he did not offer penis enlargement or a cheap Rolex.

Mark freaking Jacobs contacted me, thanked me for the preview and offered to help me out with whatever I need in order to write future articles about the game. Look, I get it, the guy has spent a ton of money on this project, he's no longer with EA/Mythic and needs this game to succeed, so he's not exactly saying hi because I'm so awesome or anything. But how cool is it that he bothers to contact me personally? Now I've got messages from Mark Jacobs (Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning) and Dan Tudge (Dragon Age: Origins). Man, I gotta look into Shroud of the Avatar so I can add Lord British to the list! Oh yeah, I also got mail from some guy at Microsoft when I was the first one to ever release custom skins for that old space sim, Freelancer, but fuck that guy. I know famous people now! :P I'm only joking, shit like that is always incredible.

I'm still in love with the incredibly incomplete, overpriced Street Fighter V. I had a bunch of matches against some fat Lebanese guy the other day and afterwards we were so completely exhausted and satisfied, it felt like we spent two hours boning much more attractive versions of each other. The fighting system is so solid, so easy to get into and so incredibly fun, I could play this thing all day and night if I had the time. I don't really get to play it much because of work and all, but I finally bothered to get my ass out of rookie league, so there's that.

Now to get challenged by random Silver players, who will pound my LP right back to zero.

Last, and most certainly least, I've spent a few hours playing the free weekend trial of Black Ops III. I haven't bought another Call of Duty game since the abysmal pile of horseshit that was Ghosts (which I actually kinda like nowadays, because I enjoy shitty games). I skipped Advanced Warfare (until somebody gifted it to me, anyway), skipped Blops 3 after I hated the beta and then looked into the free weekend thingie, because of a certain pushy friend of mine, who keeps hyping this shitty game like it's crafted from angel's vaginas.

I still hated the game during the first few hours, because free weekends on CoD always mean blatant cheating, wallhacking and aimbotting. And call me paranoid, but if some guy racks up 50 kills without dying during the first three minutes or so of a match, then I start losing interest juuuust a little bit. And that was when I finally got the fucking game to run in the first place. Stupid thing launched in 4k every single time, with my mouse pointer being god knows where, so changing the resolution turned out to be the toughest challenge in any CoD game to date. At some point I tabbed out to check on Facebook and getting back in the game reset everything to 4k. Great. Also, every restart forces you to spend an eternity watching animated Treyarch and Activision logos, which CANNOT BE FUCKING SKIPPED! Why the fuck do developers and publishers feel the need to do this? We fucking know who makes these games, most of us don't freaking care and we sure as fuck don't need a 30something second reminder EVERY FUCKING TIME we boot up the stupid game!

I don't know what annoys me more. The user names in that lobby or the "texture" of whatever the fuck that thing is my character is farting on (all settings on maximum).

The game looks okay, texture resolution is a bit shit in some places, absolute garbage in others. And as with every CoD game, ever, obvious flaws and problems don't get fixed, developers half-ass their shit and then stop patching problems, because they're already working on the next fucking game. Case in point: The fucking weapon kill counters. If you think that idea is blatantly ripping off Counter Strike's StatTrack system, then you'd be correct. Except, Treyarch obviously don't fucking know how to pull it off, properly. Let's say you put a kill counter on your favourite gun in Black Ops 3, so you can see how many 12 year olds you've shot in the face. Behold:

Can you see the problem? Yeah. Been like that since release in November 2015, so I wouldn't hope for a fix in this life.

The game itself is okay for the tenner they charge for its standalone multiplayer. The guns have close to zero recoil, you can spray somebody on the other end of the map without sights and still hit them in the face if you keep at it for a few seconds and you can now add up to five attachments +sights to any gun. So if the guns don't all feel exactly the same in their default setting, try adding rapid fire, large magazines, heavy caliber and a thermal scope to any of them and keep telling yourself they still feel vastly different. Well, I suppose there's always shotguns and sniper rifles if you're that kinda guy.

You can also turn one of the playable characters into a white-haired anime chick and give her a sword, so guess what 50 percent of the teenagers on there are doing. And yes, there are playable characters now instead of generic soldiers. There's only a handful of them and players on both teams get to choose from the same pool of guys, which makes no conceivable sense, whatsoever. Why are all of these people both Black Ops and terrorists? Why am I the only one bothered by this? If you play the shitty Free2Play Ghost in the Shell shooter, your team will always be displayed as the characters from the anime, while the enemy team will always look like generic bad guys to you. Blops 3 couldn't do that?

I'm sure Jonny is a perfectly legit player.

What really bothers me is the return of ridiculously powerful killstreak rewards with added specialist powers. The last bunch of CoD games tried to make these rewards a little less powerful, preventing the already dominant players from blowing up the entire battlefield in two minutes. That shit is as devastating as ever in Blops 3 and on top of that you get to trigger a bunch of oneshot-killmoves on many of the playable characters, which you absolutely cannot counter or react to in any way. Yes, it's fun that I can activate a grenade launcher that clears an entire room after every five or so kills, but I'd gladly give up on weird shit like that if it meant people had to rely on their freaking guns to kill shit. Or swords, apparently, because knives are no longer black opsy enough or something.

Am I gonna buy the standalone multiplayer after the free weekend? I don't know. It's not a lot of money and this isn't the worst game I've ever played. But then they'll want another 20 or so for some stupid map pack, then another when they release one more a few months later, then they'll probably make this the first CoD in years to receive user-hosted servers at some point and I'd hafta spend another 30 or 40 to upgrade to the full version in order to access these servers. And then I will have paid another 100 or so Quid to Activision, only for them to release Modern Warfare 4 (maybe) or Ghosts 2 (probably not) or some WW2 rehash (most likely) this coming November (definitely). Or I could just not spend any money at all, because I'm very happy with Warframe and Street Fighter V.