Your game diaries are always awesome.

I heartily recommend you to put a water elevator in your base ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qxxq2JUf034 ), these work well without that wall in the middle. Also, a tree fort is fun as long as you remember not to burn it.

@Jaz You may be right (although poor Nondrick did resort to adventuring during his later days), but the game may get frustrating for Tom without proper strategy (by the way don’t listen to MadTinkerer, not only is hunting cows boring but also unproductive).

I played Modern Warfare 1 and 2 on both Hardened and Veteran. It was frustrating! One of the most hilarious-in-hindsight moments was the time I *almost* beat the Ferris Wheel, only to confusedly bump up against the Spec Ops NPCs as they filed back into the helicopter and then watch the helicopter ramp raise right in front of my face, unable to jump since I was carrying my captain. But it was never actually bad enough to make me give up, because there were always alternate approaches to try. Maybe I’ll grab a sniper rifle and use it to clear the roofs before I advance, maybe I’ll duck down the alley on the right and carefully clear the building with a pistol using a back entrance to the second floor. Instead of going in the main gate, you can circle left and find a section of the wall you can blow in with C4, along with a number of RPGs that can be used to take out that pesky APC in relative safety.

Black Ops made me give up and switch to Regular in the middle of the prison break, way back at the start of the single-player game. Because when I died over and over in those sections, I couldn’t try changing my strategy- tactics could be tweaked, but for the most part I simply had to replay the same sections, doing the same things, watching the already-unsubtle setpiece scripting until it was blatantly obvious and struggling to figure out the windows where I could advance another step down the one available level path without getting shot and killed.

The meat of Black Ops’ levels, at their high points, is on par with the meat of COD4’s low points- the sections where you can take cover & advance on either the left or right side of a single constrained level section, with the approaches distinguished by different-shaped bits of cover and the occasional one-room enclosure. The most depressing thing about Black Ops is. . .well, the cutscenes that make Half-Life’s plot exposition look liberating. But the second-most depressing thing is that those high points of level design were the only thing that reminded me how CoD’s core gameplay could actually be FUN.

Step 1: Wooden sword.

step 2: Kill as many cows during the day as you can, craft leather armor.

Step 3: Look for easy sources of iron (shallow caves at or just below sea level) smelt as much iron as you can, make a full set of iron armor as fast as you can. Depending on where you spawned, this may be super-easy or a gigantic pain. The point is: you don’t necessarily need deep caves or a big mine to get iron right away and you NEED iron for decent armor and you NEED decent armor for spelunking and you need to spelunk to “win” Minecraft.

Hopefully you’ll take this advice

Korolev, I gave it the benefit of the doubt during the interrogation cutscenes, because Mason is, well, being tortured. Most people aren’t in the best frame of mind when they’re having Needles-Full-O-Stuff injected into them, tied down in a chair, TVs flashing random numbers, being shocked intermittently.

That being said, I’m going to hold off on my final judgement of this game until I actually play it- I watched a friend play for half the campaign, a few hours of MP and a long night of Nazi Zombies (which is excellent). I get the feeling that people are playing these games looking for why they’re good or why they’re bad and not actually playing the game to play the game. When I play, unless something is REALLY REALLY bad, I don’t notice it until I think about it later. Game developers don’t build their games so reviewers can play them, they play them so [INSERT TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC HERE] will play them and enjoy them. I happen to in be the target demographic for this game (Teenage FPS gamer that likes lots of explosions), so it looked pretty cool.

Is the multiplayer still bugging out for you? They seemed to fix it for Australians about three days after launch. Occasionally I still find a laggy server, but it’s rare. They patched it yesterday and it runs pretty much fine now. Server browser finally works. It doesn’t excuse the initially bad state the game came in, but you might now finally get some enjoyment out of the game.

That is, before obsessive players get the entire game down to an exact science and it becomes as impossible to casually enjoy as Starcraft II.