Call of Duty: [Insert movie tribute here]

Like roughly 15 million other people this year, I got a copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops. As I was hopping for the game is great. It is certainly the best Treyarch made Call of Duty game its developers deserve kudos for their efforts. Recently there has been a lot in the news about Activision, EA, Infinity Ward and Treyarch, mostly around Activision filing a large lawsuit against the former heads of IW and adding EA itself to the lawsuit earlier this month. But I'm not going to touch that.

Spoilers Ahead

Instead I'd rather point out a few small details I noticed from the single player campaign in Black Ops. But first let us just acknowledge that many games take inspiration from film. After all, film (and television) are much older entertainment mediums and I have yet to meet a game designer, programmer, artist or producer type who doesn't watch TV or go to the movies. Back in my design days I thought a lot about modern WWII media, mainly Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, and wondered what locations and settings from those works I might somehow include ina level I was designing that hadn't already been done in a previous WWII game. The beach scene in SPR, along with the entire film, was a huge inspiration in Medal of Honor: Frontline. The same movie's climactic battle in "Ramelle" was inspiration for several Day of Defeat levels including the Merderet map, named for the Merderet river that the bridge in the Ramelle scene crosses.

But the key point here is that for gaming moments to resonate with moments from film or television, the details need to be fairly close. Recently in a discussion with a marketing person at a games publisher, I learning about his idea for where their game concept should go, and how it would really resonate with a recent popular movie.

"So in what ways would it resonate?" I asked. The answer I got back was, "Well they both have strong military themes." And that was it. That's like saying The Sims resonates with the TV show Friends because they both feature male and female characters. When I pushed him to be more specific, he hadn't thought it through. No kidding. So for him all I could offer was some remedial advice, and I used Call of Duty: Black Ops as an example.

Call of Duty: Fight Club

FYI, this is a spoiler if you haven't played the Black Ops singleplayer campaign all the way through. Don't say I didn't warn you. Anyway, in the game you play as Mason (voiced by Sam Worthington...say what you will about his American accent in the game...)

where most of the game is played in his flashbacks during his intense interrogation. In

his flashbacks he speaks of Reznov, a Russian he met in...Russia (it's a long story) but the point is that Reznov appears throughout the game. Near the game's climax in one such flashback Mason and Reznov are infiltrating some secret base to find a holder Nazi from WWII plotting some awful scheme (in now the 1960s) involving bio-chemical warfare and Reznov is about to kill the Nazi, even though the Americans need him alive. Well, let's just say that it gets revealed that Mason had actually been brainwashed long before to dream up this Reznov guy in his head. Reznov didn't exis

t even though Mason totally thought

he did, and during the game the player had no real reason to believe he did not exist until that moment. When it was revealed in the game, my first thought was that it was pretty much a rip-off of the movie Fight Club. I wasn't too bothered by this obvious not to one of my favorite movies, but it didn't really feel that fresh even though I thought it was an interesting move for a video game story to have a twist of this level. As I said, the idea itself isn't that original and how it landed in Black Ops didn't have the same punch as in Fight Club, probably because it is a video game and it's not as easy to get emotionally invested in the characters. Overall, I commend Treyarch for it.

Call of Duty: The Abyss

Remember, there are spoilers so if you one of the 17 people on earth who didn't buy Black Ops, I am about to spoil a small part of the game.

Near the end of the single player campaign you and yo' crew get in fancy wet suits and dive under water to some secret underwater base that, get this, is under water. The picture to the right shows a screencap from the trailer of the underwater base. It even has a moonpool inside where you enter that is right out of the James Cameron underwat

er film The Abyss. I can't find a good image of the set from the movie, but it's in there. Instead please enjoy this picture of a pretty good LEGO mock up I found. When in doubt, express your idea in LEGO to get people to say "wow that is cool."