The ZRC attended a New Year’s Eve party last week and surprisingly enough, even on our night off, The Cause found us and demanded attention, as the party-goers had Call of Duty: Black Ops playing on a tv downstairs.

Eventually the siren song of Zombie Rights demanded that I try it out. The results were not pretty.

First, some background. Call of Duty: Black Ops is a sequel to Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: World at War, and both Call of Duty titled games have featured Anti-Zombie components/gameplay modes. Call of Duty: Black Ops has sold ridiculously well, 7 million copies in the first day, according to the wikipedias.

The Zombie component of Black Ops, judging by our New Year’s experience, is a very popular piece of this very popular game.

It is also ludicrously offensive.

I got the chance to sit down and play one of the two big Zombie slaughtering stages, the World War II themed Kino der Toten (Theatre of the Dead) stage, for several hours. A few thoughts:

1) This game, without a doubt, qualifies as Living Supremacist. The ‘protagonists’ that the players operate defame and mock the Differently Animated as monsters and abominations even as they gun them down, wave after wave of poor Zombies facing far superior firepower.

2) Players are placed into the role of the barricade-defending archetype established in Night of the Living Dead, only here the violence and black humor are greatly increased. Whereas Romero intends to emphasize the purported ‘horror’ of the Undead, Treyarch (this game’s developer) definitely intend to focus on dehumanizing the Differently Animated and making it ‘fun’ to mow them down.

3) Realism in terms of combat is sacrificed to create an easy to use sort of experience treadmill, where killing Zombies directly leads to earning money which gets you more guns to kill more Zombies which opens doors so you can find more Zombies and more guns, etc. If you don’t participate in the treadmill system, given no chance to negotiate peaceably, you get attacked by the Zombies. Advancement or even stasis demands carnage.

4) The Zombie characters definitely come off better than the protagonists. Note that while the Living player characters take no prisoners and blatantly violate the Geneva Conventions, the Zombies will leave players alone once they have been incapacitated; Zombies, unlike the alleged ‘heroes’ you play, take prisoners.

And yet they are the bad guys, and you get points and acclaim for blasting them.

After a few hours I thought I had seen enough, and swallowing my disgust, filed away my experiences for a review. Conclusion? Call of Duty: Black Ops is a disturbing, violent, crass, slick and very well produced piece of Living-Supremacist propaganda.

Thus it receives our very lowest rating, Living-Supremacist.

Shame on Treyarch for peddling this filth.

Tags: Videogames, ZRC Reviews

This entry was posted by John Sears on Friday, January 7th, 2011 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.