Review: Black

Looking for a diversion after taking qualifying exams last fall, I picked up a charming-looking game for the PS2 called "Black," which featured only a pile of shell casings on the cover. "I've heard of this," I thought. "Isn't this the game that's only about shooting things? How stupid."

$19.95 later, and I'm kicking ass, first-person-shooter-style. 10 hours later, and the game is done. Was it worth it? Not really.

To begin with, the computer AI is pretty bad on "Normal" difficulty. Maybe on the highest setting, "Black Ops" (how gay), it's genius, but that seems doubtful.

If you stand behind even the smallest cover, some enemies will not notice you. As Emily Post would tell you, the appropriate thing to do when you walk up and catch an enemy unawares is to clear your throat and say "excuse me" before shooting them in the face, but mostly I just threw grenades and sometimes the enemies wouldn't notice them either. They just stood there and sometimes after a bit one would point at the ground and yell "grenade!" before kindly blowing up.

If you beat the game--all 8 stages (eight! count 'em!)--on "Normal," you unlock...well, the same weapons, with unlimited ammo. And so you can replay the same game with the same weapons with unlimited ammo. That's freakin' gr--no wait, what?!

There is no targeting system to speak of; there's a dot in the middle of the screen, and as you swing your sight line around, the dot moves. Presumably, your gun is attached to your retina, or sewn to your collarbone. It's hard to shoot people, is the point, unless you have the sniper rifle, in which case you can shoot an enemy literally anywhere on his body and he dies. My killpoint of choice is the shin.

Having "sniperriflesuperkillingpowers" is very nice, actually, since all enemies in the game have serious body armor and can absorb better than 80 rounds from any weapon before dying. I am not using hyperbole. You will run out of ammo before some of them die.

This leaves the player with the daunting challenge of shooting everyone in the head--using, as mentioned, the absurd non-targeting targeting system. Or, you can adopt the method I almost certainly invented first, where you run up to your stunned enemy, drop a grenade at his feet, and then run away. Often, many of your enemy's friends will feel jealous that he has a new metal hackey-sack, and will run over to play with it and end up so much more human ground beef. Like I said, the artificial "intelligence" is on the same level as all those Penthouse Letters that you can tell are written by the same paid staffer: it's the same words, the same actions, the same damn story every single time.

The weapons aren't even that fun. You have your pistol, your shotgun (no good outside ten yards), your AK-47 and similar submachine guns. Then you have an Uzi, a rocket launcher (which makes a-nice-a-boom-a but you never get to admire it because it only appears in the game when you are facing other people with rocket launchers, and thus you'd best keep your head down), and finally the ultimate weapon in the game, the M249 or something like that, which is just a big chain gun. The shit part is that it also has no aiming capability and is horribly inaccurate. For a .50 calibre weapon, it does a shitty job of knocking down your enemies, who are just as invulnerable to its effects as they are to all other weapons. Oh, and you can only have 2 guns at a time. Booooo.

So what's fun about the game? This is it, and it's the only fun thing about "Black":

This car?

It blows up.
Yes it do.

Trucks? Naturally:



Fuel tanks and fuel-related objects also 'splode:






Hmm...will this big ass fuel tank blow up if I shoot it with a combat shotgun?

Well, I think that's a big "yes."

What are these harmless-looking barrels up to? No good, I'll bet! Perhaps I should shoot them...
GOOD CALL!

That box is looking at me funny.

Eat it with a 9-mm fork, harmless box!

I wasn't able to get a picture--clearly, I'm low-tech--of it, but at one point just for the hell of it I shot a rusty stove in an abandoned farmhouse. And it blew up. Ditto for a file cabinet I shot. A cable spool. A concrete section of sewer pipe. A locker door. You get it by now.

The pictures are fuzzy because it's hard to balance a camera, the controller, and whack off to all that destruction all at the same time.

Ultimately, however, all that 'splodin' isn't enough to carry a game. Luckily, my brain was mush from the exams, so it was less obviously stupid to me at the time. But you'll hate it, trust me.

Though if you want to try it, I have this copy of "Black" that has been gathering dust for several months...