It’s 2026 And I’m Once Again Addicted to Call of Duty: Black Ops

The Internet did not want me to buy the PlayStation 5 port of Call of Duty: Black Ops. For a few weeks, I didn’t think I was going to. A barebones port of a 15-year-old game, not a remake or remaster, the DLC not included, priced at £40? Yeah, I don’t think so. Then I saw it was actually £17 and bought it immediately. The nostalgia grabbed me at the menu music and hasn’t let go since.

The OG Black Ops was the prime Call of Duty of my youth. For a while I’d get them each year, all the subsequent titles, and then I’d go back to Black Ops once I’d prestiged a few times and the platinum trophy chimed. It’s the best one, no question. In 2010 I was addicted and I was great at it. It’s 2026 and I’m once again addicted but now I’m a lot less great at it. I used to play it before school, one last match leaving me with just enough time to put down the controller and run out the door. Now it’s the same with work. Insert Doctor Manhattan meme here.

I haven’t played the game in years. I only play modern COD games when they are ‘free’ on PlayStation Plus. But returning to Black Ops after so long wasn’t a disappointment, nor did it lead to a realisation about how it’s aged poorly against my rose-tinted memories. It’s still fantastic. It’s the game I remember as I remember it. It plays great and looks perfectly fine. I’m glad it’s just a barebones port, no tweaking with the magic. I don’t even need the DLC; I never had it originally.

My first game back I was in a lobby with a loud American using a tinny mic calling himself BIG_DONG. When I killed him he called me ‘gay’. Oh, the sweet, sweet nostalgia. It was like I’d never left. The original teenage playerbase, now in their thirties, straight back to acting like dumb children. I muted him of course: I couldn’t hear enemy footsteps over his inane chattering.

It is often pushed too far, however. You’ll often see a player with a swastika as their player emblem, ‘Trump’ has their clan tag. Even the occasional ‘6-7’ emblem, which might actually be worse. I report them alongside the Nazis. All the while I’m over here trying to create a little animated Karl Pilkington for my emblem using ancient guides filmed off a tube TV using a camcorder. 

While I’m glad the game is as it once was, there are maybe a couple of quality of life improvements I wish could have been made. Please give me a ‘mute all’ button so I don’t have to manually mute everyone by scrolling down the list as quickly as I can during the 10-second countdown before a game. The poor server selection is also a frequent annoyance. And ‘Theatre Mode’ has disappeared! When I eventually get a tomahawk kill after 800 attempts I can’t go back and rewatch it in slow-mo.

It’s safe to say age has not been kind to my reaction times and aiming ability. My kill/death ratio is above 1 but only barely. I’ve had to select some lesser killstreaks because my old favourites are unobtainable. I tried to have a go at sniping and it was the most demoralising 10-minutes of my life. Next match it was straight back to the Famas or AK74u, with a suppressor and the Ghost perk, of course. That’s right, I’m one of those pricks. And now any time I miss I blame it on my bad Internet connection, which is actually perfect.

The one big change from the early days of Black Ops when it launched in 2010 is that RC-XDs are now non-existent. I remember that being a big selling point of the game: a remote controlled car with C4 glued on the top. Amazing! Players have since realised they are actually pretty lame. After 25 hours I’ve encountered a grand total of two. Everyone chooses the less cool but much more useful spy plane. The map selection hasn’t changed, however. Despite endless iterations in the following games ruining all novelty of it, Nuketown is still the favourite. It’s easy to get in an endless loop of playing nowhere but Nuketown and Firing Range. Crisis and Havana being the worst maps, if anyone’s keeping score.

And party games! Oh, the party games/wager matches are so much fun. That was my first port-of-call when I installed the game. TDM and Demolition can wait, I had to jump straight to Gun Game. I’m pretty good until the back-to-back snipers. And it’s a rite of passage to be angry at the pricks who get to the ballistic knife and then just run around stabbing people, demoting them, until you manage to get to the same weapon and do the same thing because it’s so fun. It’s the same with claymores: I hate them and curse them and want to ban them and then I unlock them and can’t help but use them.

The game’s campaign has got to be the best in the franchise. The 60s setting is great and the story actually engaging and quite clever. I’ve played through it twice now, the second time on veteran difficulty, which wasn’t too bad apart from a couple of spots (kicking those damn napalm barrels in the Khe Sanh level). It was fun to revisit it and discover all the line readings that have been trapped somewhere in my brain, bubbling to the surface a split second before they are said onscreen. I even remembered where most of the hidden intel was located. As a further destination on my nostalgia trip, it also got me watching 15-year-old Achievement Hunter videos, back from when they existed and actually made achievement videos. I think I’m going to have a write a whole other article about the campaign, but I wanted to at least pay lip service to it here.

The truth is I’m only sitting down to write this because I can’t currently play Black Ops. The PlayStation servers are presently down, delivering one final blast of nostalgia to that infamous 24-day outage in 2011, right at the game’s height. I have so many other games I need to get around to playing or replaying: I wanted to revisit Alan Wake 2 before Control Resonant, play through the Plague Tale series again before the new instalment, and I still need to finish up 007: First Light. But they are now all on the backburner for more Black Ops. I’m stealing matches in any free moment I have. The new Modern Warfare 3 is ‘free’ on PS Plus this month but no thanks, not interested. And once I’m done with Black Ops, that nostalgia rush is going to start all over again with Black Ops 2.