On Tuesday, Richard and I went to the midnight release for Call of Duty – Black Ops II. I feel like this was complete deja vu as I was standing in a frigid line just last week for Halo 4. The line was considerably longer for Black Ops II than Halo 4, mostly because the demographic is a bit different for the game. We have kind of created a ritual for our midnight release habits. First we head over to GameStop and finalize receipts, then head over to In-N-Out burger for delicious burgers. I seriously feel bad for anyone who does not have an In-N-Out near them. This time we decided to also stop at Krispy Kreme because our arteries did not take a big enough beating and picked up a couple of donuts.

Richards custard filled donut looked rather derpy if you ask me. All of this ended up taking way less time than we expected it to, and we had no intentions of standing in line any longer than we had to because of how cold it was. The GameStop we were at shares the same parking lot with the Target that I used to work for, which was also doing a midnight release, so we wandered over there to get out of the cold and see a couple of friends. When we got there at around 11, the line was a whole 4 people deep vs the 100+ people outside of GameStop. I think these people had the right idea. I did some Christmas shopping while there (my goal is to have everything done by the end of the month and put nothing on credit cards) and we finally headed back over to GameStop to stand in the obnoxiously long line.

By the time we returned the line had grown from the side of the building almost looping the entire building. We had to stand out back in the boonies and rosemary (seriously rosemary plants everywhere!) but luckily we were only in line for about 10 minutes as the line moved really quickly. I am always saddened by how much trash people leave when hanging out for midnight releases or Black Friday – is it really too hard to pick up your garbage and throw it away 2 feet from you? It is not fair to either the employees that have to pick it up, the customers that have to navigate around it, and the other businesses in the shopping center that now have a bunch of garbage in front of their doors come 10 am. We were in and out in within minutes and back home to check out the game. Unfortunately I completely passed out before I even got to see a minute of the game play, woops.

So far I have only played the Zombie mode and its okay. I find the lack of readily available guns in some levels to be exceptionally frustrating as well as the introduction of fire. There are cracks in the ground in some levels and while I understand that if visible flames are coming from the cracks then yes, I will catch fire if I do not jump over them, but I should not catch fire if I am simply stepping over one of the cracks that does not have visible flames. Are you trying to tell me that I can not step over a crack in the ground? Stupid. As for Halo 4, we beat the campaign in 1 day and sadly have to replay through it on my Xbox so that I can get the achievements as well. Oh well.