Call of Duty: Black Ops Review

You've probably played it. So you'll remember that, upon first arriving at Vietnam in 1968, protagonist Mason remarks that his friend Woods looks like "hammered shit". Coincidentally, so does the Wii port of Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Skimming away most of the aesthetic prowess of Black Ops is noticeably jarring, and the effect is severely worsened by the fact you can't turn your head without seeing the HD version of the game prominently displayed in internet adverts, shop windows or everybody else's living rooms. The fact Treyarch has managed to release a fairly competent cut-down version of the game isn't the point: playing Black Ops on Wii would be tantamount to watching a pirate copy of Inception on VHS while someone rubbed Peri-Peri sauce into your willy.

Even the most devout supporter of the Wii would be hard-pressed to not complain about the shonky visual effects, like the screen just awkwardly cutting straight to white when you die - apart from the level when you're trotting around Khe Sanh, where it inexplicably fades to black. Bang. White. Or black, of course. None of that technically stressful fading or blurring: only (mostly) white. That's Treyarch deciding to respond to a problem - the lo-fi Wii can't handle the post-processing effects of the death screens - by just ignoring it entirely.

Or have a little peek at the game's third level, where you take a car trip with Robert McNamara to the Pentagon and subsequently get ordered by President Kennedy to assassinate Russian antagonist Nikita Dragovich. On the Wii that's just an abridged movie sequence - the first instance of many, too - with Treyarch taking footage from the HD version and riddling it with poor compression and glaring artifacts. Watching the high-poly models strut around in movie form is also like coming second on a daytime TV game show - here's what you could have won!

In converting the splendid Black Ops to the Wii, Treyarch has completely forgotten to compensate for how the Wii is an absolutely terrible home for Black Ops. The enemy AI feels far more basic than in the HD consoles, and they were hardly rocket scientists on the bigger boys' consoles, though the wonkier snap-to aiming helps keep you from steamrolling all opposition. Thanks to the Wii's diminutive resolution, too, attempting to fire an assault rifle long distance is like trying to accurately throw breadcrumbs at a pixelated grey pea on the other side of a park without wearing your glasses.

Standard pointer controls are included, which get the job done (after a bit of fiddling in the options screen to get the right sensitivity) while losing almost all the speed and grace of the analogue sticks. Using the Zapper is absolutely hilarious, though: reloading is handled by shaking the Nunchuk, so doing that when connected to the Wii Remote via Zapper causes the on-screen gun to flail around like someone having an epileptic fit at a rave. Bung a Classic Controller Pro into the Wii Remote and it's like playing a Fisher Price version of Black Ops - something to wean the 10-year-olds on before they hit their teenage years, get an Xbox LIVE Gold account and start throwing offensive racial epithets around like they're candy.