SirLube

Pinball Arcade was originally released on the Xbox 360 in 2012. Due to a long running legal dispute this game was eventually withdrawn from the Xbox 360 store (having only released two DLC's in the time it was there) with no sign it would ever come back or have further DLC's released. So it was a great surprise to see it released on the Xbox One, with a graphical upgrade and all the tables that should have been released in the past two years! Pinball Arcade itself is free, and comes with the excellent Arabian Nights table to get you started. You can try any of the other 30+ tables as a demo, and either purchase them individually if you like, or as a 'value' pack so there's a lot to look at. The tables are all real-life replicas, with all the detail and gameplay meticulously crafted with astonishing attention. For example, the lighting on the tables has had a significant upgrade from the 360 version. I personally like to play all my tables with the 'dark room' setting as it really increases the realism on the Xbox One. The gameplay itself hasn't changed much from the Xbox 360, but it really didn't have to. The ball mechanics are absolutely spot on, and the little metal balls actually feel, well, just like they should do, with weight and inertia, which in turn makes Pinball Arcade fast and frantic. I do, however recommend that if you have a Samsung TV/Monitor, that you set it to 'Game Mode', otherwise screen latency will be a problem, and that is not documented anywhere. While other pinball games are available, Pinball Arcade is where I spend my money. It just plays 'right' and scores massively on realism, nostalgia and fun. Oh lastly, I looked at buying The Addams Family Pinball. A mint concourse example would be £8500 to you sir. For ONE table. I would still buy that and play this too. Great game.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

REDUCED SCORE: After a week of 'getting to know' COD Ghosts I am reducing my score by 50%. Another year, another HACKED TO PIECES piece of crap game. Tonight I shot someone, who had juggernaut on, I couldn't kill him but my rounds rickochey'd and blew me up? Hacked code. Aimbots, wall hacks, all easily available if you want them. Cheaters and campers all accommodated. Honest, good players totally screwed. Bored of little kids on a supposedly 'mature' game. Bored of Playing HardCore Kill Confirmed where everyone camps. NO ONE IS PLAYNG THIS THE WAY IT WAS INTENDED. What a waste of money.

I have slated this game in the past, but I do feel that this is the best DLC for Black Ops II multiplayer yet. At the very least, this did contain MP maps, and wasn't just a Zombie-only DLC like the last DLC in first Black Ops. I especially like POD, which has a good balanced layout like COD maps of old and Dig, which is actually a laugh and suits my style of play. Takeoff seems a bit bigger than I remember Stadium being, but that's not a bad thing and Frost is also a good run and gun map. I do feel that including two remade maps were a bit of a cheat though, after all this is one of two or three top games for the current Xbox and it cheapens the franchise to just repackage old for new. Stadium was DLC itself so technically, Takeoff is a remake of 2 year old DLC. But in Treyarch's defence not everyone gets each and every COD and each and every DLC and Apocalypse is a good one. Now can we have a patch for the network code so that I can just play people in my country and not be grouped in with laggy, annoying, camping, unsporting, thick, **** Europeans that would be great.

As a regular player of the original Black Ops I had hoped to enjoy almost every aspect of COD Black Ops II (with the exception of Zombies) but now that I have actually played the sequel I can only say what a massive disappointment it is. I bought this game at midnight and queued for an hour and a half to get it on release. When I got home and first loaded the disc I was greeted with a mandatory update - 24 Mb - hardly a good start and increasingly common these days. Then came the Nuke-Town DLC - 125 MB - and when that was done I had the chore of setting the graphics / sound / safe zone options. Half an hour since the disc went in and I haven't actually fired a shot yet. When I did actually get to play I selected multiplayer first - and a quick look at the leader-boards revealed that some people at the top of the leader-boards have had nearly two (2) days game-time played already!! That's game-time folks - not time that they've actually owned the game but time spent playing BEFORE the game was officially released. When I did get into my first multiplayer game I had to select my weapons from the default classes - and no weapons were familiar favourates. It seems that 'just to be seen to be a bit different' all default weapons have to be ones I was unfamiliar with. Oh well it was getting late so just get on with it. Although the graphics looked very 'cartoony' I was impressed by the effort that went into the way the game looked - a lot of it seemed very graphically simular to MW2 and 3 though. When playing I did seem to be dying too easily and taking too many shots to kill people though - a nasty sign that lag compensation has reared its ugly head again. I am on a 56 mbs (15 ms ping) fibre connection so someone on a 2 mbs landline will own my ass because Trayarch seem to not understand or care how fast internet connections actually put the person with the fast connection at a massive disadvantage or that the faster your connection and the lower your ping the more clients will try to join your host and those clients will be further away so will lag more and your ping will be artificially increased to 'make it fair' for slower clients at your expense AND IT DOESN'T WORK.. grmbl. The Pick 10 system doesn't work either - it annoys me and restricts load-outs and I spent too much time compromising on stuff I couldn't have rather than picking the stuff I could have. I did miss the option to buy new stuff using the money from challenges/kills/contracts from Black Ops I. The contracts and option to buy should never have been removed as this again brings this new game closer to to MW3 - just the same way that all the good weapons are only available late in the Presige ladder it will encourage people not to bother Prestiging so again Trayarch got it wrong. By now I was yearning to just play a good game and realising that it wasn't going to happen. I played the Single Player mode the next morning - in 3D and in Regular difficulty. Very impressed with the cut-scenes which oozed quality. However, the game itself was a joke. I was surrounded by a huge number of enemies only to be getting slight grazes by their weapons and gunships, seemingly superhuman in the face of impossible odds. My AK-47 worked in a way that was massively different to the multiplayer game in that it mowed down wave after wave of enemies. Disappointed in yet another COD let-down, I ended the game. This will sell in millions. It doesn't deserve to.