We all know (or should) that when it comes right down to it, first-person shooters are about shooting things. Does it matter that the premise of the original Doom was that you were fighting alien demons on Mars? Wouldn't it have been just as much fun if the story was something like, "Mrs. Marma invited several of her ugliest friends for tea, but none of them showed. Now, it's payback time."? Providing gameplay remained the same, my guess would be a "No." Does the fact that you're fighting to keep Earth safe from two different kinds of aliens that intend to wipe out humanity make pistol-whipping the Covenant grunts in Halo any more satisfying? Again, I doubt it. I mean, can anyone even tell me what the hell Duke Nukem 3-D was all about? A gold doubloon to the first man who can (note: I am not actually going to give you anything if you answer this question) [- oh great, I get stuck with promise fulfillment again! - ed.]. One might even go so far as to say that plots are largely irrelevant to a good first-person shooter. Of course, if you did say that, you'd be totally ignoring the possibility of a plot actually making a shooter worse, and therein would lie your downfall. Let's look at an illustration in some actual FPS game - oh I don't know, let's take Black, for sheer argument's sake.

Much less nudity and torture than most American interrogations.

   The game opens with a mysterious man interrogating a Sgt. Joseph Keller about the recent activities of his special-ops team. That's about as far as I got with the story. Between the abrupt (read, "epileptic") cuts between various photographs, newspaper clippings, and files, the way foreign names and military terminology are thrown around like pillows at a sexy pillow fight, and the overall poor delivery of most of the poorly-written dialogue, I couldn't make heads or tales of any of this story. By the end it seemed like it had something to do with hunting an American leading foreign terrorists. For all I know, though, it could have been about a trip to get ice cream that went horribly, horribly awry. [Or maybe some Seargeant getting mad at his poor foreign-born mother for forgetting to give him a first name - ed.]

In some games, such as the examples given above, this wouldn't matter. Simplistic games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3-D don't require any real context for their visceral fun. And games like Halo are really all about out-witting and out-gunning your foes. However, Black clearly wants you to appreciate the complex military thriller it's painstakingly constructed. But you won't. Which is a shame, because if the story was any good, it might have taken some of the focus off of the crappy fighting.

If these are the weapons we're using, no wonder the Iraq war is going so badly.

Get to the choppa!!!

   Considering all this drudgery, Black's beautiful, epic music score seems startlingly out of place. There were maybe a handful of moments during the game where I felt like what I was doing on screen warranted such gorgeous melodies [I am willing to be this involved some kind of secret crotch-scratching animation - ed.] , and these were the moments when the music was (surprise!) absent. Combining this awkwardness with the lifeless, profanity-ridden nonsense the game claims is dialogue gave me the feeling I was playing through a scene in one of those mindlessly patriotic Hollywood action-turds that make me cringe. If you've ever seen Air Force One, you know what I'm talking about.

The game's graphics aren't quite as good as its sound, comparatively, but they still hold up relatively well, managing to give the otherwise painfully uninteresting settings a teensy bit of personality. I also should mention that I never ran into any slowdown, even when trucks were exploding, bullets were flying, and Russian bodies were pinwheeling limply through the air. One neat effect that I actually really liked was how things in the distance went out of focus while you were reloading, as if Sgt. Keller was actually concentrating on putting bullets back in his gun. How novel! Too bad it does nothing to resolve all of this game's other issues.

No friends? No problem!

   Of course, there's no problem because Black offers you nothing to do with any friends even if you had them. That's right, just like Half-Life 2, another big-name, big-budget shooter has been released without any kind of multiplayer. Now, multiplayer isn't the most important part of a game for me since I'm a crazy recluse living alone out in the wilderness in a tiny shack I cobbled together from driftwood and pine nuts, but it's nice to have it there so when I catch a lost hiker or an injured mountaineer I can force them to play a few rounds with me before I butcher them and eat their organs to gain their strength. For the rest of you who are more integrated into "normal" society, I imagine this is much more irritating, especially since the game's mechanics seem like they would lend themselves better to multiplayer than to the crappy single-player campaign.

At the end of the day Black is far from the worst first-person shooter you could play (that honor is unquestionably held by Dick Cheney vs. Infants & Elderly: Take No Prisoners!). You'll have a few decent moments of shooting and killing, but considering the amount of boring blasting away at specs in the distance and dodging wildly out of the way of rockets from nowhere, they're probably not worth it. You're much better off playing a game that makes you feel less like a bitch for lowest-common-denominator marketing strategies. I suggest my own soon-to-be-released magnum opus, Mike Zeller's Traveling Antique Dealing Adventures. It's got more credenzas than most!

       ... Mike Zeller