Preview by: Jeff McAllister

I write about videogames, therefore I will never be able to afford a 3D television. The only things I get to see in 3D are awful movies in theatres during matinees three weeks after they have been released. For those of you with a real job, you may be a little more excited than I to learn that Call of Duty: Black Ops has been given the full 3D treatment and will be available in both regular and 3D versions come November 9th for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. Which console you own won’t matter in regards to 3D as it takes into account the television set rather than the system, except for PCs which will need Nvidia cards that are 3D compliant.

I was able to check out a couple of single player levels to see how the 3D experience worked and not to overwhelm you with my incredibly technical vernacular, it worked pretty damn well. The first level was called WMD and took place in a winter setting; the level opened with us taking off in a SR71 Blackbird for surveillance. As my fingers twisted and turned knobs to the side of the viewer that showed allied positions on the ground far below, it was pretty surprising how the 3D effect made the screen I was looking at in my lap stand inches higher than my hands that were placed at the sides. As the mission went on, I would call to the allies on the ground and tell them enemies were approaching and the scenario would switch to the ground perspective. The campaign now took on a traditional feel of a FPS game and that’s when we got to see how the 3D would really work in an actual game environment.

The first thing that stood out was that although my gun was perceived with depth, the ever present on screen crosshair for the gun was still up close and “behind” the weapon. It felt awkward that what I was using to aim felt like it was two feet behind the barrel. Thankfully when I questioned Jay Puryear, the managing director of Treyarch, he noted that usually the crosshair is turned off as it does have an odd effect on the visuals. So, it can be turned off to not distract you, but then you don’t have a crosshair while shooting from the hip.

If using a traditional aiming reticule, the true iron sights, the aim sights line up from butt to tip on the gun in 3D and it looks amazing. The laser dot sights were also impressive and as I looked down the scopes of various weapons, especially the crossbow, it made me feel like a kid again holding a cardboard tube up to my eye, pretending I was using a telescope. As the mission went on, there were a few other things that popped out such as the objective markers being on the same plane as the HUD and not in depth. If the objective is 40 meters away, it would be impressive if the objective marker looked as though it was 40 meters away as well.