It's the year 2012. You wake up to a tenant class where you can't focus on any of the work assigned that day. On the way home, you rest your head on the cold glass window of the car or school bus to then power up the thing you were looking forward to most that day. Maybe it was a PS3, Xbox 360. It doesn't matter.   And then you watch a cutscene until you approach a menu that reads Call of Duty Black Ops 2. Start a party chat with two friends you know from school, alongside four other people that you've never met in real life, but can still call friends. You all go into a private lobby where you run free for all snipers to reenact that montage video you saw at school the same very day. And you repeat this day after day after day until you lose track of time and realize you're an adult full of nostalgia. Call of Duty is a series that has risen to be more than just a game, like Minecraft, Halo, or any other franchise I played in my youth. It's become forever tied to me. It was a part of my upbringing. It has shaped me to be the person I am today, like so many of you watching this. You might have started with COD4, NW2, Black Ops 2, or even a later title, but it doesn't really matter where you started. What matters most is what you made of that time. And boy, did I make the most of Black Ops 2.  I know in some random dot of the globe there's the minority who jump for joy when you say Call of Duty Ghost or Vanguard, if I could Springfield maybe. But when you hear Black Ops 2, you think of zombies.  So congratulations on raising a retarded young man. As well as the copy-paste intro templates from every other goddamn YouTuber at the time. A lot has happened in culture since the release of Call of Duty Black Ops 2. The Queen croaked, we went through a global pandemic, I exist, and Kanye West went to war with the skinny-tatted SNL man. Life changes drastically in 10 years. You see the title? You get it? Saying Black Ops 2 was a good game isn't a controversial take or even a special one. You could find hundreds of video essays where grown men get teary-eyed by getting called slurs in the golden years of 2012. When the game came out I was 10 and while I do miss grown men getting off their 9-5 jobs then yell at a 10-year-old to die of cancer, the angle I have for this video is to play off its anniversary. The game is 10 years old. Actually I lied, the game is turning 10 years old but it looks nice in the title and I'm not waiting till it's official birthday because there's other games that are also turning 10 this year that I want to talk about. Also it's my video and I make the rules.  Here's your Dairy Queen ice cream cake. Black Ops 2 is a universally enjoyed game and it'd be really easy for me to blindly praise it in this video for brownie points. Not to stroke my ego but I've had some hot takes where I was originally the minority critiquing something that I was really enjoyed and was to be proven right over time. Like for real, these two videos aged so well, especially this one. What I'm trying to say is I'm not blinded by brand loyalty and that times can be actually overly pessimistic. But in the case of Black Ops 2 it really makes me interested on how I want to tackle this video. All I have to say is how the game is perfect and you would most likely trust whatever I say due to the game's reputation or your own fun nostalgia. I'm even a victim of this. Before making this video I knew that it wouldn't be that hard to tackle the topic because I've worked a mouth over the years. Black Ops 2 is great, Cod Ghost was not, and Cod got worse and worse over the years. This isn't to discredit the game's validity. I haven't even began to talk about the game yet but it does really make me fascinated about the power of nostalgia. Call of Duty is a really good marker to track the change of opinions toward video games because of how mainstream the series is. In the modern landscape of gaming we all fall victim to relieving criticism of older media that was once controversial due to the landscape getting way worse. When Modern Warfare 3 first launched it originally had mixed reviews. But in the year 2022 after playing games like Vanguard, Cold War, even Modern Warfare 2019 you could go back to play Modern Warfare 3 and completely dismiss all previous stances by accident due to the dramatic shift of quality over time. This happens a ton with other franchises. Halo Reach was once said to be the worst Halo game ever on its release and since then Halo 4 took its place, then 5 took its place, and now Infinite sits as the worst Halo game currently.  I also find the same dilemma being present in the former. There's a lot of games that have great reputations and are extremely difficult to replay and might be a slight bit overrated. A big offender of this are Bethesda games. Fallout 4 and 76 are worse than New Vegas and 3, but replaying New Vegas 3 or even Skyrim in the year 2022 is exhausting. Fallout New Vegas stands out from the rest because of its lightning and a bottle premise so its validity is justified, even though the game is extremely dated. But in the case of Fallout 3, it's also really dated and doesn't have that same lightning and a bottle magic that New Vegas has making it quite limp. But if you ask the common person who played it when it first came out, they could possibly praise the game very highly when they haven't even replayed it from start to finish within the last decade. But are going off of Nostalgia. Nostalgia is a powerful tool because it's 100% subjective. With my adult brain, I could rip a part Fallout 4 for multiple reasons and admit that it's an extremely flawed project, but back in my mind, there'll always be that memory of me getting the game for Christmas in 2015 and playing it throughout my entire winter break in my living room. Making a video like this is extremely scary. Black Ops 2 is very personal to me and potentially popping that Nostalgia bubble by examining it with hindsight can be a gamble.  If you liked this video, please share it on Twitter, Reddit, or any other landscape that's available to spread it around. Subscribe as well, it helps, please. In the modern climate of Gen Z humor, shouting big chungus and playing Breaking Bad memes can be funny to some. This was made by the official Buffalo Bills account, but there was a time period where that wasn't always the case. The best way to put a kid in the ER back in the day was to spam the hit marker sound effect a million times while you've made Doritos, Mountain Dew, and the infamous MLG logo spin in circles for 10 minutes.  To then get into a midlife crisis where the only solution was to spam grant the photo tattoos while getting a decent haircut. In 2012, you didn't have many options of what content to make in the gaming sphere. You either had grown men screaming at amnesia and slenderman, or Minecraft creators making music video parodies. Black Ops 2 was the most played game in the world in 2012, and was universally enjoyed making a gold mine for content creators.  Woody's gamer tag was playing the role of Master Oogway for the youth. The Van Oskruz making fun content, trolling videos, zombie videos, trick shotting, and actual fun esports ran rampant.  Content wasn't exhausting like it is now, and didn't change how the game played every other week. As of right now, Call of Duty content is no longer centered around being fun anymore, but instead centered around being overly competitive for business opportunities.   Instead of seeing videos by KYR Speedy having a good time and talking of lobbies, you are now instead spammed by boring, sweaty, try hard, battle royale creators like this girl, who's most likely cheating.  Everyone today wants to be a streamer, so you have an oversaturation of neckbeards who get bloodshot red sweating in any game they play, so they can get an audience or get recruited to an organization. And the sphere gets so saturated that it begins to bleed into casual lobbies within most games.  Call of Duty has always had their sweats, I know that, but they aren't nearly as generic and desperate as the modern way.  Nowadays you just need to play Fortnite or Valorant and you'll probably get in. The pro aspect of Call of Duty was always separate from the mainstream, and even now it's not the pro aspect of Call of Duty bleeding, it's just the clip culture and wanting to put a show on every time you're live because it has objectively made people's careers. But in all honesty the hell's getting praised for being a professional cod player in the year 2022. The downfall of video games started when kids complained about people being good at the game. I remember when I was a kid and saw a prestige master in cod, I didn't tell him to take a shower or go outside, I sent that motherfucker a friend request. I've came to the conclusion that when it comes to content creation around Black Ops 2, it's not my nostalgia clotting my judgement at all. Someone getting a squad wipe in Warzone just doesn't compete with open voice chat lobbies in 2012 culture. YouTube was tiny in scale in comparison to today, and Twitch was almost non-existent. While Minecraft was on the come out for creators like Beijing Canadian, Stampy Longhead and Captain Sparkles, the community for Call of Duty was thriving just as much. Before the Vanoss crew and other creators began to explode off of GTA and Garry's Mod content, they revolutionized YouTube by just having fun in Black Ops 2. These videos were not just products at their time either, each video had millions on top of millions of views and began to impact culture. You could go to school and say an inside joke from a video you watched the day before and someone would most likely understand the reference. Before this content was either highlight clips or commentary let's plays. But creators like Vanoss and KYR Speedy were making full on edited projects that you could still feel the ripple effect of to this day. Creators like Swagger Souls, Fitz, Tommy and Jay Schlag get props for adding captions and funny editing to their videos. But when you go down the line of inspiration, it all goes back to someone, getting inspired by someone who got inspired by these videos who are most likely also inspired by someone. The ripple effect goes unnoticed and is often underappreciated, but like I said, you could still feel its effect to this day and some of your most enjoyed content creators. But the reason these videos are good boils down to one simple fact, these videos were just friends having fun, having fun playing a game they loved while making careers out of it. It was a spark that ended up setting these people up for life financially, revolutionizing a format that is still used to this day while entertaining millions and it was done in Black Ops 2. And that's just this style of content. Like I said, you still have the zombie creators in the come up, trolling videos, and other pieces of content all done in Black Ops 2. This content was more impactful and memorable than any small streamer getting a quad kill in Rebirth Island ever will be. So it's not just nostalgia and being stuck in the past, content was just better. This is probably the most important part of the video. The zombies in the campaign are enjoyed by some, but when you talk about Black Ops 2, almost everybody reflects on the multiplayer aspect. And that's justified. The campaign is only a couple hours long, so it could have gone one way or the other, right after you played it. And the only way to really get into zombies is by being committed to its easter eggs or lore.  But the multiplayer in Black Ops 2 was casual and easy to pick up and drop no matter what time period you played it in. You can play after school, after work, after the gym, none of you are doing that. Or on the weekends, and it will always be the same as when you left it. And even now in the modern day it's still really fun. I replayed the multiplayer quite a bit to once again see if it was just nostalgia making me feel this way, but I just got so into it again that it finally clicked with me on why this game is so adored and revered to this day. Call of Duty multiplayer has been on the decline for a while now, and if you enjoy it still drop your weapons and hear me out. I liked Modern Warfare 2019 when it released, and I played Cold War a bit, but those games are proper examples of nostalgia cope. Modern Warfare peaked when quarantine happened, and with the whole world either being inside or being extremely racist, everyone just played Call of Duty or games in general really. I did a rest wipe in 2020. Why did I choose to play such toxic games during lockdown? And quarantine I was able to just play wars on all day with my friends to the point where I got so bored and lonely that I made this YouTube channel where I continued to be bored and lonely. When you examine Modern Warfare without quarantine nostalgia you could spot out the flaws easily.  The progression system was tied to the battle pass so I was no longer able to sell my soul to the black market for a master procedure. The camo challenge is also a blue deck. Some guns were totally broken, banana, fun MW2 way where everything was unbalanced and chaotic, but instead broken to where they became meta weapons that everybody copy and pasted. And after a while the game got to a staple point, but that was because the only enjoyable maps were shoehouse and remakes from older games.  It's not getting any better either, the MW2 beta just wrapped in. When that game comes out I'll be hanging from the sailing within the first week. A lot of the same criticisms of Modern Warfare also applied to Cold War, the standout maps from previous games as well. But as a base game, Cold War was half-baked due to it being crunched in a 6 month period and hit a deadline. While every other developer was delaying their games due to Covid, Chark was getting whipped like a slave to release a card game so they could avoid Activision killing the developers family members. While CD Projekt credit was drinking margaritas in the Bahamas since they were in the towel 6 months before release. But it's okay though, they made an anime so it all worked out in the end.  Like why is there still no map voting in the new MW2? And before you asked I'm not gonna rip into the vanguard because I really cannot be bothered to play that game.  But what made Block Ops 2 so fun was just how simple it was. You didn't have skill-based matchmaking that punished you for getting more than 4 kills, you were able to just run around and shooting whatever gun you wanted while also running at the same speed as everybody else.  Also the sniping was improved from Black Ops 1, so you were able to quick scope your heart out and compile a montage to get only 10 views. Shotguns are simple, SMGs were great for running gun, and assault rifles, the AN-94, that's all you need to know. Trust me, I would know because I'm American. The gunplay is really solid even 10 years later and that's owed to Black Ops 2's greatest innovation. That would be copied for the following years to come after its release and that was the Pick 10 system.  In MW2 and Black Ops 1 you were only able to have one attachment on your weapons, and in MW3 you're able to have two if you had a perk. But the Pick 10 system in Black Ops 2 was designed to allow more customization for your loadout. What's up world?   If you wanted to deck out your weapons with three attachments to unleash your inner NRA, you could as well. Donald Trump, if you can hear us, please, Donald Trump, please save me. Please save me Donald Trump, please.   And this Pick 10 system flourished greatly within the amazing maps of Black Ops 2. The game launched with 14 base maps and some good DLC maps if you were willing to pay for them. Look, it's 2022. You think I'm gonna pay for 10 year old maps? Some of the base maps were ass, but a majority of them were really good. Call of Duty really did make some good maps back in their day. Let me name you some of the Black Ops 2 maps, and to yourself, count how many times you've played them outside of Black Ops 2. Express, Hijacked, Raid, and Slums.  If you didn't play cod, you might be content that you didn't get to participate with my little brain game there. Probably reminds you of school, when nobody picked you for their team in PE, didn't it? You deserve it. You also have standoff, Turbine, and Newtown 2025, which is more of a tradition than a remake, so I give it a pass. The design of Black Ops 2 maps were small and dynamic. Encouraging people not camp like Cod 2019 are the most recent MW2, and this was because the map design didn't award that playstyle as much as other titles. And while a lot of them still followed the simple three lane pattern, they still had unique architecture that allowed flanks and alternative routes. Another reason to not camp is because getting kills wasn't the only way to achieve a missile that comes out of the sky. Obama. The kill streak system was changed to the score streak system, so you could also get points by playing the objective and assisting teammates alongside getting kills in a match. Doesn't matter for me personally. I bought a gaming mouse and a gaming keyboard, so I'm obligated to be good at video games, right?  Um, playstyle's a subjective. What if I like to camp, and that's the way I have fun?  But yeah, I liked Black Ops 2's multiplayer. Playing double XP weekends, hardpoint for the first time, getting gold and diamond weapons instead of generic, woodland and snow camos.  Stomping on Christmas news, playing in custom lobbies. It's all very, very nostalgic. Black Ops 2 multiplayer isn't my favorite by design. That would still be MW2 due to it being total chaos, but it's my second favorite because of its environment as well as its care toward the players in comparison to today's call of duties. Before you had to open crates to get better guns or buy weapon cosmetics exclusive to only one gun, you could get cool cosmetics without sacrificing an arm and leg.  Cool cosmetics that the community could vote for. I prefer cheap, good-looking camos than soulless corporate product placement and games like Vanguard with half-baked multiplayer experiences. But what if I want to be King Kong and I really like King Kong and I get to play as King Kong for the movie King Kong?  I also really do miss ranking up and prestigious. While I clowned on this guy for this terminally online take, there is some validity to what he said about max prestige. Getting to master prestige meant something when you entered a lobby because it was visible to everybody. I also gave you another challenge to complete so I made you play the game more. But when I played COD 2019 I got to level 100 for it to reset, where I did it again next season and it never felt that good because all I got was a little emblem and in the new game it doesn't even pop up when you kill people.  No one's gonna see it. Also customization has been neutered heavily and Black Ops 2 you can make your own funny little emblem cards no matter how vulgar they were and you weren't even able to do this in Cold War. Black Ops 2 was simple, it was a simple better game and it most likely won't ever get this good again. But if you played in its prime I'm happy for you. You could still replay it now but it's just not the same as back then. But don't forget about those memories and if you ever feel nostalgic go watch some old videos and remember those good times.  When you put on that headset you were not just yourself but instead the gamer tag you chose as you got to escape in a world of fun. It's 4 a.m. on December 18th, 2012. That's absolutely a number I just pulled out of the mirror. The members of the core friend group are either asleep or grinding for legendary weapons in Borderlands 2 like the degenerates they are.  Call of Duty Zombies is a weird little accident made out of curiosity that still stands 14 years later, like me if it was 20. That joke didn't really work. Zombies was never intended to be a selling factor for Treyarch's games and was only greenlit in the late stages of World at War's development as a neat bonus to players that finished the campaign. Knock Durantotan was a massive hit, which isn't that surprising. From 2008 to 2015 making a zombies game was essentially just jiggling car keys in the face of gamers. So because of the success more maps were made for World at War and the game moved continued to flourish into Black Ops 1 with an even larger budget. Who are you people? What do you want from me? Keno Durantotan and the DLC maps despite being controversial were so loved and enjoyed that a whole designated team was made for the zombies game mode going into the development for Black Ops 2 with Jimmy Zelensky being the game design director. Earlier I mentioned how the game's marketing built in same height for transit, but now we're at the part of the video where I need to address transit itself. Transit is the largest example of popping said nostalgia bubble that I explained about in the intro, but I also have a large amount of empathy for the game designers of transit. As much as transit has its faults I will always respect when a studio tries to think outside of the box and fails. Way more than when a studio tries to play it really safe and ends up being uninspired or underwhelming. Black Ops 4 reinvented Mob of the Dead but worse.  Five but worse and call the dead I said reinvented. Re-invented. I need to reiterate that because don't be misunderstood. The remasters in Black Ops 3 with zombie chronicles. And if you didn't play zombies just trust me. And if you really are that desperate for content go watch some zombie creators. Fuckers are pretty much zombies themselves living off of scraps. Transit had overly ambitious ideas while also having tight deadlines as well as console limitations. Treyarch originally had a lot of hope for transit's development process and if all the original concepts were able to work it could have been one of the best zombie maps ever made. But like I said transit was so big ambitious that the engine literally wouldn't have been able to run it. So because of this the map is littered with gross fog to shrink your point of view so the game could render textures. Also the denizens were put into disencouraging from exploring the map while also slowing you down so the game could have a buffer to once again render new areas without crashing.  The buses flawed and the player has no control of it. The areas are barren and are often better played standalone instead of within transit. Like town could actually be fun on its own when not playing in transit. And while the map was the debut for buildable items it was still flawed due to the turbine being essential for the map while only being able to carry one item at a time. Also two of the craftable items were pointless while we're at it the turbine mechanics sucked. The wonder weapon had to be crafted and it broke if you use it too much making you have to go all over the map to make it again. The boss sucked. The pack of punch process sucked. The fog and lava were annoying. Okay I see I'm starting to lose some of you with over specifics.  The chaos element of transit is definitely the most entertaining part of it. As Mike was asking from the hit film monsters incorporated one said The map could be unpredictable and confusing letting you know that you are playing something chaotically flawed.  So I could say that I like transit as a kid but that's only because I had fun with friends time to time when I was a kid. But that's it right.   I hate it. I hate it.   Die rise is something worse. It's boring. And I rather have chaotic and confusing than bland and forgettable. Wait no that's me. The elevators were annoying because you couldn't control them unless you had a one-use item. The closed spaces were obnoxious and the map's art style was ugly. But I had good wall buys and the slip of fire was nice. That's an understatement. It was really nice actually.  What a wacky out the box fun gun. Can't be said for this snoozefest of a map. I know I'm rushing. I just don't want to talk about die rise anymore.   Now let's praise mom with the death. You forgot about this map. Nuketown Zombies was given to season pass holders. Not battle pass. Season pass.  Nuketown was a bonus map that was small and had zombies in the map Nuketown. That's it. It's the same as town pretty much. Not a full map but a fun area if you wanted to go high rounds. I don't hate Nuketown Zombies but there's not much to be said about it and I rather use my time to praise the other three maps for the rest of the zombie segment.  Now as I was saying mob of the dead is one of the greatest zombie maps ever made and it was the most crucial for the zombies game mode.    People were losing hope with zombies and were getting nostalgic about the old simplistic map structures. Jimmy Zelensky was the leader for the past two projects but a new lead was assigned to mob of the dead and his name was Jason Blundell. He was originally a campaign design director but took on two maps for black ops two and to say he knocked out the park is an understatement. Mob of the Dead is a linear self-contained story that originally had no connections to any larger picture besides its own. But before we talk about the map let's talk about its atmosphere.  Erm actually it's Rebirth Island?  Alcatraz is a historical prison in San Francisco notorious for holding high profile mobsters including the most infamous Al Capone. It's also stated to be impossible to escape from due to it being a rock in the middle of the ocean. So if an inmate breaks out they have to swim for freedom meaning they would either drown or freeze to death. An escape attempt was made but the three inmates either died in the water or escaped successfully to then never be heard or seen from again. The game designers visited the now closed prison to take notes and photos so that they could be accurate for the level design. But while Alcatraz is a cool concept for a map we've had other Call of Duty maps with great concepts like zombies bringing down the Titanic where you play on the literal Titanic. But the map wasn't executed well and was mainly due to its lack of impressive atmosphere. The main crew of Mob of the Dead are all played by actors who depicted famous mobsters in movies or television shows. The recently passed Ray Leota popular from Goodfellas played the intimidating Billy Hansom, Chaz Palmentary from A Bronx Tale played Salvatore DeLuca, Michael Madsen from Reservoir Dogs played Michael Fenn O'Leary and Joe Pentiliana who played Ralphie and the Sopranos plays Albert Arlington aka The Weasel. The Titanic map Voyager Despair had a messy plot with forgettable characters that didn't play into the maps theme. And while I like the original crew of zombies they don't really fit into the Mob of the Dead theme either. Some of the best characters in zombies are one-off characters that were made to fit the atmosphere of whatever map they're in. The only other map to encapsulate this feeling just as well as Mob of the Dead was Shadows of Evil which was also made by Jason Blundell for Black Ops 3. The four characters that you play in that game fit right into the map's gorgeous setting to encapsulate the time period. But that's Black Ops 3, I'm getting ahead of myself. Mob of the Dead's characters are amazing. It makes sense why they chose the cast they did because they're all supposed to be shitty prison inmates. And what better people to represent that than mobsters played by actors who played iconic mobsters? Everything you need to know about these people is set up in the map's amazing intro. You meet the cast one by one showing that they're all deceptive criminals, talking with the security guard Ferguson in a friendly matter knowing that his death is imminent for their escape. Feeling no emotion and working in their own self-interest. James Galalfini, the actor who played Tony Soprano died two months after this map came out and that's my main criticism. What is it? My fault? You're twice as likely to be robbed by a Black?   The whole premise of Mob of the Dead is that the main characters are stuck in a purgatory cycle due to the selfish and deceptive natures within them, living and dying again and again until they break that cycle from previous actions done on the map. And in the intro you have the characters leaving each other for dead. Left for dead reference.  For all of them to die and have to repeat the cycle again. Also somehow their revolvers got extended mags.  I don't know. And when you start playing Mob of the Dead you feel the atmosphere instantly. Candles, blood splatter, and hanging bodies everywhere. While the prison is destroyed and on fire. Look at the mystery box for fuck's sake, it's so cool. And the level design bleeds right into the atmosphere. Mob of the Dead fixed everything bad about transit. A closed off map with fun areas and good buildable items. A great wonder weapon that could be upgraded. No more shitty turbine to progress. It's said you have the afterlife mechanic that could also be used as infinite quick revive. Electric cherry was introduced.  A good easter egg. A good pack of punch system. A great boss character. Fun weapons. Feeding the dogs for the hell's retriever.    And with that we go to buried. Is buried better than Mob of the Dead?  But is buried the best map of the Victus crew? Yeah. And if you're not a freak but instead of average show the Victus crew is the one with the hot cow girl in the homeless guy. I smell a plan coming together. Let's be honest it's not that hard to be the best of Victus when your two previous maps were transit and die rise. Buried is a fun map with a pretty atmosphere of a buried western red dead redemption like town under a mining facility. And is a very casual map that introduces new mechanics that aren't too complicated. And is honestly just a good old time. You have two new wonder weapons the paralyzer which is a redemption to the jet gun and can be used to fly around the map and kill zombies with infinite ammo. And the other wonder weapon which is the ray gun mark 2 which is an improvement to the original ray gun and was put into the rest of the other zombie maps. You also had cool gimmick stuff like the chalk system which allowed you to put whatever wall guns in whatever area you wanted them to be in. You also had Leroy who was some hillbilly guy that was essential to the maps progression. Voltrade was cool as well. The map was easy and fun. It was a nice atmospheric time and I enjoyed it. But now let's talk about Origins. Some state that Origins is the best zombie map ever and I understand why completely. Origins brought back the original zombie crew and was their debut to the story Black Ops 3 which some considered to be the peak of zombies.  Okay that was kind of mean.  He's just not making zombies anymore. Origins followed everything that made Mob of the Dead good and applied it to this map as well. A great cinematic intro that introduces all the characters. An amazing atmosphere of a world war one battle.  The maps wonder weapons were four elemental staffs that the player could build. The panzer was the maps boss and he was also pretty cool and had a part that was essential to build one of the staffs. Origins to some could be a complex map on the surface but when you get into the swing of things it flowed greatly. Also had one of the most controversial easter egg cutscenes ever which had people believe that the whole zombie storyline was just a board game until the release of Black Ops 3. You don't even know how to play properly. Girls don't know enough about songs. No. Origins was such a unique map and where I liked a lot of the aesthetic design of Mob of the Dead I really liked the layout of Origins. Areas were wider giving you space to move and the map was quite big while not being annoying like transit. But more free and open to explore. It encourages you to explore the area you're in and go around the map since you literally need to in order to progress with the new generator alternative to turn on the power. I had countless nights where I would just stay up till four in the morning looking up how to upgrade the ice staff while me and my best friend would discuss what the hell of Gartha was.  Origins was just a great send off to a zombies experience at such a rocky start and it was so strong that it created the best zombie era in the following game while also tying a little ribbon to the chaotic rollout of Black Ops 2 zombie DLC maps. Overall zombie had its ups and downs yet we all continued to run trains, complete easter eggs and get annoyed when we went down and never take accountability for our actions. So for that chaotic as it was I always loved Black Ops 2 zombies. I'll go back and play the maps or play the remastered versions within Black Ops 3. Black Ops 2's campaign is interesting when you look at how people perceive it. Multiple choices.  A really good villain in the clan. Cut scenes and over the top missions. I recently finished the three modern warfare campaigns as well as the Black Ops 1 campaign and hot take. I honestly prefer those campaigns to Black Ops 2. Today we all have the benefit of hindsight and I'm not gonna lie about the campaign being the best in the series even though some people might believe that and I'm not gonna say that it's a perfect standalone campaign either. In 2013 the last of us came out which was a single player experience full of immersion, good writing and beautiful set pieces. This is Black Ops 2. Is it an unfair comparison? Absolutely. So stop doing it.  It's not these thingies. Stop putting it up here. Black Ops 2's campaign isn't a Picasso painting and some of you hold it way too highly.  Some of the sets are stiff and repetitive.   It was goofy and action packed. When I play Black Ops I want to ride a horse at the gun, take over a robot, glide like a squirrel and go on a rampage. And if I really wanted a God of War experience I'd go play God of War. This is Call of Duty. It's an experience that only lasts a couple of hours. The funny thing is though I'm saying that Black Ops 2 isn't good as like these real story games that are made strictly for single player experiences.  So I don't want to take this one for granted. The game is a revenge story from all sides. There's twists and turns from the past and present and you have to play between the past and present from the perspective of Alex Mason and his son David Mason. And that's why this campaign isn't as good as some of the other ones including Black Ops 1.  Harper's a fun sidekick because it's Michael Rooker and Michael Rooker is just awesome. But the futuristic segments are trumped by the flashbacks where you get to play as Alex Mason on Woods. Menendez is also a good villain. I don't want to skim over him. He's more complex than any other Call of Duty villain. To be fair though it really isn't that hard to outdo them. He ties right into the story and is the reason why the campaign is talked about so much today. He has gripes with characters. He has history with characters and he's tied directly to every character. I know I'm not saying much about the COD campaign. I don't just think there's that much to say. Overall I enjoy the Black Ops 2 campaign as a fun action movie. I still prefer Black Ops 1 in the realism aspect. Having real world figures and the whole plot with the numbers and stuff. It was really good. I also still prefer the three modern warfare campaigns. It sounds like I'm discrediting Black Ops 2's campaign. Go play it if you have time. It's a fun time waster game that you don't have to pay too much attention and you could just enjoy what's going on.  So you did it. You made it through the old days of YouTube, the fun multiplayer and the over the top campaign and controversial zombies. You also got to see my childhood from my perspective for a little over half an hour.  And that's nostalgia. A question I've thought about even before scripting this video that I now want to present to you with is if a game of the exact same quality of Black Ops 2 released today, would you still like Black Ops 2 more? While making this video I'm a 20 year old man who has graduated from high school, done taxes, found love, lost love, made friends, lost friends, gone to college, dropped out of college. It is now chasing a passion project while dealing with doubt and security, success, failure and thousands of stresses that we have to deal with every day in this little game we call life. And in 2012 I was a 10 year old kid. A kid who would never have thought we would have gotten 100k on YouTube. A kid who would have never thought we would have gone through the character arc that we did. A kid who didn't know what was yet to come. But what he didn't know was that hours of fun, laughs and nostalgia were being made on a game that he played every day. And I don't think most of us feel this way about the older stuff because we were kids. It's more just a general passing of time for everyone. Some of you watching this aren't like me.  But some of you were teenagers enjoying that fast period of life while also gaming every day after high school. And now most of you aren't those kids anymore. You have real jobs, real responsibilities, some even families and children. Even some of you watching this might have been that adult who played the game with your children and friends as time passed and now you're older and you watch your kids grow older and you're now reflecting on the older times. Age doesn't matter when it comes to nostalgia. We all have nostalgia.  Regardless of age and position we were all much younger and different from who we are today. And that's why these games are so important. They aren't just old games but time capsules of our past. The old positions of life where you could look back and reflect on the old you. It could be sad sometimes I know but you're always grateful it exists. But today isn't all bad either. Shit might seem grim. You might not like the games you play now or the life you live but in 10 years you might come to the same crossword that we're at right now. There will always be good games, bad games, fun games, and sad games. And sometimes it doesn't always matter about what the game is out of 10 but more about what you made out of that game. When you were sad or scared you built that dirt house and found those diamonds and saved the world as master chief or you went 25 and ate on nuke town 2025 and that helped you forget about all the white noise in the world. And that's why these games will always be so important.  Because I can never let go of that kid who didn't do anything wrong and just wanted to play a game and make friends.


Cool. So, thank you for coming to Let's Build a Blog with Cloud Foundry. Let's Build a Blog with Cloud Foundry. This is a talk. But what am I trying to achieve with this talk? What I want to do is try and explain what I think is the Zen of CF, right? Like, CF largely gets out of your way. And I want to show you how you use CF well, right? It's a very easy thing. We're just going to build a blog. But I hope we'll talk a little bit about how you use Cloud Foundry to build a blog and how it's different from how you might use other systems to build a blog. This is an opinionated talk. I am going to say some opinions. Other opinions are available, though not from me. This is how I think about stuff. Right. This is how I think about stuff. Today, I may change my mind. I'm open to other opinions about how we should build software. But maybe some of these ideas will be useful. So, I think the core thing about CF is the abstraction is code. Why is that? Because, actually, we use computers to solve hard problems, right? We are actually doing stuff that's hard. Sometimes we forget that. We forget that we use computers to do hard things. In the last, like, three decades, if you think about it, we have gone from biasses to people on the moon to driverless cars.  How did we do this? I think there's two things. There's two things that have ever worked that have letters with the same size of chimp brain go from biasses to men on the moon to really annoying computer games that people should stop playing. Those are removing accidental complexity. These are literally, we've known this since the mythical man month, right? Like, Brooks, 1983 or something. Remove accidental complexity. As in, the less you can focus on the problems you cause for yourselves, the more you can focus on the essential complexity of the problem you're trying to solve and use good abstractions. The reason we can build a driverless car is we don't do it in assembly language and C. We have higher and higher level abstractions. That's accidental complexity. That's mythical man month. Fine. Let's talk about abstractions for a second. I just want to give an analogy. C, we're going to play a game. The game is called operating system or web app. I say a language and you say whether you should use it to build an operating system or a web app. C. Let's see if you are right. Well done. Okay. Let's play another. Ruby, operating system or web app? Yes. If anybody is building an operating system with Ruby, come and talk to me afterwards. I think I can help you. I think. So the point is that different languages have different sweet spots. It doesn't make C better and Ruby better. It makes C better at a certain thing and Ruby better at a certain thing. Different tools are suited for different jobs. That brings me to Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry is a high level approach that doesn't try and solve all problems but tries to solve some problems well. It's a high level abstraction to try and make you faster. And that abstraction is code, not containers or orchestration or pipelines or stateful stuff, code. That's what I want to try and show you. Plus services, right? Because you do need some states. The trick with states is to make it someone else's problem. So let's build a block. This is structured as like four opinions punctuated by a bit of coding. Opinions could also be rants. You have heard the first one which was on accidental complexity. Let's build a bit of code. This is where I have to like do a font size check. This is too big, right? Is that kind of visible at the back? All right. So let's, what should we call our blog? Call it blog. Whoops. Thank God we haven't had an inventive audience on the peak of their naming abilities. So how do we get started writing a blog, right? We're going to need a docker file. We're going to need some deployment YAML. New. Main.go. Package main. Funk main. It's not called package main. Package blog. So what I'm going to do is build the back end, right? I'm just going to build the back end for the blog, right? So I have what's called a snippet. Let's me do that. Let's put it in data blog.json. And what does json, what does blog.json do? It's going to newencoder.incode. And then we'll give back some, the posts, right? We'll give the list of posts back. So let's do that. Working backwards. And what would a post have? It would have a title. Oops. I have no idea what I just did. Typing is hard on a MacBook. Titan body. Cool. Who would like to name our blog post? What's the title of our blog post? The treasure trove. This is what's called audience participation, friends. Great. And it says, in the treasure trove, we will find a Jools. Thank you. I approve. So why doesn't that work? Is that it? Computers are hard. What's wrong with this? What's wrong with this sentence? That is. Ooh. Ooh. It formatted. That probably means it worked. Yeah. Good. So that will print out our stuff, right? And how do I, oh, I need to do a listen and serve, right? But first, like, so start thinking, how do I run this? How am I going to test this? Listen and serve. OS.get port. Neal. Done. Okay. So how do I run this? Go run. I hope people know enough. Like, if you don't know, it doesn't really matter. It's just the language that I know. Port equals, let's say, 8080. Go run main.go. Oops. Oh, I still have that running. Can't run non-main package. Never live code. Oh, we have to create a go.mod file. Because we're not in a go path. I think it's called module blog, is it, I think? Does anyone know how you write these, like, go.mod files? These are new. Don't really understand them. Go.mod init. Aha. Here we go. So, yeah, you get rid of go.mod, and you say go.mod init blog. Cool. This worked when I did it before. Module blog. Can't run non-main package. We might have to put it in a go path.  So here's our thing. It's in package blog, right? Look, this is on you as much as it's on me if we get this wrong. Go.mod init. Let's do it the full way then. Do I have to do this? Oh! You are, yes. That is, that is embarrassing for everyone else. Yeah. There we go. And that is why we do not live code. Right. So if we curl that, curl local host, 8080datapost.json, datablog.json I did this time just to mix it up. Great. We have some JSON. Good. So that is our back end. What shall I rant about now? Microservices. All right. So we're going to talk about microservices, because they are the hot thing. Here is the flowchart. This is what I call the microservices flowchart. I told you there are opinions. If you are less than a two person, two pizza team, that is a team that you can feed with two pizzas, microservices, not for you. You've caused complexity, you've caused complexity, you will not get, in my opinion, enough back from doing that. If you have, there's a proviso as well, if you have more microservices than teams, so if you have five teams and 50 microservices, you are probably not getting that much value from your microservices. There is an overhead to microservices, which is absolutely worth it if you can only solve the size of problem that you are solving by having more teams than people. Because within a single monolith, if your team can do pairing, do TDD, do anything like that, you can manage that. If you need to scale up, that's where microservices are useful. So in other words, if you cannot do it with one team, that is when I think you should use microservices. But to fake out a good reason to have a microservice, let's build a UI. So what we are going to do, we are going to build a UI for our blog, we are going to use a language that I like to call React, because it is called React, blog UI. So for anyone who just joined us, we have took a poll of the room to decide a clever name for our blog, and we came up with blog. So we are going to create just so. We are just going to create a React app. Just create a React app. One of the things I want to try and show you is most of what I should be doing, if I am building something like a blog or like most things, is just writing code. I am going to use the programming languages test suites, I am going to use the programming languages deployment tools. I am not going to start spinning up containers and stuff at this point. I am just going to run it. So we have got our blog and this is blog dash UI. And we can edit our app.js. So we are going to, this is going to be ugly. This is not going to be, I am not going to do some CSS here. I am going to do posts.map. So post.map p. And inside you get a post and you get h1p.title. And you get the body. p.body. Div. Div. Good. Does anyone want to spell check me? See, that was an intentional mistake to see if you were paying attention and you were not. Come on, folks. Cool. So post.map. We need to make that post thing. And let's start off by just like creating a fake one. So we will just do posts and title, high, body, there. Right? Const. Yeah, see? You are getting there. You are getting there. We are learning as we go. So how would I run that? I do yon run. Yon start. So this will be just the front end. Just coding it out. And we are imagining that we are, yes, why not? Why not? We will have ports, whatever. So we are imagining we are two separate teams. So I am going to develop my UI reasonably separately. Start the development server. Does anyone watch Crystal Maze? Start the fans, please. Is that just like a UK thing? All right. It says, hi, there. Good. So what we want to do now is integrate these two things together. So how do we integrate these things together? There is a great thing for React. You can do this. You can do package.json. And we can add an element called proxy. And what proxy does is it says, when you access slash whatever, forward it to something else so that you can integrate two things easier. So in a browser, you can't directly access a URL for security. So we are going to access local and React will just proxy it. So we will use local host, local host data. And I think we did it on 8080. So what this will do is anything that goes to local host, it will forward it over to local host 8080. If it is not asking for JSON, it will forward it to 8080. And what we want to do is we want to now grab it from that URL. So we want to grab it from the data URL. So we can build a little use fetch. So function use fetch URL. And so to do a fetch, we want state and set state. This is this new React hook stuff which is super awesome. State. And we need to do a use effect. It doesn't really matter if you know what I'm doing here. So I do a use effect and I say fetch URL. Then we get the response. And I'd like the response.json. And then give me that JSON and set state with the JSON. That looked about right. Return state. Cool. And with that, I'm going to say use fetch. And I want to fetch data block.json. I think is what we said. Spell checking as we go. Is that about right? What's wrong with this? It's really hot because you can't see the end. So we've got fetch.then, response.then. That all looks right. All right. Who helped me last time? fetch.url, then response, response.json. Then json, set state json. Yeah, one more close brackets, isn't it? It's literally the hardest thing in programming, isn't it? It's just like brackets. Oh, of course. Right. So function. I think that should do it. I don't think we care about anything else. State, use state. We need to declare it because imports, use state, and use effect. Good. Right. So we now have a UI. I'd really like to get to the cloud foundry bit soon. We're close. We're close. So let's boot that back up. So we've got our blog post running on 8080. We've got our thing. We should be able to load it up. Well, hello. And did we get anything from fetches? So now we can debug. One thing that's quite cool about this way of working is that you just have all your native tools, right? This isn't running in a container or doing anything funky. So if I look at, ooh, lots of stuff happening there, we're going a little crazy. I have a feeling we're getting a ton of 404s. Let's see. I'm running out of time. We might, might have to go to the next step. You can't do it. You can't do it. So let's look at the console. And I want to look at what's going on in the network. I'm looking at XHCR. Oh, so we've got the blog back. We've got our blog posts. There they are from our XHCR request. But it didn't make it into our thing. So let's have a look. Why isn't that working? We've got posts which use app, post.map. All of this looks good. Did a set state when the JSON came back? Can we turn the state? Does anyone know why that's not working? We got the state. We know it came back because we saw it come back. We did a fetch and we put the response. We've got the JSON. We've got the JSON. I mean, we can do a bit of logging. All right, let's have a bit of logging. I think we do not have enough time to skip. We might have to skip to the next bit. What's in our logs? So we even logged it. Got all the way back. Oh, wait, you know what I think it might be? Oh, this is sad. Very sad. No. It's looking for lower case. That is annoying. So I can put it back and what I will do. So this is actually okay. All we actually want to do is edit our main.go. What we should of done is put struct tags on here, right? That's not the one. JSON title. Good. JSON body. Good. Good. Cool. Yeah?  Yeah? How confident do we feel? Yes. Boom. All right, great. So we now have a UI. I want to do a little rant. Containers. I think what a lot of people do right now is start putting this in containers. We are not going to put this in containers because it is a go application and a JavaScript application and there is nothing magic about either of those two things. Here is my container workflow. By the way, I work on containers in Cloud Foundry. I run the garden team in Cloud Foundry. I love containers. Containers are brilliant. I just don't think most people should touch them most of the time. You don't actually need them for most things. If you are a pass, you need containers. If you are CI, you need containers. So by all means, set up some CI to convert all your code into containers, but most people should be able to see F push or something analogous. Are you coupled to an OS? This is another good reason for a container. If you are doing something that is genuinely coupled to an OS, it matters what OS you are running on, then you are going to have to decouple yourself from an OS and have a custom Docker file. I would argue you should try not to be coupled to an OS. If this seems crazy, let me point out, every day we load JavaScript via our web browsers and it does not come packaged with a browser to run that JavaScript in. It works fine if your language is encapsulated. Go and just make static binaries. They will run in anything. Java literally runs in a JVM. We don't actually need to isolate ourselves from the OS if we write simple code. So just push code. Lock in. If I don't use Docker files and stuff, I will be tied in. It is just code. What I have written so far is just code. I didn't touch Cloud Foundry. I could add a Docker file to any of that stuff. Now let's do a CF push. What we are going to do, we are going to first, we are going to push our blog to the interwebs. Let's do it here. Let's have this one. It is surprisingly difficult to do it when it is really big text size. I am not going to push it as JavaScript. I am going to build it. I am going to do a yarn build. What that does is it packages it because all the various MPMs are enormous. If I do a CF push it will upload all of this JavaScript stuff. I am just going to build it. Then we end up with this build folder which has inside it all the stuff that I need to push up. If I touch build static file, that will tell Cloud Foundry that it is just static, just serve it with a static thing. I can do a CF push, blog, and I will say dash P build. That is it. That is all we need to do to run that on the cloud. It is now going to run on the cloud. That proxy thing will no longer run.  We want to run that on slash data. Anything on slash data, we want to serve the go app instead. Luckily, we are using CF. That is quite easy. I can do CF bind route. First I should push it. I can push this application. Let's create manifest because it is go. I do not have time. I am going to skip it. You use bind route. You bind the route of that go application to slash data. You now have those two things communicating. I want to have enough time to get to the next step. I am just going to get to the next step. Opinion for state. I think this is probably the most important thing that I want to say. I have three minutes. What is wrong with it? I need you to do a visual picture because these are not the correct slides. What is wrong if there was a picture? If you go to any Kubernetes website or Docker website and you look at a picture of a simple app, you may have to Google it, what you will see is a MongoDB or a Redis plus an engine X plus your application server. What is wrong with that picture? Do not push Mongo to cloud. Do not push database to a cloud. Unless you want to be a DBA, use a service for that. You should be pushing code to a cloud. State is bad. State is bad. Why? Because state is the magic trick that turns cattle into pets. State is why I can't throw away any one of my replicas that I want. When something goes wrong, if there is state, I have to worry about it. That is why you need to back that machine up. You need to investigate when it goes wrong. You need to think about how I scale that up and down because you cannot just add instances easily. State is hard. What do I do about state? Make it someone else's problem. That is how you are able to move fast, develop iOS apps that deliver ice cream to my door, which is important. Use state. My flowchart is are you a DBA? If so, state is fine. Would you like to be a DBA? If so, state is fine. Otherwise, no. How would I add state? I don't quite have time to do this. What I would suggest is for example, I use IBM pays my bills. If I go to IBM and log in, I will see that is the nice thing about a Cloud Foundry system. I see a catalog of services that can do my state for me. If I created one of those services, I have created one here, then I can just bind it to my app. I say CF bind service and bind that service to my app. My app will get an environment variable with the username and password for that service in it. That is how I do state. If I take my main.go and get the username and password, quite a good one is, in my opinion, Cloudant, but use anything. The nice thing about Cloudant is you can just store JSON stuff in it. You just store JSON documents.  All you will need to do in your development process is code and then push. No containers, no deployments, no orchestration or scheduling or anything else, just your actual business value. That is the edge of my time. We didn't quite build a blog with Cloud Foundry. Nevertheless, this is the Zen of Cloud Foundry according to me. Number one, avoid accidental complexity.  But try to operate at the highest level that you can because your problems are complicated enough. If you can spend time either on container orchestration or improving your login flow, making your code faster, adding a feature, prefer the latter things. In my opinion, most people, the abstraction should be code. Cloud Foundry is one way of doing that. If you're building for something like Kubernetes, build some CI that makes that process repeatable. Microservices are fine, but don't go crazy. If you use CF, it's quite easy to run a lot of microservices, just CF apps. Don't run 10,000 microservices unless you have 10,000 teams and consider whether you need 10,000 teams. Most importantly, state is bad, so make it someone else's problem. That's not building a blog in Cloud Foundry, but at least maybe we got to a little bit of the Zen of Cloud Foundry, which was the more important point. Thank you very much.


you want to improve your touch in this video I'm going to show you how to improve your ball control for soccer you want to improve your ball control you want some soccer drills that are going to give you a nice touch in this video I'm going to go from beginner to more advanced but in reality these drills are not complex I don't really believe in complex fancy drills I believe in drills that actually create results so let's improve your ball control number one what do we all do juggling so this is where everyone should start like I said in one of my most popular videos how to juggle a soccer ball five to five hundred I said if you cannot get to five hundred or at least to a hundred get somewhere where you feel like I don't really have to drop the ball and I'm just tired of counting but everyone in my opinion young player your first goal once you really figure out how to juggle soccer ball get to 500 after that you don't have to count anymore you can do fancier skills focus on different touches but let's come back to juggling so nice relaxed upper body I'm a light on my toes if I have to react the ball is about under under knee height look at the backspin on the ball backspin on the ball it's not going away from me it's not going left right staying right in front of me left right left right nice rhythm that's the goal that's the objective but if you're not there yet what you need to start with is just getting good backspin on the ball okay so maybe this is where you start if you're at this level right now that's totally fine but you need to improve kick catch kick catch especially on your weaker foot and as I always say I don't like the word I don't like the term the phrase weak foot you have two strong feet one just needs a little more practice okay so especially on your weaker foot let's fix it right now it's probably too weak as the phrase goes but you're not flexing it strong enough you're not making your foot hard enough if you're practicing on your weak foot and it keeps dying into the ground or the contact just doesn't feel the same on here it's nice and sharp it's nice and firm here it feels like it's dying into the ground every time tighten that up tighten that technique up flex your foot a little stronger if anything it's better for you to have a touch that's way too heavy than a touch that isn't heavy enough so start there but start with the kick and catch backspin on the ball if you can do about 10 of those with one touch just go two touch two touch okay then you go right left because I want you to get you into that rhythm of right left right left right left but very basic that is where I would start okay next if you're a little more advanced go into the single leg stuff or the more advanced techniques so I just call these mini touches but on both feet good for your balance as well which is a nice delicate touch that I want to help single foot but a little higher putting the foot down every time getting a nice backspin on both feet yes you can do the thighs head okay tracks and that have a better touch than that but one thing I really like to promote is this directional juggling so maybe you just start with walking because in the match you're never juggling on the spot you don't get the ball in the corner of the field and do this but you might take some touches where you have to move the ball you have to manipulate it in different ways so I would start walking and then you can add a bit of pace to it running with the ball directional ball control the next ball control exercise that I would encourage you to do is a foot stall I think this is a beautiful exercise for training your weak foot because the problem with your weak foot or your foot that's not good enough yet is usually you don't have the strength you don't know how to flex it properly so practicing stalls especially on your weak foot get it in there really flex it turn the toes up squeeze it in there so that ball doesn't leave that's going to train your foot really well but that's a good technique and it's another good ball control drill that I like to do then I would move into air control so maybe it's just popping the ball in the air bringing it down with the toe and again if you're a beginner it's okay to start with your hands but I would challenge you to always use your feet whenever possible even if you're struggling in the beginning okay so you can do with the toe inside of the foot getting your body over the ball so it's the timing right as that ball hits the ground boom then you're on top of it it's not bounce and then try to get down on it read the ball anticipate the balance get over it touch and my body control is on top of it outside the foot we always practice with both feet don't we but outside the foot you could do croit the next ball control exercise would be an air control up out of the air keep it alive with different techniques so you can do with laces inside let me tighten up let me tighten up that left inside go with that right outside the foot lovely and obviously you don't just have to use feet you need to be able to control the ball with all parts of the body one of the best tools you can use to improve your ball control is a wall so start with open touch whenever you're comfortable play a pass against the wall receive angle again when that gets easy play two touch so one to control one to pass control pass be on your toes so if you have a bad touch or a soft touch you can get there quickly finally you can play one touch which is going to help you with your ball control but also your passing also your ball striking so focus on being light on your toes but making good contact practicing just as inside the foot is a great place to start and then you can go different techniques