Part 3: Episode 4: US WINS WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
Episode 4: US WINS WAR IN AFGHANISTANYouTube Blip
Things to Notice
This episode introduced a character important to the Strike Force Missions and gave us a bit of plot.
We see a young Raul Menendez execute someone at the start of the episode. The shots to the knee and slitting of the throat with the heart pendant he gave Woods before the start of the game are sort of a calling card established through the tie in short story Rightful King that was given out as a free download to those who preordered or bought the game early on from Amazon.
Tian Zhao is a Chinese special forces officer in Afghanistan in this mission. By David Mason's time he is the head of the SDC (sort of a Chinese based Eastern Bloc) and considered a bit of a loose cannon by China's military. Strike Force missions are centered around stopping him from increasing his sphere of influence. In this mission he's a companion character for a while.
I pick up Mortars in the camp early in the level and use them against the first BTR. It is way more effective to just toss one at the thing than to try to sneak around the two of them that pop up to get to the Stingers on the roof.
The mines are an interesting idea, but there's really no point to them because of how the level is set up. If I wanted to use them I would have to plant them and wait for the tanks to roll over them, which would have been pretty boring video.
I always thought the background drawings here and in other Woods scenes were interesting. You can see he kept some really old art of David's. Of course, David may have just drawn that last week for all we know.
I failed this scene too many times to count. Basically if you tap X too fast that game won't register it and will just have Mason shoot. I think this is a side effect of the way Black Ops limits people from abusing modified controllers to shoot semi-auto weapons faster than they should. In Black Ops 1's multiplayer if you somehow tapped the fire button faster than the rate of fire set for the gun it would jam, so that may be in play here.