Call of Duty fans surprised to discover new Black Ops 2 port preserve…

Amongst all the news of brutal layoffs, studio divestments, and ironic task force appointments at Microsoft this week, over in the Call of Duty corner of the megacorp, something kinda cool happened. Activision released updated ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) and Black Ops 2 (2012).

They come with caveats, of course: At $40 a pop, the Call of Duty tax is firmly affixed to these elderly shooters. They're also PlayStation only, sadly, so the millions of fans who originally played them on PC are cut off from the reinvigorated scene. But they are nearly complete updates of those original games, now upscaled to 1080p, with few exceptions. Players were especially surprised to learn that even the emblem editor—a beloved and somewhat controversial feature of Treyarch's early games—made the cut. amunra.qpon

Because, well, people are making swastika emblems with it. And depictions of 9/11. And Charlie Kirk's assassination. And a KKK member. And that's just all that fit into this tweet from influencer JakeSucky.

As you can see, the emblem editor is surprisingly powerful—its stock of primitive shapes, symbols, colors, and layers let dedicated thumbstickers depict just about anything. Most often, custom emblems ended up looking like the trash bin of an early South Park animator, but it was a regular occurrence to glance at a profile and be treated to a remarkably convincing Mona Lisa, cartoon character, or yes, something naughty.

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I'm also quite surprised the feature made the cut. Even with player moderation, there's no policing photoshop, so a tool that allows for high expression assumes that sometimes your killer will flash you with cartoon racism. There are normal, cool, creative emblems being made as well, but in keeping with the Call of Duty community, terrible behavior is more the norm.

As others have pointed out, they should've done the work to let people turn off custom emblems entirely—there wasn't an option back in 2010 and there isn't one now.

Weirdly, the only major change to the ports is the omission of some modes. Wager matches are gone from Black Ops 1, so clearly developer Iron Galaxy did some surgery here, but you won't find modern options like FOV sliders or high refresh rates. Pretty barebones ports, all told.

Today, Palworld left early access with a massive 1.0 patch that brought an avalanche of changes and has drawn hundreds of thousands of new and returning players with the seductive allure of making creatures work in conditions that OSHA would object to if they were people.

Unmentioned in its massive 1.0 changelog, however, are a series of visual reworks the patch made to a handful of Pals that previously bore the most blatant resemblance to preexisting Pokémon designs.

I think this is all redesigns from r/Palworld

At launch, Palworld attracted derision with its inclusion of Pals that tested the definition of creative inspiration. These weren't just conceptual similarities: These were Pals constructed in Frankenstein fashion from recognizable Pokémon silhouettes, limbs, details, and design elements—often without even changing the color palette.

Now, even Pocketpair seems to agree that some of those Pals were in particularly poor taste. Players have identified a number of Pals who've been reimagined to add some plausible deniability when they're compared with their Pokémon counterparts.

Verdash, one of the Pals more commonly cited as proof of Palworld's creative indecency for being a Cinderace lookalike, has been given less-humanoid proportions and is no longer aping the legwear of its inspiration. Robinquill and Fenglope are no longer using the color palettes of Decidueye and Cobalion, respectively, and both Pals have received a detail rework to further distinguish them from their doppelgangers.

Don't worry, though. Cremis is still Cremis—and definitely nothing else.

To be absolutely clear: Palworld's character designs were never the basis of Nintendo's still-ongoing lawsuit with Pocketpair, which is instead centered around a series of patents that Nintendo holds on specific creature-capturing and riding mechanics. We could speculate that the 1.0 patch's redesigns might have been part of an as-yet undisclosed settlement agreement—but there's no immediate reason to do so. Especially considering the amount of doubt that has been cast on the validity of the Nintendo patents in question since the lawsuit was initiated.

Still, the Pal reworks are a quiet acknowledgment from Pocketpair that its creature designs weren't a sterling example of creative integrity. Now that it's made its millions, however, that's evidently a fixable problem.

But hey: At least it wasn't as blatant as Pickmos, the game formerly known as Pickmon.

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