Someone has leaked the details of the next DLC in the Call of Duty: Black Ops saga. It would appear to be called The Escalation Pack, and may be available as early as early May. What can you expect? → Read More
Sigh. Call of Duty: Black Ops is now the best selling video game of all time, at least according to NPD. Activision has sold 13.7 million units since its release last November. Billions and billions served, etc. → Read More
What do fans of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Mass Effect 2 have in common? One group of fans spends its time playing a pop-a-mole shooter set in outer space, while the other group of fans spends its time playing a pop-a-mole shooter set on earth. Oh, and both groups of fans have been fighting game-breaking bugs for some time now. One such bug, gone unpatched for more than two weeks now, corrupts… → Read More
By now you surely must know that Sony has released PS3 firmware 3.56, which applies a “minor security patch” to the system. Of course it does, and of course it prevents people from hacking their PS3. What happens hereafter will be most telling. → Read More
And here’s another non-iPhone story to sorta cleanse the pallet. (We recognize that not everybody necessarily goes nuts over the iPhone, but today is just one of those days.) Recognize this Jeep? You will if you’ve played Call of Duty: Black Ops, the Big Mac of the gaming world. → Read More
Trusting in TorrentFreak’s numbers, Call of Duty: Black Ops was the most downloaded (read: pirated) game of 2010. You probably could have predicted that, but there’s something far more interesting in the Xbox 360 numbers, and it’s that Black Ops was only the fifth most pirated game of the year. The number one Xbox 360 game on this ignominious list is Dante’s Inferno. That’s an odd one. → Read More
Timed exclusivity strikes again. Major Nelson says on his latest podcast that the first DLC map pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops, entitled First Strike (/me rolls eyes), will be available exclusively for the Xbox 360 on February 1. If you were foolish enough to buy the game on other platforms—that is the message Microsoft is trying to send with these timed exclusives, right, that the 360 is… → Read More
Ha, this is pretty funny. It’s “Lego Black Ops,” fan-made video showing everyone’s favorite building block toys totally destroying each other, Black Ops-style. It’s worth your time if you like silly stuff, which I assume you do. → Read More
There’s two big stories coming out of November’s NPD numbers. The first is that Microsoft somehow managed to sell more Xbox 360s than Nintendo sold Wiis, with Microsoft selling 1.37 million to Nintendo’s 1.27 million. That’s probably the result of the Kinect. The second is that, yes, Call of Duty: Black Ops sold a whopping 8.4 million units. Good on Activision, swimming in piles of coin. → Read More
Yeah, Call of Duty: Black Ops may have sold a number of copies during its first few days of availability, but like any summer blockbuster it seems to have quickly fizzled out. It’s the video game equivalent of a popcorn flick: giant opening weekend followed by a pirouette off a cliff. → Read More
Yeah, we know, Activision. Call of Duty: Black Ops made a lot of money. It should, being that’s it’s $60 a pop. But just because McDonalds has “billions and billions” served doesn’t mean I’m going to go out of my way to partake. → Read More
As a caller on Ron & Fez reminded us a little while ago, Call of Duty: Black Ops (also known as BLOPS) had the biggest entertainment launch in history, taking in some $360 million in first-day sales. But as we all know, that’s a reasonably misleading statement. How do you compare “entertainment launches” across different entertainment, um, sectors? Let’s take movies. If one person buys… → Read More
Call of Duty: Black Ops launched to great fanfare yesterday, but, at least on the PC side of things, it hasn’t exactly been a flawless launch. Users are filling up message boards from here to somewhere else with complaints of all shapes and sizes, from stuttering frame rates to unplayably laggy multi-player sessions. And keep in mind that the game is based on the 11-year-old id Tech 3 (Quake 3)… → Read More
We may be seeing the first signs that, just as people tired of World War II shooters, they may also be tiring of more modern variants. (Well, maybe the second signs. Medal of Honor may have gotten the first of the “OK, we’ve done this before” response.) Call of Duty: Black Ops will be released tomorrow—you know, for something that’s supposed to be a black op, this sure has seen an awful… → Read More
Let’s face it: Call of Duty: Black Ops will sell more than a few copies. ¡Gran día! In fact, Amazon tells me that the incoming data indicates the game is being pre-ordered at such a pace that it has overtaken other big media items, including Halo: Reach and Red Dead Redemption. It’s even outpacing the DVD release of Michael Jackson: This Is It. Michael Jackson was a famous musician, I think → Read More
A few weeks ago we saw more than a few Medal of Honor-theme accessories. Now that we’re rapidly approaching the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops we can expect to see Black Ops accessories, too. First up: KontrolFreek’s Limited Edition FPS Freek Prestige. It’s basically a raised texture that you put on your PS3 or 360 control stick to give you a better handle of the situation. That, or you can… → Read More
A fancy e-mail just arrived in my inbox, which is 94 percent full right now, saying that the PC version of Call of Duty: Black Ops is now available for pre-order on Steam. Hilariously, they’re charging $59.99 for the game, which may be acceptable if you’re gaming on a PS3 or 360, but is patently ridiculous on the PC. Have to pay for that non-existent PC license fee, I see? No, this isn’t merely a… → Read More
And it would have done so fairly quietly, given that EA’s Medal of Honor had gotten much more heat in the past few months. Was that good heat or bad heat? Who knows. But what we do know is that people are pre-ordering Black Ops like crazy, so much so that HMV, a big retailer over in the UK, says that it has “every chance of being the biggest game release ever.” Well! One of HMV’s… → Read More
Call of Duty: Black Ops, the “other” first-person shooter this year (you can’t get around the fact that Medal of Honor has the most heat this time around), will be in full 3D when it’s released in November. Yeah, you’ll need to take out a second mortgage to be able to afford all the required equipment, but if you have the means! → Read More
How best to battle the scourge of trading in your used videos games? (Remember: video game publishers scream bloody murder when you buy a used video game.) Credit to Treyarch, the developers of the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops, for doing something novel. Rather than use the stick, as EA does with its Project Ten Dollar, Treyarch will use the carrot. That’s right: they’ll make you want to keep… → Read More
An olive branch to PC gamers, and from Activision of all people? It would appear that the PC version of Call of Duty: Black Ops will ship with honest-to-goodness mod tools. This is a most unexpected development. → Read More
There will be at least two special editions of Call of Duty: Black Ops. There’s the Hardened Edition and the Prestige Edition, the Prestige being the fancier of the two. But let’s start with the Hardened Edition. → Read More
Here we have a video—a glimpse, really—of Call of Duty: Black Ops’ mutli-player mode. It looks awfully familiar, which, granted, may be the entire point, but as I asked the other day: at what point does burnout set in? → Read More
Golly gee, Mad Catz will once again make “accessories” for a Call of Duty game. That game, of course, if Call of Duty: Black Ops, the hundredth game in the beaten-to-death series. → Read More
Yup, it’s another game where you shoot the baddies in the face. This time it’s set in Vietnam. Exciting. → Read More
Surely by now you’ve seen the first teaser trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops. What do you think? → Read More
So what to make of this latest Call of Duty rumor? The seventh game in the series will be named Call of Duty: Black Ops, and will take place between the end of World War II and the present day. It won’t necessarily “be” a Vietnam War game, but will have missions that take place all over the world. Remember: it’s being developed by Treyarch (i.e. not Infinity Ward), the same dudes who developed… → Read More
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