This emblem tutorial brings together two dewchuggin' classics—football and Call of Duty, enough to make any bro-gamer stand up straight and armpit fart Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA.
The gang at FPSGeneral put together this tutorial if you want tomorrow's Super Bowl combatants in today's Call of Duty. The 49ers logo lacks the stylized, serifed SF, but it's still plainly recognizable. The Ravens emblem is an alternate logo, not the helmet decal. I've never been any good at layer-editing, so all of this gets an ooo-rah and a beer belch from me.
This is the exact> process every human brain goes through upon trying to create an acronym for Activision’s record-obliterating mega-blockbuster, so it’s only natural that someone would eventually convert that lush, meaningful imagery back into a game. Thus, I bring you Cod of Duty. The basic premise? Evil fish terrorists are planning… something. It involves guns. And barrels. And being in barrels. Yes, this is a game in which you literally shoot fish in a barrel. The commentary, it is palpable. CODPALPS. Or something. I don’t know. Join me for some crunchy, lightly fish-flavored discussion after the break.
Perk-a-Cola—soda that grants you a much-needed perk—is a life-saver in zombie rounds of Call of Duty multiplayer. It's also not a real drink, so a pair of fans set about changing that.
Redditor Kjkemme and their zombie-handed sister have recreated all the sodas found in the game, right down to the nutrition labels.
Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan (via The Local) is reporting that over the weekend, a group of kids playing Call of Duty got a little more than they bargained for when they got all excited about the game.
When one of the teenagers was killed in a round, he jokingly fell to the ground and started screaming "HELP HELP HELP". Passers-by heard his screams, though, and thinking they were real called emergency services, who sent a police unit to the house.
Opening the front door to greet them, the kids were yelled at to put their hands on their heads, before the cops ordered them outside and had them lie down on the ground.
The kids were soon able to explain what had happened, though, after which they were allowed to go back inside and keep playing. Presumably a bit more sensibly this time.
As some of you know, Nuketown is a small, compact map that recreates a slice of suburbia in Call of Duty. Overtly, the mannequin-populated map pulls from American history—a time when the Army wanted to test out how a typical town would stand against a nuclear explosion. (Not very well, it turns out.)
Though obviously based on a nuclear test town—it's in the name!—I didn't know that it was based on the infamous refrigerator scene in 2008's Indiana Jones until I read the writeup on Gamelogical. Specifically, it's the scene in the movie where Indy survives a nuclear blast on a test site by taking refuge in a fridge.
There's something eerie about Nuketown and its picture-perfect depiction of the American atomic family....and yet, something very appropriate about its existence as a multiplayer map on a popular shooter. It's like we've simply accepted that that reality, that conception of the American dream, is so unreal that it feels fitting as a campy stage used for our entertainment.
At the same time, we're complicit in something when we idolize the map. It's like we can't let go of this era, like there is still something about this time that haunts us. The fact that Black Ops II presents a technologically updated Nuketown supports this idea: we're dragging that past with us, even to the future. Granted, a more meaningful exploration of that all of this would probably be found on the Fallout games.
Regardless, it's clear that the mere image of Nuketown carries baggage and that alone makes a good case for why it's such a popular map.
...so far, all conceptual mumbo jumbo. This is a place we play in, so surely, there's something to be said about that too, yes?
Gameological poses that Nuketown is both "fairest battlegrounds in series history" and yet it's a place that can "devolve into chaos at times." I'm not sure both of these can be true at once, unless we're postulating that most Call of Duty maps are awful and broken.
If nothing else, the small map size allows the Call of Duty signature twitch style play to shine—it's almost entirely close-combat that requires fast reflexes. But that also means we're constantly experiencing the highs and lows of the Call of Duty experience. Shortly after a match starts, because of the lack of downtime, you'll feel either empowerment or rage depending on how you perform.
But ultimately, as Gameological puts it, most of that is all for naught:
The sadistic joke of Nuketown comes at the end of each match, when a bomb drops and obliterates everything in sight, making all of the desperate head-shooting and flag-capturing seem a bit futile. But that's all forgotten seconds later when the scoreboard pops up and the game asks you to vote once again for a new battlefield. Ninety percent of the time, the crowd votes for yet another skirmish on Treyarch's lark of death.
Or, as they're now called, the K9 unit. Regardless of what you call them, dogs are no laughing matter in Call of Duty. As a scorestreak, they'll mess your shit up. But! There is a way to survive them. It involves an assault shield though, which not everyone carries around—here is a demonstration by YouTube user defendthehouse.
Previously you could kill dogs by breaking their necks if you got the timing down right. I'm not sure if that's an option anymore. Regardless, if you have an assault shield, dog attacks aren't something you need to worry about. When you have an assault shield, you can just marvel at how cute the dogs are instead.
It might just be this idyllic music playing in the background complimenting the snarling so well that's making me say that, though.
The world's best selling video game won't be sold in Pakistan. Fox News reports that a declaration has forbidden sales of Activision's Call of Duty games, as well as EA's newest Medal of Honor release.
According to the report, the ban came into effect after shop owners complained how Pakistan was portrayed in the games. A notice by the organization that controls sales of digital media in the Middle Eastern country, translated in the article, says the following:
"The Association has always boycotted these types of films and games. These (games) have been developed against the country's national unity and sanctity. The games ("Medal of Honor: Warfighter" and "Call of Duty: Black Ops II") have been developed against Pakistan, and the association has completely banned their sale. Shopkeepers are warned and will be responsible for the consequences if found purchasing or selling these games."
Both last year's Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Call of Duty: Black Ops II featured sequences set in Pakistan. Those moments are ones that portray Pakistan as a hotbed of terrorist activity which, according to the Fox News report, doesn't sit well with local merchants. Saleem Memon, head of the All Pakistan CD, DVD, Audio Cassette Traders and Manufacturers Association (APCDACTM) said, "These games are an effort to malign the minds of youth against Pakistan."
This restriction on the two titles recalls the temporary halt of sales of 2010's Medal of Honor on U.S. military bases. That game became controversial after it was revealed that players could play as the Taliban in mulitplayer modes. But, unlike the Armed Forces PX store ban, this move by the Pakistani trade organization seems unlikely to be lifted any time soon. Still, the article notes that there's a robust market for pirated games in Pakistan, so players who want to get their hands on Black Ops II or Warfighter probably will still be able to do so.
The image above is of a French soldier currently on active duty in Mali. He's wearing a mask that looks like the one a character from Call of Duty wears. This is, somehow, cause for enough indignation that the French military and government have opened an investigation into what they call "unacceptable" behaviour.
Wow.
The entire controversy appears to stem from the fact the mask makes the guy look like Ghost (pictured below), a character from the Modern Warfare sub-series of Call of Duty games, whose first game was released in 2007. The association people (and some elements of the the French press) have made between the soldier and a character in an "ultra-violent video game" is apparently being seen as something distasteful.
At a press conference earlier this week, reports AFP, French Colonel Thierry Burkhard said the wearing of the mask was "unacceptable behaviour", and that it was "not representative of the action that brought France to Mali to help". French authorities are now trying to identify the soldier, presumably so they can reprimand/make a scapegoat out of him.
Well Col. Burkhard, and everyone who took note of only the observation and whose knee jerked instantly in response, you might want to investigate the mask before investigating the man.
For one, you've got to feel for this particular guy, since skull masks (or balaclavas, which is actually what Ghost is wearing) are incredibly common in armed forces across the world, especially the US. American soldiers have been wearing them, and have been having their pictures taken in them, for years. This isn't one guy acting alone, it's an established "fashion" amongst soldiers worldwide.
Which leads us to perhaps the more important point: the mask was not invented by Call of Duty, or its developers Infinity Ward. Indeed, its presence in the game was inspired by the mask's use by soldiers in real life, as it's been worn by US troops—who first took to it as a fashionable alternative from regular gear (it began life as a designer ski mask) at the beginning of the Iraq War—for almost a decade now, long before development ever began on the Modern Warfare series.
It was even in Hollywood movies before it was in Call of Duty, with 2005's Harsh Times (left) featuring a scene in which Christian Bale is sporting a "skull mask" almost identical to the one "Ghost"—and now this French soldier—wears.
In short, the mask is in Call of Duty because it's associated with real soldiers, not the other way around. If the French are saying it's somehow representative of a video game, it makes no more sense than saying bad tracksuits are only around because of Grand Theft Auto IV. And if they're just upset over the fact the guy is wearing a decorative mask, when he's a soldier fighting a war in which people are going to be killed, then the fact they're worried about this shows their PR priorities are entirely broken.
Could this particular soldier have been influenced by the game? Maybe. I'm sure the prevalence of such headwear has increased since the release of the first Modern Warfare game in 2007. But it's silly for the French to assume, or take some upset commentator's word for it, that this is some kind of video game homage without even knowing who the soldier is (his identity remains a mystery), let alone his reasons for wearing it.
The photographer at the heart of the controversy, AFP's Issouf Sanogo, is "surprised" by the resulting media storm.
"A helicopter was coming in to land and churning up tremendous dust clouds", he told AFP. "Instinctively, all the soldiers grabbed their scarfs to avoid getting a mouthful of sand. It was evening, and rays of sunlight were pushing through the trees and into the dust clouds. It was a lovely light. I spotted this soldier wearing a strange scarf and took the photo. At the time, nothing about the scene seemed especially unusual or shocking. The soldier wasn't posing and there was nothing staged about the image. He was just standing there, protecting his face from the dust, waiting for the chopper to land. No one tried to stop me shooting the picture."
Call of Duty earned both the first and second spot of Major Nelson's annual Xbox rankings, which is a pretty impressive (if totally unsurprising) achievement for Activision's popular military shooter franchise.
Halo 4 took third place on the list, which measures the top 20 games based on the number of unique users that connected to that game on Xbox Live each day.
Here's the full list:
1. Call of Duty: Black Ops II
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
3. Halo 4
4. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops
6. FIFA Soccer 13
7. FIFA Soccer 12
8. Battlefield 3
9. Halo: Reach
10. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
11. Borderlands 2
12. Assassin's Creed III
13. Skyrim
14. Madden NFL 13
15. Gears of War 3
16. NBA 2K13
17. NBA 2K12
18. Far Cry 3
19. Grand Theft Auto IV
20. Forza Motorsport 4
And here are the top 20 Xbox Arcade games of 2012 (based on sales, not users):
1. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
2. Trials Evolution
3. The Walking Dead
4. Pinball FX2
5. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
6. Castle Crashers
7. Gotham City Impostors
8. I Am Alive
9. Fruit Ninja Kinect
10. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD
11. Trials HD
12. Magic 2013
13. Fez
14. Dungeon Defenders
15. Alan Wake's American Nightmare
16. Peggle
17. The Simpsons Arcade Game
18. REAL STEEL
19. Toy Soldiers: Cold War
20. Full House Poker
For more, including the top 20 indies of last year, check out Major Nelson's blog.
Step one: assault shield. Step two: combat axe. Step three: no fun allowed. It's the fun police, here to mess you up with one of the worst/best loadouts in Black Ops II.
I'm curious as to how viable this loadout is, so I'll have to try it out. I love me some tomahawk, so I might as well... but if I was going up against GrillMcLoin here, I'd probably feel kind of mad!
Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan (via 
At a press conference earlier this week, reports 
