My first, perhaps my only visit to Cuba came last week in a video game that asked me to kill the man responsible for taking my grandfather's property from him and who changed the country so dramatically it ensured our family would never return.

But what stuck with me most about that much talked about first level of Call of Duty: Black Ops wasn't the moment I pulled the trigger and sent a bullet spiraling into the head of a man I thought was Fidel Castro, it was how the game depicted the island nation as I made my way to Castro's compound.

My grandfather was born in Rodrigo, Cuba in 1914, orphaned at a young age and brought up by a priest in the nearby town of Quemados. His only ties to his family were the pharmacies and buildings his father left him when he died.

He left Cuba in the 30s, returning with his American wife to work as an accountant at a sugar refinery for a few years before heading back to south Georgia, where my father was born.

Shortly after Castro took power in 1959, my grandfather returned to Cuba to check on the properties his father left him, when he arrived he was told they no longer belonged to him.

That was the last time anyone in my family stepped foot in Cuba. My knowledge of the country comes from my grandfather's tales of growing up as the ward of the church, told to me as we ate thick slices of guava paste following a huge, Cuban lunch in the kitchen of his Moultrie, Georgia home.

They were stories of a wild childhood in a place that sounded almost magical. My grandfather, and the boy that would become his brother in all but blood, running around a pre-Castro Cuba getting into the sorts of trouble you'd expect to read about in books by Hemingway or Jack London.

I yearned to visit those places, to see where my grandfather grew up and ran wild. But I didn't get a chance until I popped Call of Duty: Black Ops into the Xbox 360 last week.

The game opens in a small bar in Havana, music plays as a woman slowly dances around the nearly empty room by herself. The bar's owner explains to you how to get to Castro's compound, a place that once was his own home. The virtual bartender's disgust and anger is obvious. It's also familiar, I think, to anyone with family who had their property taken by Castro.

The scene quickly devolves into a running firefight with police which sends you down the streets and toward the compound. The rest of the Cuba level has you fighting your way through the compound, trying to get to Castro.

The level ends with your player discovering that the man you killed, the man who grabbed and used his mistress as a human shield, is actually a body double, and not Castro.

The discovery is a reminder that as with books and movies before it, Call of Duty: Black Ops is simply examining historic events and adding a bit of fiction to spice things up.

But because Black Ops is a video game, because it puts the gun in your hand, the trigger at your finger, it can also give you a chance to do something that some Cubans have longed to do for nearly half a century: Kill Castro.

As the son of the son of a Cuban expatriate, the moment was lost on me. No death, virtual or real, can return my family history to me. There is a part of me undiscovered, unexamined thanks to the rift between the U.S. and Cuba.

I realize that this game doesn't hope to heal that scar, that the makers of the game may not have even weighed the impact this small part of Black Ops might have had on Cubans.

But the Cuban government, the one now led by Castro's brother, certainly noticed and as they always have, twisted the meaning, overlooking the game's reminders of what Cuba actually did to its own people in favor of decrying the bit of fiction the game uses as a plot device.

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I'm not sure at what point my test drive of the Call of Duty: Black Ops remote control truck became an attempt to blow things up, but it was easily within the first ten seconds.

Of course I didn't succeed. The RX-XD add-in that comes with the prestige edition of the game certainly looks like the real thing, but that's not C4 strapped to the top, it's just plastic. But had it been I would have totally added three kills to my stats... well two if you don't count big dogs.

The biggest video game of the year isn't making any fans in Cuba's government. Here's why...

About 5.6 million people bought Call of Duty: Black Ops when it went on sale earlier this week. The first-person shooter had a bigger opening than any movie, any video game, any... book. But not everyone was delighted about the game's exploration of the 1960s Cold War.

The opening level of the game sends a special ops team onto the island nation during the Bay of Pigs invasion to take down Fidel Castro. The outcome of this particular mission likely isn't as relevant to the Cuban government as the mission itself, which was too much for the state-run news agencies to handle.

Allowing gamers to take a virtual run at what clandestine ops have been trying to do for half a century "stimulates sociopathic attitudes in North American children and adolescents," they say.

So what's the big deal? Let's go to the tape... unless you're worried about spoilers. You can find the embedable version here.

If that's not enough Fidel for you, check out how he fares against zombies.

When I was thirteen, Ice-T was the baddest dude on the planet, rapping about pushing dope and killing cops. There were no musicians who seemed as hard as him. The guy was scary. Now?

Even as he eases into middle age, Ice-T still seems like someone you wouldn't want to set off, but over the years, he's increasingly become known less as an urban terror and more of a virtual one. These days he's kicking ass and taking names in Call of Duty.

Ice-T started doing video game voice work way back in 2000 with action title Sanity: Aiken's Artifact and followed that up with appearances in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004 and Scarface: The World Is Yours in 2006. He's even lending his voice to the upcoming Gears of War 3.

From James Woods to George Clinton, loads of celebrities did voice work in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. But when Call Of Duty: Black Ops launched, was James Woods huffing the limited edition bundle?

Ice-T is, no doubt, a super sharp guy and has always been hard to pigeonhole. He first made his name as a rapper, but then went on to successfully blend hip-hop and metal. He's enjoyed a highly successful acting career in both film and television.

But it was in 2008 that Ice-T the gamer came on our gaming radar with an interview in which he gave his gamertag LORD 187X and said if you see him in Call of Duty, "you gonna die". An appearance on The Jace Hall Show and pics of him with the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 night goggles helped seal his reputation as a serious COD player. And it's not only Call of Duty, Ice-T dispenses his opinion on whatever he's playing, whether it be Fallout New Vegas or Medal Of Honor.

This is the same guy that decades earlier pioneered gangster rap and pissed off police officers, President George Bush, Tipper Gore and even Charlton Heston with his song "Cop Killer"! Now, he's on his way to become a gaming icon, something that would have been unthinkable in the gangsta rap days of 1992. Then video games were still viewed as children's toys and not mainstream adult entertainment. It just goes to show how far gaming has come — and how far Ice-T has come as well. He's no longer rapping about killing cops, he's playing one on TV.

We've seen off the wall knife kills before in Call of Duty multiplayer—remember this lucky Modern Warfare 2 stab?—but across the map, off the wall, off the floor and into the Achilles heel of an online opponent?

The unlucky recipient—a player by the handle of "BotteDimix"—of this Call of Duty: Black Ops tomahawk is likely calling bullshit on this seemingly random shot, but we're ready to call this the luckiest Black Ops kill to date until proven otherwise.

This image of active Call of Duty: Black Ops players was snapped by reader The Dude at 11 p.m. eastern time last night.

Note the nearly 3 million active players and the fact that seemingly the only people not playing Black Ops last night lived in the Rocky Mountains.... sorry, I had things to do.

About 5.6 million people bought copies of Call of Duty: Black Ops in North America and the United Kingdom on Tuesday, when the game went on sale.

That makes it the largest entertainment launch in history. And Black Ops is not just a popular game. It's a very popular game. More popular than Modern Warfare 2 was one year ago, its creators said today.

Activision executive Thomas Tippl told an audience of investors in New York that Black Ops has sold $360 million worth of copies in its first 24 hours of release in North America and the U.K. this week, compared to $310 million in the first day of release for Modern Warfare 2 a year ago. Modern Warfare 2 sold a mere 4.7 million copies.

If you care deeply about pixel counts and frame rate—or are simply still on the fence about which console version of Call of Duty: Black Ops to buy—don't miss Digital Foundry's deep technical tear down of the Xbox 360 and PS3 releases.

Eurogamer's techy side examines the two console versions of Treyarch's latest Call of Duty game, judging it by resolution, texture quality, frame rate and even which platform spits out a better stereoscopic 3D experience. Digital Foundry's analysis ultimately says "there's little doubt that the Xbox 360 offers the better experience: superior image definition, and a pleasingly smoother run of play."

(The PC version of Black Ops, which has its own ups and downs, is not factored into the comparison.)

The results likely won't be a surprise to discriminating Call of Duty fans, as the site's analysis of last year's Modern Warfare 2 resulted in a similar conclusion.

If the only thing preventing you from picking up a copy of Black Ops is the number of vertical lines on the screen or the mip-map quality of a cigarette pack texture, this is required reading before a purchase.

Face-Off: Call of Duty: Black Ops [Eurogamer]

David Voderhaar is not a happy guy. The design director for Call of Duty: Black Ops' multiplayer is busy dealing with the baffling lag problem in the PC version, so please stop "Twit-bombing" him with video of glitches and exploits.

"I'm not going to talk about it publicly," an obviously pissed Voderhaar said in the Black Ops forums (which are down for maintenance at the moment). "We are disinterested in making mini-celebrities out of douche-bags. You better think twice before you glitch."

Voderhaar is more than a little ticked off at the culture of being the first to glitch or exploit the latest Call of Duty game and the online bragging behind it. "I got Twitbombed today from dozens of people with the same two links," Vonderhaar wrote. "What many of these people want is to be Internet nerd famous. I'm not going to make them famous and you shouldn't either. Internet hysteria from normal people is exactly what they want and that's how many people reacted today. You gave them exactly what they want."

He said if it were his call, he'd banhammer "anyone who thinks he is clever by abusing any glitches. Good thing I don't have the opportunity that often and we actually have a constructive, measured, and well-managed live ops team."

Voderhaar did thank those who "sent in polite, constructive messages without the hysterics." For gltiches that are reproducible issues, Voderhaar promised Treyarch would hotfix or patch "just like we said we would."

Treyarch Issues Stern Warning to Call of Duty: Black Ops Glitchers [GameSpy]

Call of Duty: Black Ops is rubbing one nation the wrong way. Cuba's state-run media has blasted Activision's latest entry in the Call of Duty series as "doubly perverse" propaganda for a story arc involving former president Fidel Castro.

According to a report from the AP, state-run news web site Cubadebate is slamming Black Ops, not for its lag on the PC version or lack of campaign co-op play, but for a mission set in Havana that targets a young Castro. Cubadebate doesn't seem too sensitive of spoilers, so if you haven't played the game's single-player campaign, watch out!

"What the United States couldn't accomplish in more than 50 years, they are now trying to do virtually," the outlet writes about an in-game assassination attempt on lil' Fidel. Cubadebate labels Black Ops "doubly perverse" because "it glorifies the illegal assassination attempts the United States government planned against the Cuban leader" and "stimulates sociopathic attitudes in North American children and adolescents."

Geez, Cuban media. The game's not that bad. We really liked it!

Read on, but only if you already know the circumstances involving the in-game attempt on Castro's life and the aftermath of that section of the game. And if you're traveling to Cuba any time soon, best leave your Black Ops at home, lest customs yoink it and trade it in for credit at GameStop.

Cuba denounces 'virtual' Castro plot in new game [AP/Yahoo News]