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.

Pakistan bans 'Call of Duty,' 'Medal of Honor' for showing country as terrorist haven [Fox News, via GoNIntendo]

Call of Duty: Black Ops II, like the last few Call of Duty games, allows players to create and personalize emblems—little icons that appear on their weapons and next to their names when they're online.

Naturally, being mature and respectable members of society, Call of Duty players are using these emblems to draw swastikas made out of penises.

This is a problem, as Activision community manager Dan Amrich points out:

This divides COD players into two camps: The people who want to create penis swastikas and the people who do not want to see them. I hear from both of them, complaining loudly that they should be able to create whatever they want and/or these people should be banned.

Amrich goes on to criticize the Black Ops II art community—"Are you suggesting you are enhancing my game with your Nazi symbol made out of wangs? You are not. You have my guarantee on this."—and begs them to stop drawing penis swastikas. The moderating teams at Activision and Treyarch are trying to delete/ban all of the offenders, but there's no approval process for emblems, which makes that a complicated process.

So allow me to echo Amrich's point. Please, folks, stop drawing penis swastikas in Call of Duty. For as much fun as I am having writing the words "penis" and "swastika" in succession, most people play Call of Duty to shoot people, not to look at Nazi symbols made out of genitalia. If you absolutely must draw penis swastikas, at least do it someplace where people won't mind. Like Second Life.

Photo: JPFotografie/Shutterstock

Towheaded and small-voiced, Felix von Perfall's countenance seems to define childhood innocence. But look into those eyes. Those eight-year-old eyes have seen war, they've seen ... things, things no seven-, six- or five-year-old should ever know.

"Call of Duty, it's a good game, but it's really—I wouldn't advise it for younger kids," Felix told WNYW-TV in its examination of holiday gift-giving trends on yesterday's 5 p.m. news.

The last Call of Duty rated lower than M was Call of Duty 3 in 2006. The title has never rated an E.

h/t Tim Burke.

In its debut week, Call of Duty: Black Ops II on the PS3 is the second best selling game in Japan, moving 197,350 units. If you add in the 22,177 copies the Xbox 360 version netted, Call of Duty: Black Ops II sold 219,527 copies, surpassing the 213,414 physical copies Animal Crossing: New Leaf sold. That's impressive! (Even more so when you factor in the bellyaching surrounding the game's localization.)

And it's even more impressive when you look at what rounds out the top five: new Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, Hot Shoots Golf 6, and Super Mario Bros. 2. It's like a game that does not belong.

For years, Western games—or "yougee" (洋ゲー) as they are called—were looked down upon by Japanese gamers. Yougee literally means "Western" (洋 or "you") "game" (ゲー or "gee"). It's not uncommon for Western things to be labelled, such as "youfuku" (洋服), which means "Western style clothing", or "youshoku" (洋食), which means "Western food". Both are extremely common in Japan, and nobody really makes a conscious distinction and no longer really sees these as "foreign" or the "other". These are things, such as blue jeans, that came from the West, but are now produced within the country.

However, the term yougee, as Square Enix president Yoichi Wada once pointed out, has had a "discriminatory meaning" in Japan and was clearly used to separate any other games developed outside Japan. This is something Square Enix has worked to change, and the company is publishing Western titles like Call of Duty. Wada wasn't being hyperbolic; there was even a catchphrase online that summed up Japanese players' attitudes towards Western games: "Yougee wa kusogee" (洋ゲーはクソゲー) or "Western games are shitty games."

But in the last few years, things have really started to change. First-person shooters like Halo have developed an increasingly hardcore fanbase in Japan, which is limited somewhat by it being on the Xbox 360 and most Japanese gamers not owning one.

While Western gamers might debate whether or not Call of Duty is in decline, there are Japanese gamers who seem to really enjoy the series and haven't tired of it—yet. All those arguments you used to hear as to why Japanese gamers don't like first person shooters—such as that FPS games make Japanese people sick or that Japanese players prefer to see the character—go out the window when a title moves 200,000 copies in a week. I expect the sales numbers to be significantly lower next week, but I also expect Western games to do better and better in Japan.

Last year, I interviewed Fumito Ueda, the creator of The Last Guardian. During our talk, he said he was concerned that the same thing that happened to Japanese movies would happen to Japanese video games: for movies, the budgets got bigger and bigger, and today, most of the feature films shown in theaters aren't Japanese.

Western games, too, are getting bigger and bigger, and because of that, more and more Japanese players are attracted to the impressive graphics and production values—the whole spectacle of multi-million dollar projects like Call of Duty. For many Japanese players, Western games aren't shitty games, anymore.

Call of Duty games have a distinctive aural imprint. The whizzing bullets, grunting allies, ringing impacts and of course, the screams of the many men you kill. But what if the game were stripped down to only that last—what if the only things you heard in Call of Duty: Black Ops II were the combatants' voices?

It's actually possible to do this—easy, even. Just go into the menu and turn the "SFX" and "Music" levels to zero. Jorge Albor over at the Experience Points blog had the idea to see what it was like, and the result, as seen in the video above, is a surreal soundscape of anguish. The echo-y, lonesome screams of dying men masked by none of the accompanying gunfire histrionics.

Says Albor:

This is not the right way to play Call of Duty, I know. Like a sitcom needs a laugh-track, the shooter needs its musical flare and auditory foliage. Without it, the violence is naked. The cries of pain seem almost free of cause, brief and alone with no aural cues to mark their passing.

I went ahead and tried this on the opening chapter of the game, and the results were more humorous than chilling—a bunch of guys issuing the exact same grunt over, and over, and over again as they died. I also found that the lack of bombastic audio actually made the game easier, as it does with many other games. Explosive game audio is cool, but also frequently overwhelming and distracting, particularly in linear single-player games where locational audio data isn't useful.

This approach to playing Black Ops II is a lot of things: Interesting look at an isolated aspect of sound design, accidental commentary on the weirdness of video game murder, secondary commentary on how vital sound effects are to this kind of game. But beyond all that, it's just kinda eerie.

The Sound Of Violence [Experience Points]

659 people are playing standard multiplayer and 68 people are playing Zombies mode on Wii U. More than last week.

For comparison, there are 511,529 people playing standard multiplayer and 124,321 people playing Zombies mode in Black Ops II on Xbox 360.

Of course, it's not fair to directly compare a console that launched last week with a console that's been around for six years. So let's do some math.

Microsoft has sold 70 million Xbox 360s worldwide to date. If you take that 635,850 number (total multiplayer + zombies) and divide it by 70 million, you get a ratio of 0.009, which means that 9 out of every 1,000 people with Xbox 360s are playing Black Ops II as I write this.

Nintendo has sold 400,000 Wii U consoles in North America to date. (It hasn't been released anywhere else.) If you take 727 and divide it by 400,000, you get a ratio of 0.0018, which means that a little under 2 out of every 1,000 (or 9 out of every 5,000) people with Wii U consoles are playing Black Ops II as I write this.

As for Madden, well... Madden doesn't even have enough online players to complete a football team.

We'll continue to check this out regularly at different days and times just to get an idea of how many people are playing at any given moment.

And by the way, if you've seen exponentially more people playing at one specific time, let us know below.

Today, Sony held the "World Game Project" in Akihabara, in which the electronics giant showed off twenty PS3 and PS Vita games. These titles were developed outside Japan, and the point of this hands-on event was to give Japanese gamers a chance to check out titles they might not otherwise and maybe remind them that some big Japanese franchises are now being farmed out to Western devs.

The weather was a bit crap today—cold and drizzly—but 4Gamer reported that there was a decent enough gathering, with waits between 15 to 20 minutes for the games.

Each year that passes, Japanese gamers seem more and more open to foreign developed games. Events like this, which are really Sony PR stunts, actually end up serving as ambassadors—video games ambassadors.

全20タイトルがプレイアブル出展 [4Gamer]

A few years back, Japanese gamers were very upset over spotty localization for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The line "Remember, no Russian" (AKA, Don't speak the Russian language) was written as "Kill 'em, the Russians" in Japanese.

Now it's Black Ops II's turn. The Japanese language version features jarring and nonsensical localization.

This image is supposed to say "Eliminate Enemy Players" in Japanese, but the way it's written seems somewhat odd (敵プレイヤーをせん滅しろ). Instead of writing "elimination" as 殲滅 (senmetsu), it's written with "sen" in hiragana script: せん滅. As jarring as it might seem to a few Japanese players, the word can be written that way. And is. So to be fair, this isn't actually a mistake. The rest of the multiplayer localization, however, is.

Take the multiplayer welcome screen, which seems like should say "Welcome to Multiplayer" in Japanese (マルチプレイヘようこそ or "Multiplayer e Youkoso"), but it actually says "マルチプレイヤーへよ........ｑ". It's unclear what "........ｑ" refers to. It's unclear what much of the localization refers to.

For example, there's this image. It wants to say "Hacking" in Japanese, but they cannot even fit the Japanese word for ハッキング on the screen. It cuts out at the corners, making the "gu" character (グ) look like the character for "ku" (ク). And "hacking" (ハッキング) in Japanese isn't even a verb by itself; it's a noun!

Take this image. On the screen of the above handheld device, it reads "kensaku chuu" (検索中), which means "looking something up." Like, in a dictionary. Pretty sure the latest Call of Duty multiplayer doesn't have you look up words or things online while playing. (If it does, that's awesome!) Rather, the Japanese tansakuchuu (探索中) or maybe "saachichuu" (サーチ中) would be better.

Then, there are the descriptions of the different multiplayer matches and equipment, which many Japanese players are finding to be confusing.

The truly odd thing is that most of these words should be in English. Japanese people know basic English and all study it at school. Many Japanese products—especially cars and electronics—have simple English in them. So writing "hacking" or "searching" in Japanese doesn't actually make much sense. Players would understand what they mean.

Online in Japan, people are complaining about these mistakes and bitching at the publisher. Some of the bad localizations are even becoming memes! A modern day "All your base are belong to us", if you will.

The Black Ops II Japanese localization seems like it was done by individuals who didn't know the context of what they were localizing and didn't have the opportunity to get the necessary context. Localization is more than looking things up in dictionaries. So is Call of Duty.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II is on sale today in Japan.

『コールオブデューティー:BO2』のローカライズが酷い。「マルチプレイヤーへよ........ｑ」 [2ch via カオス]

For Call of Duty fans, developer Treyarch just delivered an early Christmas present when they released Black Ops II. As the ninth game in the Call of Duty franchise and the sequel to the 2010 game Black Ops, we are hoping to see something meaningfully new from Black Ops II. We say this because last year's release (Modern Warfare 3) was somewhat lackluster on the PC, and also because the competing franchise Medal of Honor: Warfighter has received mixed, if not poor reviews overall.

But we could be in luck as Black Ops II is the first game in the Call of Duty franchise to feature future warfare technology and the first to present branching storylines driven by player choice. So far Call of Duty Black Ops II has received mostly positive reviews, with Kotaku saying "Black Ops II feels great to play, especially when futuristic weapons are involved, yes - but it also makes you think." IGN editor, Anthony Gallegos also said that the game is "a good example of how to evolve an annualized franchise."

But as usual, our main concern from a performance article perspective has to do with the game engine which has been slow to evolve over the years. Black Ops II has been built using the "Black Ops II engine" which has been upgraded from the Black Ops IW 3.0 engine released back in 2010. The key changes to the game engine include a new technology called "reveal mapping" which improves texture blending by comparing tones between two textures before blending them together.

Lighting has also been improved and now includes HDR lighting, bounce lighting, self-shadowing, intersecting shadows, and various other improvements. On paper the upgrade also calls for the move to the DirectX 11 API for the PC version of the game. This means PC gamers should enjoy better visuals when compared to those using console versions.

Still, despite the various enhancements to the game engine, the minimum system requirements only demand a GeForce 8800 GT 512MB or Radeon HD 4870 512MB (both DirectX 10 GPUs) with an old Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz or AMD Phenom X3 processor. This means either the game scales very well to accommodate for older systems or despite the enhancements it's just not that demanding or visually impressive.

Testing Methodology

We'll be testing 29 DirectX 11 graphics card configurations from AMD and Nvidia across all price ranges. The latest beta drivers were used for every card. We installed an Intel Core i7-3960X in our test bed to remove any CPU bottlenecks that could influence high-end GPU scores.

Shortly before Black Ops II arrived, both AMD and Nvidia released pre-WHQL drivers that claimed to provide improved performance and stability in a number of games. AMD has noted numerous bug fixes, thus our decision to go with the latest beta drivers.

Nvidia released a new beta driver that addressed specific performance issues with the game. The new GeForce 310.54 beta driver delivers "up to 26% better performance" in Call of Duty: Black Ops II and provides smooth, shimmer-free graphics with Nvidia TXAA antialiasing.

We used Fraps to measure frame rates during 90 seconds of gameplay footage from Call of Duty Black Ops II's first single player level, Pyrrhic Victory. The test begins at the third Intel where the player must flee the shore line and head into the jungle. The player must defend Woods and Hudson to the extraction point. We found this part of the game to be quite demanding, so felt it was a good place to begin testing.

We tested Call of Duty Black Ops II at three common desktop display resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600, using the maximum quality settings with 4xMSAA in the DX11 mode.

• Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (3072MB)
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB)
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB)
• AMD Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB)
• AMD Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 7770 (1024MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 7750 (1024MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 6950 (2048MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 6850 (1024MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 6790 (1024MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 6770 (1024MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 6750 (1024MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 6670 (1024MB)
• AMD Radeon HD 5870 (2048MB)
• AMD Radeon HD 5830 (1024MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 (4096MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 (2048MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2048MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti (2048MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 (1024MB)
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 (1024MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 550 Ti (1024MB)
• Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz)
• x4 4GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 (CAS 8-8-8-20)
• Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 (Intel X79)
• OCZ ZX Series 1250w
• Crucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s)
• Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 64-bit
• Nvidia Forceware 310.54
• AMD Catalyst 12.11

1680x1050 - High Quality

At 1680x1050 the Radeon HD 6870 was the first graphics card to exceed an average frame rate of 60fps, though the 6850, GeForce GTX 560 Ti and GTX 650 Ti were close with over 50fps. The GeForce GTX 560 also did well averaging 47fps.

It's worth noting that while the GeForce GTX 560 managed 47fps in Black Ops II, at the same resolution in Modern Warfare 3 it was 60% faster, so this latest installment is clearly more demanding.

Having said that, it didn't take much to deliver playable performance at 1680x1050 and many will get away with mid-range graphics cards from previous generations.

1920x1200 - High Quality

At 1920x1200 the frame rates are only reduced slightly compared to the 1680x1050 results.

The Radeon HD 6870, for example, has barely dipped below 60fps with an average of 57fps. The GeForce GTX 480 which is over two and a half years old managed 59fps, and the three year old Radeon HD 5870 was even faster with 62fps.

Current generation budget graphics cards such as the GeForce GTX 650 Ti and Radeon HD 7770 were good for roughly 40fps which can be considered as playable.

Continue Reading...

• 2560x1600 - High Quality
• CPU Performance
• Final Thoughts

After suddenly pulling a popular pre-order multiplayer map from Black Ops II online play yesterday, Activision added it back to a new playlist called Chaos Moshpit. Game design director David Vonderhaar from dev studio Treyarch—who delivered the bad news—made it seem possible that the map could come back in a tweet late yesterday:

That was followed by a notice from Treyarch which indicates that all that fuming from the COD faithful didn't fall upon uncaring ears:

It's not the same as having Nuketown 2025 in a normal playlist, as many have asked for, but at least it's back.