call-of-duty-black-ops posts

It's rare that a DLC for a game gets an all star voice acting cast but that's what's happening with the new zombie level included in the upcoming Call of Duty Black Ops Escalation map pack. The zombie map is titled Call of the Dead and will be set on a frozen ship.

The four playable characters in the level, as you can see in the above "grindhouse movie" style trailer, are modeled after and voiced by genre actor favorites like Robert Englund, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Michael Rooker and Danny Trejo. Oh and the king of zombie movie directors, George Romero himself, shows up as a big and nasty zombie. The map pack will be released in a week for the Xbox 360 console with the PC version likely due out about a month after that.

Download the Call of Duty Black Ops Escalation Call of the Dead Trailer at Big Download

Efforts to improve and fix bug issues in the PC port of Call of Duty Black Ops continue today with the newest patch for the hit first person shooter now available for download via Steam. The patch notes show that various exploits that have been found in the game have been fixed in this new patch along with some more stability improvements.

Among the other issues in the new patch that are fixed are having the weapon unlocks showing the right icon, the call vote menu has been updated with all the maps and challenges are now appearing again in After Action reports.

The second and most likely final map pack for Call of Duty Black Ops, titled Escalation, will be released for the PC in the next few months and today we got the first gameplay trailer showing off the five new levels for developer Treyarch's hit first person shooter.

The trailer goes into detail on the four new multiplayer maps in the pack; Zoo (complete with monorail) Hotel, Convey and Stockpile. It also mentions the new zombie themed map, Call of the Dead, but aside from a very brief glimpse of a rather foreboding location (including a spooky lighthouse) details of that map are being kept close to the vest for now.

Download the Call of Duty Black Ops Escalation DLC Map Pack trailer at Big Download

PC players of Call of Duty Black Ops have been waiting patiently for developer Treyarch to deliver on the team's earlier promise of providing mod tools to make new levels and other mods for the hit first person shooter. Now it looks like the wait will soon be over.

Treyarch's community manager Josh Olin retweeted a note from an unnamed Treyarch developer stating that the PC mod tools for the game will be released sometime in May. No other details were announced. Some fans were upset that developer Infinity Ward decided not to release mod tools for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 in 2009.

[Via Kotaku]

The second map pack for the hit first person shooter Call of Duty Black Ops has finally been officially announced via the Major Nelson web site. The DLC map pack is titled Escalation and will once again feature four new multiplayer maps along with a new zombie-themed map.

The maps include Hotel, set in a "Cuban luxury hotel and casino", Convoy set during a "ambushed US military convoy", Zoo, which takes place in an "abandoned Soviet Russian Zoo," and Stockpile, set in a small Russian town "housing secret WMD facilities." The new zombie map doesn't have a name yet but we are promised a unique map with "all-new playable characters."

The map pack will be released on May 3 for the Xbox 360; the PC version will likely be released sometime in June.

A retailer in Australia may have revealed the title, maps and release date for the next Call of Duty Black Ops DLC map pack. VG247.com reports that the GAME Australia web site posted a flyer (since taken down) for the Escalation Pack.

According to the flyer the map pack will contain five new maps for Treyarch's hit first person shooter, including one more new zombie themed map. The flyer hints that one of the maps takes place in a zoo. It says the map pack will be released on May 3 for the Xbox 360. It's likely the PC version will be released about a month or so later.

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has had a rocky (hehe) relationship with making movies based on games. In a new chat with MTV.com he admitted that the 2005 movie adaptation of Doom (where he basically played the good guy that turned into the bad monster) "... didn't work out the way we wanted it to, creatively." And remember when he was supposed to play the driver in the Spy Hunter movie? We do.

But that doesn't mean Johnson is scared of making another game-to-movie project. He also admitted that his dream project would be to make a movie based on " mind: "'[Call of Duty] Black Ops,' that'd be bad ass. Let's make it happen, let's do it," He might be right.

Crysis 2 continues to sell well, at least as a downloadable PC game. Crytek's latest entry in the sci-fi shooter series was the number one best selling game on Steam's download service last week. Pre-orders for Valve's Portal 2 came in second for the week while the Call of Duty Black Ops First Strike DLC map pack came in third.

The full top 10 sales list is as folllows:

1. Crysis 2 - Crytek/EA
2. Portal 2 - Valve
3. Call of Duty: Black Ops First Strike -Treyarch/Activision
4. Total War: Shogun 2 - The Creative Assembly/Sega
5. The Potato Sack - Various Indie Games
6. Shift 2 Unleashed - Slightly Mad Studios/EA
7. Rift - Trion Worlds
8. Darkspore - Electronic Arts
9. Dragon Age II - BioWare/EA
10. Call of Duty: Black Ops - Treyarch/Activision

Another day, another revelation from Valve that its Team Fortress 2 in-game store can really generate a lot of money.

• Steam has new automatic updates for Painkiller Resurrection and a small update for Call of Duty: Black Ops.
• Valve's Doug Lombardi says, "We are not done with Gordon Freeman's adventures". We certainly hope not.
• A new gameplay mode has been added to the racing MMO Need For Speed World.
• (Not) Shocking news 1: Treyarch is hiring people to work on Call of Duty games.
• (Not) Shocking news 2: The next Call of Duty game could be officially revealed in April.
• AMD has released new versions of its Radeon Catalyst graphics card drivers.

PC players of the hit first person shooter Call of Duty Black Ops got a triple amount of news to digest. The biggest is the long awaited release of the first downloadable map pack for the game via Steam, First Strike, which adds four new multiplayer maps and a new zombie co-op map to the Treyarch-developed game for $14.99.

The second bit of news is a new patch for the PC version. The patch notes go over what's included which includes "mproved stability for Zombies, Multiplayer, and Dedicated Servers". It also fixes a number of exploits in both multiplayer and zombie modes and adds a Dolly Cam editing mod in the game's Theater feature.

Finally PC gamers are now in a double XP weekend, allowing them to double the amount of experience points in Black Ops their player characters can generate in multiplayer modes.