Ray guns, zombies, tropical islands, live-action cameos. Plus a banshee. Activision put out another sneak peek at the latest add-on to their newest Call of Duty, the Vengeance pack, which hits Xbox Live next Tuesday, and the PC and PS3 a bit later.

Beginning Wednesday, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 will begin offering "personal customizations" on the Xbox 360, the game's community manager said this morning. The items don't affect gameplay—they're items like weapon skins, targeting reticles, and player calling cards. Moreover, the multiplayer map Nuketown 2025,…

It can be easy to become desensitized to Call of Duty's brand of realistic-yet-cartoonish violence. As motion-captured video-game dudes blow each other away over and over again, whatever I'd normally feel at watching that kind of carnage melts away. I see the game for what it is, and it stops having an impact.

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.

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.

Images purportedly of in-store promotional materials suggest that Call of Duty: Black Ops II's first map pack extension will be a timed Xbox 360 exclusive arriving on Jan. 29. Five maps are included.

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?

When I had enough of Call of Duty: Black Ops II's campaign, I decided to spend some time with its more fantastical mode, Zombies. These are my thoughts.

I haven't played enough of Black Ops II to render a real verdict on how I feel about as a game, I can say for sure that I really enjoy the soundtrack. It's a cut up from past games in the series, an exciting, diverse blend of whirling orchestral parts, ethnic instruments and atmospheric electronics.

Well then. There are a crapload of people playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II online right now. On Xbox Live alone, between Zombies mode and regular multiplayer, there are more then 800,000 playing:

Boy, those young men sure do love video games, don't they? And wouldn't you know it, two of the biggest games of the year, Halo 4 and Black Ops II, just came out! Surely there is some pithy joke to be made here, some quick gibe about how men will be playing those games and therefore neglecting their girlfriends?

Call of Duty Elite will be free when Black Ops II launches this November, but Wii U players won't be able to get their hands on it just yet.

Call of Duty's zombie game modes have always been a multiplayer-only kind of deal, entirely divorced from the game's singleplayer campaigns. A product listing on Amazon, however, suggests that might be about to change.

While not the full game (impossible, since it's not even done yet), some enterprising types have managed to get hold of a demo for the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. And proceeded to do what you'd expect.

This is going to sound like one of those stories in which a friend of a friend heard something from a janitor's mother-in-law. This isn't like last year, when we had the story of Modern Warfare 3 dead to rights in May, six months before the game's release, thanks to some chatty sources. But we'd be remiss in not…

Lt. Col. Oliver North is a polarizing figure in American history and, we found out, earlier this month, an advisor on the next huge Call of Duty game, Black Ops II.

Call of Duty was always popular, but became a cultural phenomenon only in 2007 thanks to a revised multiplayer system that hooked players with a then-innovative ability-unlocking level-based system.