Since the sub­scrip­tion ser­vice for Call of Duty is now a real­ity, it’s time to take a closer look at what we gamers are get­ting out of it. Of course, Activi­sion Bliz­zard is unable to detail most of the paid fea­tures for Elite because the premium-tier ser­vice was designed to be deeply inte­grated with Call of Duty: Mod­ern War­fare 3. Until we are closer to the launch of the game we have to make do with the scraps the com­pany throws at us.

Call of Duty: Elite is a ser­vice incor­po­rat­ing stats-tracking, social net­work ele­ments, an inter­ac­tive strat­egy guide, and plenty of options for com­pet­i­tive gam­ing. Activi­sion tries very hard to sum Elite up in three words: con­nect, com­pete, and improve. At least it is kind of elab­o­rat­ing on the mean­ing of these three words on the Elite web­site. Suf­fice to say that, in a nut­shell, Activi­sion is not charg­ing for CoD mul­ti­player. Read more…

Yes­ter­day, the lat­est Deus Ex: Human Rev­o­lu­tion trailer hit the web. Titled “Revenge” it is about … well, revenge. Have a look for yourself:

Of course, you may also want to con­sider the Collector’s Edi­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s only intended for us Euro­peans and since it’s  using Steam­works it might not be a good idea try­ing to import this edi­tion. Deus Ex: Human Rev­o­lu­tion will only get a stan­dard and Aug­mented edi­tion release in North Amer­ica. In order to get all the con­tent offered in the Collector’s Edi­tion Amer­i­cans would have to pre-order the game twice, as mul­ti­ple retail­ers are offer­ing dif­fer­ent pieces of content.

Deus Ex: Human Rev­o­lu­tion launches on August 23 in North Amer­ica, August 25 in Aus­tralia and New Zealand, and August 26 in Europe.

Aci­tivi­sion Bliz­zarc Inc. is out to charge a monthly sub­scrip­tion fee for the upcom­ing online ser­vice called Call of Duty: Elite. This ser­vice will work with Call of Duty: Mod­ern War­fare 3 and future install­ments of the fran­chise. CoD:E will pro­vide extra con­tent that isn’t avail­able for reg­u­lar cus­tomers and it will be avail­able for pay­ing and non-paying mul­ti­player fans.

Play­ers will pri­mar­ily access CoD:E through web browsers though Activi­sion is plan­ning to offer apps for Android and iOS devices. Elite will let play­ers track their stats, par­tic­i­pate in com­pe­ti­tions for real and vir­tual prizes, and pro­vide a lot of social-networking options rem­i­nis­cent of e-sports. Appar­ently, stats-tracking and social group­ing fea­tures will be free for everyone.

Pre­mium Elite sub­scribers will receive a con­stant flow of Call of Duty con­tent, like map packs. Cam­paign, co-op and mul­ti­player modes can still be had for no charge, so going for the pre­mium mem­ber­ship isn’t strictly nec­es­sary. Unfor­tu­nately, details regard­ing the ser­vice are still very scarce. The guys over at Kotaku at least scored some infor­ma­tion on how the ser­vice looks like.

In short, Call of Duty:Elite is divided into four sec­tions: Career, Con­nect, The­ater, and Com­pete. The first sec­tion is loaded with stats, the sec­ond one offers social-networking options. The­ater allows users to host their favorite Call of Duty videos and Com­pete will allow play­ers to win lots of prizes by let­ting play­ers engage in short-term chal­lenges and long-term tournaments.

No word on pric­ing yet but accord­ing to the Wall Street Jour­nal Activi­sion exec­u­tives expect the cost to be less than Net­flix monthly movie sub­scrip­tion. That could mean some­thing in the range of $5-7 a month. Not quite pricey, right? Well, as long as we don’t know what to expect from becom­ing a pre­mium sub­scriber that sounds like buy­ing a pig in a poke.

Call of Duty: Elite will launch on the same day as the Mod­ern War­fare 3 – Novem­ber 8, 2011. If you’d like to test it before then, try to get an invite to the closed beta which will start later this summer.

I found myself play­ing Call of Duty: Black Ops quite a bit over the last few days. I’m not that good and I usu­ally do bet­ter with Mod­ern War­fare 2. Still, there are a few gen­eral things that are nice to know. The fol­low­ing intel isn’t about strate­gies, class setups, game styles or any­thing else. Firstly, because I’m not qual­i­fied for that and sec­ondly, there are hun­dreds – if not thou­sands – of guides, arti­cle, forum/blog posts, etc. out there deal­ing with that kinda stuff.

• Dol­phin div­ing into water will pro­tect you from fall dam­age. That may prove excep­tion­ally use­ful on Jungle.
• On a side­note, jump­ing on peo­ple or RC-XDs also pre­vents fall damage.
• An indi­rect kill from a kill­streak reward  will count towards unlock­ing the next kill­streak reward.
• You can actu­ally cap­ture a flag while in Sec­ond Chance. You’ll even get a medal out of it.
• But you can’t defuse a bomb while in Sec­ond Chance.
• Valkyrie rock­ets can be destroyed by the Strela-3 (even though it’s vehi­cle lock-on only!) or by friendly fire.
• Don’t throw smoke and gas grenades into water. They’ll sim­ply dis­ap­pear with­out ever going off.
• SAM Tur­rets will kill you if they’re shoot­ing against obsta­cles and you’re nearby. In this case, they’ll also blow up them­selves. Choose a nice, open place for them.
• Jam­mers affect RC-XDs and make them an easy tar­get for nearby enemies.
• Using a zipline will dis­card your Death Machine, Grim Reaper, or Valkyrie Rockets.
• The auto-turrets on Berlin Wall can’t get a lock on you through smoke. Throw one in the mid­dle area or two smoke grenades in the outer areas to safely tra­verse the no man’s land.
• You can also use a smoke grenade to cap­ture the B flag from out­side the cen­tral way. Just make sure you pick the side your team holds, oth­er­wise you’re easy prey for enemy snipers rely­ing on IR scopes.
• If you can, make sure to have a Counter-Spy Plane ready for enemy Blackbirds.
• One par­tic­u­larly annoy­ing thing is a bug Tre­yarch will hope­fully fix ASAP: If you pull out your Care Pack­age Marker when going into Sec­ond Chance, you’ll end up in Sec­ond Chance with your pri­mary weapon. Some­body raped me this way with his Olympia the other day.

Hope that’s some use­ful intel for ya. Over and out.

Today, Square Enix dropped a new game­play trailer for Deus Ex: Human Rev­o­lu­tion reveal­ing a lot of the game’s game­play mechan­ics and user inter­face. You’ll see the game’s aug­men­ta­tion inter­face where every aug­men­ta­tion is upgrade­able in three lev­els. You also get to see some kind of infra-ray vision and an inter­est­ing weapon wheel to choose your gear from. Hack­ing a work­sta­tion obvi­ously allows you to tin­ker with tur­rets, robots, and cam­eras. Next, you get some weapons demon­stra­tion – you can use dif­fer­ent kinds of ammu­ni­tion – and you even get to see Jenson’s meelee skills. Oh, and don’t for­get the nice laser weapon with which you can aim and fire through walls.

All in all, I like what I saw, espe­cially the art direc­tion.  The mon­i­tors are awe­some as is the user inter­face. If the trailer isn’t enough for you, head over to ComputerAndVideoGames.com – the guys over there did a lit­tle Q&A with the devel­op­ers. The devel­op­ers promised that there will be a lot of hid­den choices in the game so that not every pos­si­ble action is thrown in your face. They also said that the inven­tory con­tains every­thing but story items and that health regen­er­a­tion isn’t as quick as in Halo or Call of Duty. Ah, I’m alredy look­ing for­ward to hack­ing con­soles in early 2011.

Accord­ing to Shack­news Call of Duty: Black Ops sold 5.6 mil­lion units on launch day – in North Amer­ica and UK alone. That’s almost a mil­lion units more than Mod­ern War­fare 2 man­aged back in Novem­ber 2009. My own copy cur­rently is en route and I can’t wait to finally play the game. Luck­ily, I once again bought the game for the PS3 as there seems to be quite a grow­ing num­ber of bugs and exploits on the PC plat­form. If you’re inter­ested, head over to the offi­cial forums.

So what does the game have in store? There’s a heav­ily scripted sin­gle player mode where you play lots and lots of dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters, a zom­bie co-op mode, and the mul­ti­player mode, of course. Nat­u­rally, mul­ti­player ist the most inter­est­ing ascpect of the game and I’m going to com­pletely ignore all the rest. Here are the key fea­tures every­one should know:

• High­est level is 50 and there are 15 lev­els of prestige.
• The player must level up to unlock weapons and perks for pur­chase (all perks will become avail­able with level 4, all kill­streaks with level 10).
• There’s a short, very infor­ma­tive list of all the perks and their respec­tive pro ver­sions over at the offi­cial site.
• You can also find a list of all the kill­streaks there.
• The in-game cur­rency is called CoD Points and it is used to pur­chase weapons and upgrades, and can be used for con­tracts and Wager Matches. Con­tracts are basi­cally chal­lenges with dif­fer­ent goals and dif­fu­culty lev­els. You buy con­tracts with CoD Points and upon com­plet­ing a con­tract you’ll earn more CoD Points than you orig­i­nally paid for the con­tract itself. In Wager Matches play­ers wager their CoD Points agains every­one else and only the top three play­ers get rewarded – the rest get nothing.
• CoD Points are 10% of the XP earned per match and 1,000 points per level-up. Con­tracts, chal­lenges and Wager Matches also com­prise a source of income.
• There are four game modes in the Wager Match cat­e­gory: Gun Game, Sticks and Stones, Once in the Cham­ber, and Sharp­shooter. Fur­ther infor­ma­tion is avail­able over at The Call of Duty Wiki.