Videogame Releases: Week of November 7th, 2010

When a really big videogame title comes out, it scares off everything around it. Other games have their release dates moved forward or backwards out of the desire to maintain sales. This is one of those weeks.

On the plus side, one of the biggest games of the year is coming out for just about every gaming system available. On the downside, there’s very little else worth talking about.

Call of Duty: Black Ops (360, DS, PC, PS3, Wii)

The ‘Call of Duty’ series has transformed into a marquee title in the last few years, and ‘Black Ops’ is no exception. It scares other releases away and is bound to take over the November sales charts.

‘Black Ops’ is made by Treyarch, the same company behind ‘World at War’. That’s important to note, since the incredibly popular ‘Modern Warfare’ series was made by ‘Infinity Ward’, a completely different development studio.

The new ‘Call of Duty’ game brings back the familiar multiplayer advancement system and adds the ability to wager points on each match in specific modes. It brings split-screen online multiplayer back, and it even includes dedicated servers for the PC versions.

Don’t let that system list trick you, though. Five games called ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops’ are being released, but only three of them are the ‘Call of Duty’ that everyone’s talking about. The Wii version and DS version might be good – only reviews will tell for sure – but they’re definitely not the same.

The Sly Collection (PS3)

There’s one more release worth talking about, even if it isn’t entirely new. ‘The Sly Collection’ brings together the three ‘Sly Cooper’ games and updates them for high definition televisions by upscaling the textures and expanding the picture to 16:9. The third game (Why just the third? I have no idea.) will also be playable in 3-D. The ‘Sly’ games may not have made a huge splash initially, but if you’re looking for a solid action-stealth-platforming that’s even appropriate for the kids to play, you could do a lot worse.

4 comments

  1. Well, at least the PC is included – I DETEST FPS on the consoles.

    It will probably be a good six months or year before I pick up COD though. I don’t game like I used to, so paying release day prices is insane to me. I just picked up the God of War collection for the ps3 for $15, and I got Katamari Forever about two weeks ago, and I got a couple of RPGs that I mentioned before that I can play between now and Christmas.

    But yeah, COD is my favorite shooter franchise (well, that and the Bioshock games), and I am always excited to see what they do. They are also pretty good about NOT requiring you to have the latest $400 video card to play – it scales well from the $30 graphics card all the way up. I will probably look for a demo, and play with it a bit, but as for tonight, I got a few constallations to make in Katamari. 🙂

  2. Rich87

    I applaud Treyarch for trying some new things in this installment, I had low expectations for this release but another generic fps this is not.

    The sly cooper games were definitely some of the best looking cell shaded games on the ps2 back when i played them. Seeing these already great looking games in high definition gives me another excuse to play them again. 🙂

  3. I’m definitely eager to see how ‘Black Ops’ works out. My PC’s not quite up to snuff for multiplayer FPS gaming, so I’m stuck with the controller until I can upgrade.

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