The original Nuketown was one of Black Ops’ best-loved maps, but its fans haven’t been particularly well-served by Treyarch since. Its Black Ops 2 successor, Nuketown 2025, was first available only as a pre-order bonus - and for a short while afterwards, not at all. Thankfully, some enterprising souls in Illinois have built a version of the map which should prove a little tougher to remove from rotation.
I used to think I could recognise all the correct symptoms of a rainbow - a bright afternoon peppered by showers, a black cat crossing the path of a lain-down cow - but too many conspicuously empty skies have blackened my reputation as a soothsayer. Now I only predict Black Ops 2 double XP weekends - much easier, as they’re far more frequent. And on a week that also sees the PC release of the new Uprising DLC? Inevitable.
Echo, beta, paid alpha, early access! Alright soldiermen, it’s time for your briefing. At eighteen-hundred hours yesterday evening, while each of us was engaged in an Approved Appropriately Patriotic Pastime with our heterosexual nuclear families, Johnny Treyarch was busy whipping up an Uprising. He stirred things up with that Alcatraz business in the Xbox Isles and PlayStonia last month, and now he’s set on doing the same here.
World of Warcraft has seen a significant dip in subscriptions over the last three months. Activision have reported a 1.3 million decline in the financial quarter ending March 31, leaving Blizzard’s MMO with a still-enviable subscriber base of 8.3 million.
Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
After two weeks of going steady with the Xbox, Black Ops’ latest map pack tires of monogamy and begins looking about itself. Mark my words - in two-and-a-half weeks’ time, it’ll be whispering sweet new maps into the hard drives of our PCs.
It might be easier if we start reporting the days when Black Ops isn’t buckling under the influence of an extended double-something holiday. It’s been only two days since the last extra XP free-for-all came to a close, and already Treyarch have announced that you’ll get twice the virtual buck for your bang over this weekend.
Mob of the Dead is one of five maps found in Black Ops 2’s imminent Uprising map pack, but I can’t imagine any of the others are nearly so star-splattered as this. Welcome to Alcatraz, where you’ll be recast as the spitting image of one of four Hollywood gangsters: Ray Liotta, Joe Pantoliano, Chazz Palmentiri, or Michael Madsen.
Activision’s cheekily irresponsible live-action shorts have returned for Black Ops 2’s latest map pack, Uprising. If you somehow missed the TV spots last time, you’ll grasp the gist soon enough: stone-cold chiller The Replacer is employed to keep the domestic wheels of Call of Duty players’ lives turning while they work on their K/D ratio, and this time has brought a friend. Laugh as the pair carry out the jobs Activision have determined are held down by the median Call of Duty player. Tee hee! Chortle as the Replacers humour the love interests of their invariably heterosexual absentee boyfriends. Ho ho!
But more importantly, play close attention to the new map footage buried around the trailer’s midpoint, and check out Treyarch’s Behind the Scenes look at Alcatraz-set Zombies map Mob of the Dead.
Black Ops 2: Uprising is yet to be the beneficiary of an official announcement, let alone a laggy PC release date. But we already know where its risings will emerge - either from the graves of a new Zombies level, or the throats of enthusiastic players across four PvP maps.
Trawling website source code is the new bin-rummaging - the cleaner, warmer, and ethically sleep-better-at-nightier hallmark of contemporary sort-of-journalism. Call of Duty YouTube regular MrDarlekJD knows this, having had a root about in the organs of the official Black Ops 2 DLC page and come up trumps from the comfort of his own home. Black Ops 2 will continue its mystifying propensity for Bolshevik monitors with Uprising, he discovered, a map pack with a new Zombies level in tow.
Xbox Live players have been inhaling the meaty delights of ham camo for two weeks now thanks to new Black Ops 2 ‘micro items’ - optional purchases that variously yield themed calling cards, extra create-a-class slots and some very silly aesthetic weapon upgrades. In another two, we’ll be able to join them.
Treyarch have been working to improve CODcast, Black Ops 2’s in-game tool for shouting over the top of matches. In sparsely-populated matches, for instance, the CODcast control panel can now be made to show the overhead map in the player list, which should allow commentators a more holistic view of events. So that’s good. Most of the rest of this week’s patch is given over to fixing issues with the recent Revolution DLC. See what’s changed below.
Gosh, that’s a tabloid headline and a half, isn’t it? In a future Black Ops 2 update, Treyarch will introduce optional in-game ‘Micro Item’ purchases. Among the items will be calling cards, extra create-a-class slots and aesthetic weapon upgrades, including something called a ‘Bacon Personalisation Pack’.
Gosh, verbs are tricky, aren’t they? ‘Rises up’ was supposed to sound more Les Mis than stomach bug, but you can never be quite sure.
While we still have another eight days till Black Ops 2's Revolution DLC releases for the PC, today we get our own download which is slightly less exciting, unless I write in bold: a patch. There, isn't that just as rewarding as new maps, weapons, and all the other so-called perks of new content?
After its earlier release on the Xbox (Grrr.) we now finally have a release date for the Nuketown zombies map which was granted to buyers of the special edition and season pass.
Black Ops 2's first DLC release is going to be full of firsts, first time a weapon's been included with DLC, first time you'll be able to play as the zombies, and (likely the) first time MC Escher has been uttered in a Black Ops 2 video. Though, some of the firsts do seem a little more tenuous.
What on earth did I miss? I took the liberty of having a Christmas, and in the meantime the definition of revolution seems to have deteriorated to the point of absurdity. In 2013, it seems revolution is spelled ‘map pack’.Call of Duty's Nuketown map is set in an isolated spot in the desert, it is a model town built to scale as a means to gauge the impact of a nuclear blast test, as such it is a place of no consequence. Which does make it -, on a narrative level - a tad confusing that men in hazmat suits would risk their lives to clear it of flesh-eating zombies.
Treyarch treat PC gamers quite well. They tend to keep us in the loop via PC community manager Cesar ‘@pcdev’ Stastny. Oh, look. Here he comes now. Hey Cesar!
