Diablo is one of those franchises that exists in every gamers dreams. It was one of the classic Blizzard titles that has been long lost in the success of World of Warcraft and Starcraft, but there has always been hope that we would see a return to the action RPG franchise.

So a few years ago it was announced that Diablo 3 was officially on the way, and the world of video games seemed like a happier place. However, A funny thing happened on the way to Gamestop and the release missed an originally planed 2011 release window. Reports of an early 2012 release were heard, but alas we have at least a few more months to wait.

Activision announced in a recent financial report that Diablo 3 is currently expected for the middle of the year, killing any hope that we would see the game sooner rather than later.

That was not the only disappointing news for Blizzard fans in the report. The long awaited second part of Starcraft 2 and the next World of Warcraft expansion are on shaky ground for a 2012 release. Blizzard is only expected to ship one other title this year in addition to Diablo 3, meaning one or both of those two announced projects is going to be pushed to 2013.

Continue Reading →

Members of Call of Duty Elite for both the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 have already started reaping the benefits of their yearly membership with the first content drop in January. As promised, Activision is intent on keeping up with their Content Drop schedule for Elite Subscribers to prove the value of the service.

This month, subscribers will be getting their hands on the new map Overwatch. Somewhat similar in aestetics to the rooftop multiplayer map of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, this one is much more dangerous as its central passage is one that provides little cover or protection from falling for the players crossing it. It does give some nice variety to the other maps that have already been released and it will be interesting to see how it plays out when more game modes are added as well.

Call of Duty Elite Drop 3: Overwatch drops you into a construction site atop a New York City skyscraper. The battle takes place along two levels in a near symmetrical layout, with the central bridge and side routes open to attack from multiple angles. Watch your every step, as a lack of safety barriers surrounding the perimeter leaves nothing between you and a 70 story fall to the ground below.

Overwatch is the third Content Drop in Modern Warfare 3′s Content Season, which will include more than 20 pieces of brand new content over the 9 month season. Elite Drops 4-6 will be available in March for Premium Members on Xbox Live and will include the multiplayer map Black Box and two brand new Special Ops Missions, Black Ice and Negotiator. The full calendar of content is outlined here.

Check out the screens after the jump and stayed tuned for more Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 news as it becomes available.

Continue Reading →

Playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and not sure if Elite membership is right for you? Check out the latest two trailers from Activision and Call of Duty Elite featuring Rob Riggle, the cop from the Hangover who had way too much fun with the taser in the classroom, as he explains the benefits of Elite as well as walks you through the first two maps from Call of Duty Elite’s nine month content drop.

As the Elite trailer goes to explain, the biggest benefit for Elite membership isn’t just getting maps first. They are actually cheaper if paid for up front. Instead of getting four packs at $15 a pop, players can pay for them all with the Elite membership for only $50 (or already have it free if they purchased the Hardened Edition of the game) and as mentioned, they get them much earlier than waiting for content packs.

As promised, Elite delivered its first two maps yesterday. In addition to new gameplay modes which will be coming soon, new multiplayer maps have been the biggest and most important DLC on XBox Live since Halo 2′s map packs.

This pack features Content Drop 1: Liberation which resembles a Central Park setting, complete with mounted miniguns (just like real life), long lines of sight for snipers and tons of tree cover and close quartered underground locales as well. Content Drop 2: Piazza takes players to an Italian seaside village filled with tight winding roads leaving lots of chances for close combat encounters.

Check out the January Content Drop trailer below as well as screens of both Liberation and Piazza. Stay tuned to The Flickcast for more on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty Elite.

Continue Reading →

It’s no surprise that one of the more anticipated games of 2012 for The Flickcast is Prototype 2. Since getting a peek at San Diego Comic-Con and getting hands on at NYCC, we are counting down to Prototype 2′s April 24th release date. Also looking forward to the release are the folks at Dark Horse Comics. Starting February 15th, Dark Horse will be launching an all digital three part web series focusing on filling in the events of what transpired between the first game and Prototype 2.

The first entry, “The Anchor,” illustrated by Paco Díaz, continues the story of Alex Mercer, the protagonist from the first game, while the second story, “The Survivors,” illustrated by Chris Staggs, follows a small group of residents of New York trying to escape the city after it has been transformed into NYZ with the outbreak of the Blacklight virus. The third and final story, illustrated by Victor Drujiniu, is “The Labyrinth” and provides fans a deeper look into the backstory of PROTOTYPE 2′s new protagonist, Sgt. James Heller.

Continue Reading →

A billion dollars in sales in just 16 days. An unprecedented release both for the video game and entertainment industry. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is a juggernaut. It only seems fitting that along with the Call of Duty Elite mobile app going live this week, that the DLC announcements would start rolling out as well. Starting January 24th for premium Call of Duty Elite members on XBox Live (and later dates for other platforms) until September, there will be at least twenty content drops for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 including “brand new multiplayer maps, Special Ops Missions, new game modes and more.”

“The mammoth launch of Modern Warfare 3 and the breakout success of Call of Duty Elite were just the beginning. Call of Duty Elite provides an “always-on” connection to our fanbase, and the MW3 Content Season is the ultimate way to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to the Call of Duty community and provide tremendous value to Call of Duty Elite premium members,” said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing. “With the Call of Duty®: MW3 Content Season for Call of Duty Elite we are delivering on our promise of more new content, more often, and with more variety than ever. With three studios collaborating on the first season, the breadth and depth of material on tap is truly extraordinary. It’s rare you can successfully execute both quantity and quality, but thanks to the expertise of our developers, the reach of Call of Duty Elite and the passion of our fans, we intend to deliver.”

Content drops will occur once a month for the nine month duration of the DLC season with the first three months from January to March promising five different content drops.

Continue Reading →

Call of Duty Elite is a service that allows the most hardcore Call of Duty players to lose themselves in some pretty advance stat tracking and multiplayer progression. Now those gamers have even less of a reason to spend any time away from their account with the launch of the iOS app for the service.

The new app will be free for all registered users, and is available on all iOS platforms today. An android version is going to be hitting soon as well.

Immerse yourself in Call of Duty® wherever you go with the Call of Duty® ELITE mobile app. Evaluate your multiplayer progress with in-depth stat analysis. Formulate new strategies based on your recent performance and remotely incorporate edits to your loadouts. Push your changes directly into Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® 3 so you’re always ready to play.

Check out a list of features and some screen shots after the jump.

Continue Reading →

Yesterday we took a look at Minecraft, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Capcom, Dark Souls and Portal 2. Today, we have a whole second set of awards to be given out for the best (and worst) of 2011.

Game That Shouldn’t Have Taken Nearly As Long to Come Out: Duke Nukem Forever

What happened in the time span since Duke Nukem Forever began development?

The entire Presidential run of George W. Bush.

This writer’s entire high school and college career.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and The Clone Wars were all released in theaters.

The XBox was released and ended its lifecycle.

Activision released 7 proper Call of Duty titles.

Lost.

A child born when development started would have grown to be a teenager.

The list goes on and on…

And the worst part is, after all that wait… Duke Nukem Forever wasn’t very good when it did finally come out. What was considered controversial when the game began production is pretty tame by comparison to what people are enjoying in gaming now and the humor comes off as sophomoric instead of clever.

While we can understand the desire to release a passion project to finally let it see the light of day, sometimes it is better to let it enjoy a quiet death with some dignity instead of coming out guns blazing as a failure.

Continue Reading →

Saturday night, Spike TV held its annual Video Game Awards show which, as promised, gave the first looks at some huge trailers for 2012′s gaming landscape.

Naughty Dog gets to step away from their blockbuster Uncharted series to work on a new IP titled The Last of Us. This new title takes a different approach from the recent string of zombie / infected scenarios where it looks like it can be a game of stealth and horror mixed together. It isn’t a world like Dead Rising or Left 4 Dead where the creatures flood the street and makes the possibility of combining the stealth and horror genres pretty intriguing.

This has the possibility of becoming a fantastic PlayStation exclusive franchise. The trailer for The Last of Us is definitely one of the great surprises from the VGAs this year.

Continue Reading →

Normally a video game tie-in to a feature film is horrible. It is rare that one of these games is even half decent, and you can probably count on one hand how many of these games have been legitimately good. So a fair amount of skepticism will always follow the announcement of a new tie-in game, and no doubt The Amazing Spider-Man will face the same.

Funny thing about that though, now that we know some information about this game it actually sounds pretty good. Activision has just released the first details about The Amazing Spider-Man in advance of it’s trailer world premiere at this week’s VGAs. Smartly the game is set up as an epilogue to the events in the film, with an all new story set around the characters we will be introduced to in the film. The game is also being developed by Beenox, the guys who gave us the great Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions and the OK Spider-Man: Edge of Time.

“The Amazing Spider-Man is in development at veteran game studio Beenox, and features an original narrative crafted by Hollywood writer Seamus Kevin Fahey (episodes of Spartacus: Gods of the Arena and the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica) that continues young Peter Parker’s adventures following the events of the new film.”

More details after the jump.

Continue Reading →

You may have heard of a little game called Call of Duty: Black Ops. In fact, before the more recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, it was the best selling first person shooter game of all time on the XBox 360, PS3 and PC.

But what if you didn’t have and XBox or were on the road and wanted to play it on your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch? Well, up until today you were out of luck. Fortunately, your luck is changing . . . for the better.

That’s right kids today Activision has released Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Here’s all the scoop from the official press release:

Adapted from Treyarch’s best-selling console hit, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and built specifically for Apple mobile devices, Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies delivers a Zombies experience never before seen on mobile along with 50 levels of cult-favorite Dead-Ops Arcade, providing the ultimate undead challenge for fans of Call of Duty’s signature Zombies mode. Featuring Voice Chat for a true Call of Duty style multiplayer experience, the title allows gamers to play solo or join a team of up to four to take down hordes of zombies.

Continue Reading →

A game that racks up sales of three quarters of a billion dollars in just five days of release is something anyone should take notice of. With the records Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has been smashing, the video game industry has been in near upheaval. Is it Call of Duty vs. Battlefield?

Is the game a cheap cash in for what should be just an expansion? Are services like Elite necessary for players? Regardless of what controversies may arise or what questions you may ask, the answer is really quite simple: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the definitive military shooter of 2011.

Gameplay:

There is a reason that Call of Duty has been at the forefront of military shooters since the inception of the series. The control is crisp and tight. Players move and react as close to they should in actual combat (with the exception of regenerative health of course).

Continue Reading →

Welcome back to another episode of The Bitcast, our very own video game only podcast hosted by JC and WallE. The boys hit lots of big news this week including the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sales records, Activision’s multimillion dollar charity donation, Limbo hitting its millionth sale and discuss the upcoming Dead Island DLC.

In the Topic of the Week, the two discuss the ever decreasing distance of video games and reality and when that line is crossed. In their Now Playing Section, JC talks more about his experience with Modern Warfare 3 as well as his $0.99 download of Scribblenauts Remixed for the iOS.

WallE takes an unexpected turn and talks about the Flash “game” from PETA that tries to target Mario for the reintroduction of the Tanooki suit in Mario Bros. 3D Land for the Nintendo 3Ds.

Don’t forget to subcribe to The Flickcast’s iTunes feed to get your weekly dose of The Bitcast!