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The familiar, tinny sound of night-vision goggles powering up, heated radio chatter and a disconnected Xbox controller. Activision kicked off Microsoft's press conference (and pretty much all of E3) with a nine-minute live demo of the latest offering in what has recently become the biggest gaming franchise ever: Call of Duty. Slated for release November 8, Modern Warfare 3 looks to give players another unrelenting, absurd explode-a-thon with little room to catch your breath...

Is there any doubt Call of Duty is the hottest franchise in gaming? No, there is not. Is there any question the latest game in the series, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, is the gaming world’s most eagerly awaited game of 2011? No, there is not. Are we the type of mean bastards to spend hours at a special, swanky preview event, getting a good, long look at two single-player levels from this very game and then keep all the exquisite details to ourselves? No, we are not. We’re going to spill our guts and rant like mad men. Let’s roll…

Confession: I’m crap at Call of Duty multiplayer. Oh, I do well enough against other journalists and love competing at review events, but as soon as that game releases to the general public, I’m finished. I can’t devote hours, days or weeks to mastering every weapon and memorizing every map, but plenty of other folks can, so I’m quickly rendered obsolete and lose all interest.

Call of Duty Elite could change that. Activision representatives dropped by our office earlier this week to demo the service and, despite my cynicism, I immediately recognized how this could make FPS multiplayer fun for me again – and for the countless other average players just like me...

If Call of Duty looks like an unstoppable, inevitable juggernaut of success at this point, it’s for one very good reason: Multiplayer. While the series has taken lumps from critics for its short campaigns, its multiplayer action has become a huge, mainstream cultural phenomenon, and if what we’ve seen at the Call of Duty XP event is any indication, Modern Warfare 3’s new modes and maps look poised to continue that trend for some time.

Our hands-on impressions of new multiplayer modes Kill Confirmed and Spec Ops Survival, as well as new multiplayer maps Dome, Arkaden, Resistance, Village and Underground inside...

Taking the stage at Call of Duty XP last night, Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling let the crowd know that big changes are in the works for Modern Warfare multiplayer, most of them relating to the balance. Some of the biggest complaints from fans, he said, came from the cheesier perks and kill-streak rewards, which tipped the scales hugely in the favor of experienced players. So the worst offenders - like the infamous, match-ending nuke - are gone, and in their place is a new kill-streak system designed to even the odds and reward different kinds of play...

When it was first announced, Call of Duty Elite was the source of more than a little controversy, as the internet erupted in an indignant rage over Activision's supposed greed in launching a premium subscription service for Call of Duty content. Today, however, we finally learned the details of Elite -specifically, that it's much more than a stingy new way to charge for DLC. In fact, if anything, Elite seems more than a little generous...

At this very moment, exhausted game journos are lurching across the globe to converge on Leipzig for a look at the industry’s latest. Tomorrow, when the show opens, this is what Activision will be showing the crowds of Call of Duty: World at War.

Like Star Trek films we’ve come to expect the Call of Duty games to run one good, one bad. However, now that developer Treyarch sat us down in front of the game, we’ve removed our cynicism goggles to look upon the series with fresh, blood-spattered eyes.

With Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Infinity Ward took its signature franchise into the 21st century. But we haven’t played our last WWII CoD game yet. Treyarch Studios, Activision’s B-team and developer of the console-only Call of Duty 3, is entrenched in the 1940s and hard at work on Call of Duty: World at War, which will come to the PC this year.