(Posted By: Kyle Buck)

Q: Call of Duty Subscription fee?
A: Call of Duty Elite.

Let me start off by saying that Call of duty's multilayer as we know it, will remain free. Additionally, the new Call of Duty Elite will be free with some parts that are going to be pay to use. But what is COD Elite? It's a social networking and self help tool for all the players in the Call of Duty community. There are going to be 4 main sections: Career, Connect, Compete, and Improve.


Career: If you are new or old to the game but wish you could keep your combat record between installments, this is for you. This will allow you to look at all your stats down to every game that COD Elite is compatible with.


Connect: Here is where the community can really come together. This matchmaking service will put people in groups of anything from clan wars to me and my furry friends.


Compete: With this, Activision will be able to keep a constant stream of events and competitions going for the players. If you're good, or just lucky, you will be able to win both virtual and physical prizes.


Improve: I will be spending a lot of time in this section because it is made to help us players get better. This will not only give tutorials on how best to use all of the weapons and attachments, but also gives advice on the maps and their terrain.
So which parts are free and how much will the others cost? We're not sure yet, but the price will be comparable to most online entertainment services and will probably me less than the $8 a month for Netflix. One thing that sweetens the deal is that subscribers will get all of the future DLC for free. This should be available when MW3 launchs and will be compatible with both MW3 and Black Ops. Expect to see more before I get it on November 8th.

(Posted by: Harrison Milfeld)

Who knew that killing locusts, while set to Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," would be a match made in heaven? Gears of War 3 is set for release on September 20, 2011. 

(Posted by: Harrison Milfeld)

(Posted by: Eric Rees)

Sony is trying to crack this ever expanding mobile market that is quickly meshing into a gaming platform of it's own. They are bringing the Xperia Play to bare in this new market and with the phone launching on the 26 the details have been finalized and the hardware is ready. Let's walk through the details of this phone to see if it's worth buying. 

Let's start with the insides since that's where all the magic happens. The phone is sporting a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU and an Adreno 205 GPU. Neither of these chips by themselves is terrible but if you look at the summer line up that the Play has to stack against (Droid Bionic, LG Optimus 2X, Samsung Galaxy S II and HTC's EVO 3D) it seems this phone might have waited a bit too long, all of the aforementioned phones are sporting dual core processors of varying speeds. The phone has a 1500mAh battery packed in and is stuffed full of 512 MB of ram for your apps and games to access. Hit the break to read the rest of the run down.

(Posted by: Harrison Milfeld)

[Update] - The video has been revealed as a fake from a couple of college students. The students were assigned to create a video that would go viral. They get an A for fooling me and a slew of others.


A video that was uploaded to YouTube yesterday apparently shows not only what Nintendo's next console will look like, but also the controller design as well. 

The video titled, "Nintendo Project Cafe leak "private developer conference" can be described as a bland powerpoint presentation that gives us a possible glimpse of the console; however, the diagrams shown on screen do not reveal any details that we can make out. Also, there is no sound accompanying the video, so our guess is as good as anyone on the blog-o-sphere.

For now, let's file this video as a huge rumor or a very elaborate fake. For starters, if this was a private meeting from Nintendo showcasing Project Cafe, then this video would've been red flagged immediately. 

As sketchy as the video is, what do you readers have to say?

This week, the guys have a new lineup. Eric, Chris and Ryan are on vacation, and we brought back Matt Terrell and Alex Clippinger. We talk about Minecraft, Brink, LA Noire, Half Life 2, and more! Plus, PSN is back, so Buck was able to indulge his horrible COD addiction. Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...The Gameshoe Podcast!

(Posted by: Eric Rees)

Now before you go getting all excited again, PSN didn't necessarily get hacked again. More like someone pointed out to Sony that it could have been.

To reset passwords on this site, all you had to do was go through the painless process of providing your email and your date of birth, pretty weak by any website's standards today. When someone realized that the hackers of PSN definitely have both of those bits of information for thousands of accounts, the site came down. Only time will tell how long it'll be down and how it'll be different when it comes back but let's hope for Sony's sake nothing big happened.

(Posted by: Eric Rees)

The Duke is back on Gameshoe front page, all is right in the world. Continuing the tradition that Epic Games recently started, Gearbox came out and said that everyone who purchased the Borderlands Game of the Year edition, aka those who are members of the Duke Nukem Forever First Access Club (rolls off the tongue doesn't it?) will get their hands on the demo June 3. They did not say what consoles this would be on nor did they say when people who didn't buy the GOTY edition will be able to play either. Time will answer all of these questions soon enough ladies and gentlemen.

(Posted by: Eric Rees)

There seems to be a few games that I get excited for, and even fewer that I go to my friends and tell them that they need to get it so we can play together. The last time this happened, Medal of Honor let me down immensely but with Brink I hope this would change. The amount of customization in the characters and within the firefights had me intrigued beyond belief, but then I saw all the reviews it was getting. Hit the break to read the rest of my own Brink review.

(Posted by: Harrison Milfeld)

Last year, Modern Warfare developer Infinity Ward went through a bit of "downsizing" to say the least. This shake-up alone created a bit of concern as to how the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare storyline would close. There were doubts as to if Infinity Ward would even be developing the conclusion of this trilogy. 

Months and months passed and fans were informed that Infinity Ward would indeed be developing the third iteration of the Modern Warfare franchise. Not only that, but yesterday Activision released not one, but FOUR different teaser trailers for Modern Warfare 3. Each teaser doesn't offer much about the gameplay, but we are shown new developments in a raging battle across all parts of Europe and the Americas. 

Hit the jump to view all four of the teaser trailers.