The newly announced Call of Duty: Black Ops is now available for you to pre-order at your local participating retailers.

"Those of you who already have your mind made up about purchasing Call of Duty: Black Ops should head over to..."

MMOHut, "Star Trek Online has had a troubling launch. Complaints of an unfinished product rushed to release abounded. What's worse is that STO chose to stick to the archaic subscription model rather than embrace the new, rapidly growing free to play model. To entice players to give the game a chance, they'll also be rolling out a demo and a free trial..."

IncGamers reports that BioWare has added an inhabitants page to the official Star Wars: The Old Republic site.

Anyone wanting to read up on the various creatures, droids and species that fill the SW:TOR universe can now refer here to find out all they need to know.

On Friday morning, browser-based gaming innovator InstantAction announced the availability of its direct-to-consumer online video game distribution service that enables game publishers to embed premium video games anywhere on the Web, including blogs, and social media sites such as Facebook. The service debuts with LucasArts' The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, available now.

GameXplain says: "The Halo: Reach Beta is upon us, and not to be left behind, the GameXplain crew made sure to be among the few to experience the game a little early. The beta is multiplayer only, and will be available to everyone who purchased Halo ODST starting Monday, but for now we were happy enough to hop into the game before the rest of the public."

BNG writes: "That huge project InstantAction has been working on since the arrival of their new CEO Louis Castle back in July of last year has finally surfaced. Right now, within your browser, you can play The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition."

IncGamers reports that BioWare has announced a new novel entitled Deceived, which tells the story of Darth Malgus, the Sith Lord who featured in the trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Legacy Games are releasing House, M.D. on PC May 10th and giving away loads of cool stuff to the first few buyers.

This predicament is similar to that of the 'strippers or counter-strike' story from a while back. If only Kim Ha Yul or Han Ga Eun dressed up as Alisa or Lili, then maybe they would have gotten more attention from the gamers at a recent "Tekken Clash" tournament.

A quote from one of the models described the situation, "it was impossible to put an attention of those hopeless men off. The game was drawing to a close and the ladies were sweating as much as they could, but the eyes of the tough players were nailed to the screens tight."

We are now finally ready to reveal what we have been working on for the past 18 months or so. Unfortunately we will be forced to close the site for submissions and comments for a few days while we import data to the new site.

Koku writes: "Judge Judy is known for handling many different lawsuit cases at times she even makes it seem like a joke when it comes to some awful law suits such as the one between Keiona Nash and Marcel Scott. Marcel cheated on Keiona, and now she wants to sue Marcel for stealing her Playstation 3, which Keiona claims she paid $2,500 for. You're probably wondering why the PS3 was $2,500. In case you don't want to watch the video, the answer is she bought it from Rent-A-Center. The whole 5 and a half minute clip is quite hilarious when you see how many times the word Playstation gets used."

Neither Activision nor Bungie would discuss specifics of yesterday's surprise 10-year publishing agreement. But to sign a developer with a pedigree like Bungie to a deal for one game would cost a pretty penny, let alone ten years worth. So how much coin did Activision have to pony up to land Bungie?

Wedbush Morgan Analyst Michael Pachter said the deal may have cost Activision as much as $100 million upfront, but suggested there's no reason to believe the publisher would need to fund Bungie's game development.

"Activision may be funding the game development, but Bungie is only 180 people. If they make $125,000 each per year (that's WAY too high, but it's a reasonable starting point for discussion), their overhead is $22,500,000 per year," Pachter told IGN. "Activision may have paid them five years of operating expense up front, but it doesn't make sense that the deal was negotiated in this manner."

It is hard to argue for a better video game genre than the RPG. No genre before or after has instilled such wonder and nostalgia in the video gamer. When playing the likes of racing or fighting games, one is enveloped by the momentary pleasure of winning a fight or driving as fast as you can to finish a race. The RPG though is quite the opposite of these genres. Anyone accustomed to RPG's knows what they're in store for before the game even starts; Endless hours of game play, always-evolving story lines, and perennial character development. The RPG is for the tortoise, not the hare, and would always prove to bring the most satisfaction to the gamer who was willing to let the parables of patience surround their being. In this list, we go through the 15 greatest RPG's of all time with a focus on the games that were not just games, but timeless pieces of art.

Ben Dutka: Look at it in terms of priority: what would I say are my favorite games - and possibly even the bestgames - of the generation so far? Well, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Heavy Rain, God of War III, Grand Theft Auto IV, Assassin's Creed II, Killzone 2, and inFamous. With the exception of two, those are all PS3 exclusives, and the other two were just fine as multiplats on the PS3. As for Mass Effect, I've never been a fan but it seems likely that the third installment will be on the PS3 anyway.

SoftPedia writes: Project Natal, Microsoft's motion tracking solution that does not use any form of handheld controller, is set to be launched at some point during the fall of this year and the software giant is planning a big event on June 13 during which it will talk about the videogames that will accompany it. But until then, some more details about the overall plan the Redmond-based company has for its new toy were offered and they point to a system that can actually learn and adapt after it is installed.

Joystiq: Though many have speculated that today's Bungie-Activision partnership announcement was timed to help distract from the ongoing exodus from Activision darling Infinity Ward, the Halo dev insists that wasn't the case. In fact, Bungie's Joseph Staten said the developer was more concerned with the effect the Infinity Ward news could have on Bungie's own announcement.

"Just speaking personally, it gave us a little bit of pause because we're so excited about this news and we knew we'd have to break through a lot of noise to get the message out there," Staten said in an interview with Joystiq today. "So, clearly that wasn't optimal."

PSPgo lets users control PSP games with a PlayStation 3 controller. Nifty, but what if you have a regular PSP? Well, there's this idea.

Sony Computer Entertainment America kicked around the idea of connecting a PSP directly to a standard PlayStation controller. A patent outlines two ideas. One uses a hinged PSP case locked on a regular controller. Another solution has users plug their PSP into a special controller

IGN: Rare has created one of the premier launch titles for 'Project Natal' and the challenges faced regarding the new design philosophy at the studio. He warns: "Everything you've learnt over the last 25 years – throw it away!"

When award winning critic Roger Ebert has a bit of free time from claiming video games can never be art, he aims his sights on 3D. Continuing his onslaught of hate, Roger Ebert wrote a column for May 10th Newsweek titled Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should Too). He starts off the column with this

3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension.