A recent gamesindustry.biz article mildly criticizes the game industry and video games for making people fat. Nothing groundbreaking here. Having spent approximately 6 full days of my life playing Call of Duty 4 and 5, I admit to playing for hours on end munching on doritos and drinking beer. Sometimes I will be so entranced by the game that I will sit uncomfortably for an hour while I need to go the bathroom just so I can level up.

Hey it’s no different than when I was a kid munching on doritos and drinking Pepsi while playing Street Fighter II on my Super Nintendo.

Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare has had 11 million unique players on XBOX 360 and 4 million players on PS3 according to Eurogamer. There are still consistently thousands of players online in CoD4 every day. The thing that shocked me most is that there are nearly three times more people playing XBOX online than PS3. Then no wonder why I can’t get a decent game connection through Playstation Network some nights! Nobody is playing! It gets painful to get lag-killed by 13-year olds in Australia in New Zealand all the time.

The 2009 Game Developers Conference will be held in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. Since I live in the area I might try to find a friend that has a pass and check out some of the exhibitions. The admission prices pretty high. Don’t they know it’s a recession?

Update: Several Gameplay videos of the new levels including interviews with voiceover comments from the developers. Thanks to midgetman for the info.

The new map pack for Call of Duty: World at War has an official date: March 19. The publisher’s website has pictures and descriptions of all the new maps. Like I said before I don’t play much Nazi Zombie but the new map might get enough players in the online version to get me interested. Peleliu looks the most interesting to me because I generally like the outdoor maps more than the building-based maps. The don’t offer pricing information but I suspect the maps will be in the $10-$15 US Dollar range on the PS3 PlayStation store.

Four new maps:

Peleliu – an outdoor map reminiscent of Makin.

Station – an underground map that looks like Dome. Maybe it’s that huge pit at the border of Dome?

Nightfire – a night time village map that reminds me of Chinatown from the CoD4:MW expansion pack.

Verrukt – the Nazi Zombie map.

From CallofDuty.com