Captain America gets hardcore in this new live action trailer for the Call of Duty Online. Apparently this is only a trailer for a trailer, but we get to see Chris Evans with an FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missile launcher, and isn't that a good way to start Boxing Day?

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You've got to hand it to the people that the React Youtube channel gets for their videos: you could not pay me to play a first person shooter for the first time while online with a bunch of strangers, but these brave men and women are more than up to the challenge despite having no idea how to work the controls. My favorite part is when a guy tells the woman with two master degrees that she's an idiot. Ahh, gaming, what a wonderful past time!

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YOUR STRENGTH IS YOUR GREATEST WEAKNESS.

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The portrayal and treatment of women in and around video games is a sore subject for a lot of us. It’s been talked about to death, and yet it still doesn’t seem like we’re making much progress. It’s a very polarizing but uniformly upsetting issue that lingers on in this otherwise great community like cat pee on an oriental rug.

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Like many of you, me and my fellow Weekend Editor Sam Maggs and I were more than a little irked by the whole Ubisoft kerfuffle earlier this week. It almost made us forget about that long ago time (last Monday) when we were really excited about the stuff coming out of E3. Then we realized...we're still excited! And though female representation still has a long way to go in the gaming industry, we're happy to report there are plenty of other upcoming games that include playable female characters.

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Gary Oldman is the best. THE. BEST. And Nick Frost is pretty cool too. Anyway, Gary Oldman has done voices for multiple Call of Duty games, and in this clip he talks about it and shouts a bit. Nick Frost, meanwhile, explains to Toni Collette what Call of Duty is and talks about the difficulties of being a gamer dad. Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

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If you're a Call of Duty: Ghosts player and you've found your self with a teammate who occasionally shoots a tree in the two weeks since it came out, don't stress. You might have been playing with Doreen Fox, a seventy-eight year old English grandmother who says playing violent games keeps her sharp, and doesn't seem to care that her neighbors might be confused by the sounds of gunfire and explosions that come from her one-bedroom apartment. And who stood on line to grab Call of Duty: Ghosts at its midnight release this month.

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Honestly, adding female soldiers to character customization wasn't about trying to lure more people into the game. It was actually just about acknowledging the people who already play our game. - Mark Rubin, executive producer of Infinity Ward. While Call of Duty initially made its name in World War II era combat, its Modern Warfare series and Black Ops II are set in the present or near future. One other good reason to add female characters to Ghosts is that by 2016 at the latest, women will serve as Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and Marine infantry. Although I have to admit, acknowledging the women who already play your game is good too. (Also it would be pretty sad if you put a mo-capped dog in your game before you added women to multiplayer.) Previously in Call of Duty

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My feelings on the Xbox One have gone from total resentment to excitement in the past couple of months, and the full launch lineup, just revealed at Gamescom, has only given me more reason to want it. The lineup's so special because it has a wide array of exclusives from developers around the world-- they're really throwing everyone an Xbone, huh?

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I'm not sure one episode of Game of Thrones goes by without me lamenting my lack of hair braiding ability. Thankfully, there's a few new diagrams for that. Or you could just do what I usually do, the Wildling look.  (via Tor) 

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Violence and video games is a tricky subject, but it's just plain factual that many games -- like Call of Duty, for example -- sometimes license the use and depiction of actual firearms. As in, the virtual sniper rifle a player's using might be about as close to the real thing as a virtual sniper rifle gets. So, is buying Call of Duty or Battlefield a moral choice? That's what Mike Rugnetta and PBS Idea Channel explore in their latest and greatest video.

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When a ten-person strong team of Swedish police officers responded to an emergency call over the weekend, they didn't know what they were in for, but considering the details they had to go on -- the caller's description of the situation stated had included the sound of gunshots and frantic cries for help -- they can be forgiven for expecting the worst. Happily, rather than  gruesome abbatoir they may have anticipated, the officers were instead confronted with... a group of teenagers playing Call of Duty.

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Way back in August we showed you a trailer for Mario Warfare -- a gritty, action-packed fan film by the good people of Beat Down Boogie. At the time, the producers behind the project never gave us a confirmed release date, so we were all left wondering if the film went down the green pipe never to be seen again. The project's finally resurfaced, and the premiere of Mario Warfare is already here. There's even a second episode not too far behind! Also, yes, it really is all that a bag of 1-Up mushrooms.

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Robert Downey Jr. is riding high on his role as Tony Stark in both the Iron Man films and The Avengers but that doesn't mean he can't take on other fun project in between. For instance, a Call of Duty Black Ops 2 trailer directed by his Sherlock Holmes pal, Guy Ritchie. It features a few other cameos but it's obviously Downey for the win. (via TDW Geek) Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

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What would happen if someone took equal parts Super Mario Bros., Call of Duty, and added a touch of the movie Equilibrium? That's clearly what the good folks at Beat Down Boogie wanted to know. They've long been at work on Mario Warfare, which is exactly what it sounds like, and have finally released a rather polished looking trailer. The cast of characters seem to be entirely drawn from Mario, but the tone the video sets is unmistakably Call of Duty. Plus, they have what appears to be Toad doing gun kata.

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It’s been a rough month in the gamer community. The furor surrounding Anita Sarkeesian opened up the floodgates for endless discussions of gender in games and gamer culture -- and that much, at least, is good. Even if we don’t all agree on the same points, the fact that lots of people are having conversations about it is a healthy thing. But I've been bothered. Not because there are people out there saying things I disagree with, or those who disagree with the things I say. That’s to be expected. No, what’s been bothering me is the vitriol. The people who think that disagreement is license for cruelty, or who are just cruel for no good reason at all. Online harassment is a well-established problem, but the casual hatred and bile being thrown around left me disheartened. To see this level of ugliness in a community that I love, one that is based around playing games with friends…it’s just wrong. But encouragingly, there are folks out there trying to make a positive difference. Meet Sam Killermann, a gamer on a one-man mission to make our community a more welcoming place. In late June, he launched a site called Gamers Against Bigotry, which asks visitors to sign a pledge against using hateful language and identity-based slurs in-game. A few weeks after the site’s quiet debut, Killermann is now running an IndieGoGo campaign to raise the funds needed to make GAB a non-profit organization. I got in touch with him to learn more about the project, and to pick his brain about the issue at hand. 

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Call of Duty and other US-armed-forces-set shooter game franchises have never exactly been a font of female characters, regardless of whether they're set in a time when women could or couldn't serve in the armies depicted. Discussions over whether or not more women should be involved in the stories of the games often devolve in to talks about "realism," whether having female soldiers is "realistic," and whether "realism" is actually already present in rigorous amounts in a given video game. The Call of Duty franchise has covered a number of different eras of American history, from World War II, to the Cold War, and the modern "war on terror." And while they've got a small group of female characters from French resistance fighters to Sarah Michelle Gellar (in a zombie themed map), the only playable female character in any actual CoD campaign has been Tanya Pavelovna, a sniper for the Russian army born sometime in the nineteen teens. This week, however, developer Treyarch started to reveal more about the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops II, like how the game features a number of female npcs, and will eventually feature a playable female character.

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