Record Breaker It's Call of Duty's world, people. We're just gaming in it.

Having already broken the day-one
sales record set by last year's Modern Warfare 2, the latest Call of Duty
game is showing no signs of slowing down. Activision today announced
Call of Duty: Black Ops has smashed the five-day entertainment sales mark by earning a whopping $650 million, topping -- who
else -- previous record-holder Modern Warfare 2 by $100 million over the same
time span.

So allow Activision CEO Bobby Kotick a little gloating.

"Call of Duty has become the first
entertainment property in history to set five-day launch records for two
consecutive years across all forms of entertainment," he said.  "The title's

With the holiday season comes the annual deluge of new video games -- and if
you have younger gamers in your household, some of them are bound to be
turning up on seasonal wish-lists. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) gives all games a helpful letter grade for age-appropriateness,
but what else should parents know before buying video games as gifts?
Get informed with this family-friendly breakdown of the year's hottest
hits.

Call of Duty: Black Ops (ESRB: M)

COD: Black Ops It might be topping the charts with consumers and critics, but parents
should take care with the latest in the Call of Duty series. Set in a
comparatively realistic Cold War-era world, it's definitely among the
year's most

About six months after it first began streaming high-end PC games to
tiny desktop clients via broadband, OnLive is poised to unleash its
Game System package: a game controller bundled with a compact, Wi-Fi-
and HDMI-equipped console that'll stream games like Batman: Arkham
Asylum and Assassin's Creed II to your HDTV, all for less than $100.

Set to start shipping Dec. 2, the $99 OnLive Game System comes with a controller that looks pretty much like the controller you get with an Xbox 360. But the so-called MicroConsole is something else: Instead of a big box juiced with a high-powered GPU
and loads of RAM, the MicroConsole is a little more than a
paperback-book-sized conduit for the OnLine

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Platforms: X360, PS3, PC

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

It seems like just last year we were sinking ourselves into the
rooftop-climbing, pope-punching world of stealthy medieval thriller
Assassin's Creed 2...and that's because it was just last year. In a remarkably quick turnaround, Brotherhood, the latest in the series, drops this week. While it's not exactly a sequel, it certainly carries on where 2 left off -- and it's gathering some stellar
reviews to boot.

Dishing out a rare perfect 10, Eurogamer's Tom Bramwell clearly loved the game. Calling it "one of the best games of 2010," he praises its execution of the oft-trodden open-world concept.

"Never before have we seen a game whose open

Fallout: New Vegas If you're the lucky owner of one of the five million copies of Fallout: New Vegas publisher Bethesda shipped out to retail last month, circle the date December 21 in your calendar.

Assuming you bought it on Xbox 360, that is.

That's the release date for New Vegas's first downloadable content update. It's called "Dead Money" and will set players the task of recovering the lost treasure of the Sierra Madre...which is a casino, not a gold-rich
region of Mexico. So no, there's no particular connection to the 1940s Bogart flick, although we kind of wish there was. It'll be an Xbox exclusive and cost 800 Microsoft points (or $10, in real money).

Dead Money will add new terrain, new enemies, and

Retail woes(Reuters) - Retail sales of video game hardware and software in the United States fell 4 percent in October, industry tracker NPD said on Tuesday, dragged down by poor demand for portable and home consoles.

Game software sales rose 6 percent to $605 million in the month, while hardware sales tumbled 26 percent to $280 million, NPD said.

Sales of accessories rose 18 percent to $142 million, helped by demand for Sony's Move motion-controller.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 was the only home console to see year-over-year growth in the month. It is the best-selling console this year in the United States on a unit basis, according to NPD data.

Take-Two Interactive Software's "NBA 2K11" was the top-selling

Super Mario Galaxy

Starting at number 10, Mario Galaxy 2 might be one of the best-reviewed games of all time, but it's off to a little bit of a slow start. All the same, its estimated sales are north of a million copies... and we get the feeling that isn't the only Mario we'll see on this list.

Nintendo might be the current king of motion-control, but they spent years as the court jester thanks to the awful (and awesome) Power Glove. While it looked like all kinds of cheesy fun, its rickety motion-control tech barely worked. Making matters worse, only two games specifically built for the Glove were ever released, quickly turning it into more of a failed curiosity than a must-have. Its one credit? Spawning the so-bad-it's-good Fred Savage flick, "The Wizard."