We’ve not had to wait long for the Resurgence Pack, have we? It’s barely been two months since the Stimulus Package first spread like wildfire across Xbox Live, and here we are with another batch of 5 maps for the same hefty price of 1200 points. Oh Infinity Ward, you do spoil/exploit us and so on.

Map packs. We’ve been here before, we’ll be here again. Do they add anything to the game? Will they divide the player base? How on Earth am I supposed to find the time to work out new hiding spots? I’m a busy man you know. Oh, and price. I ended my review of the Stimulus Package with some thoughts on the pricing, but the initial community reception to the announcement of the Resurgence Pack shows there’s still plenty of venom regarding the cost.

It’s probably worth expressing some personal thoughts on the matter, so there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind as to which side of the fence I’m on. My Modern Warfare 2 clock stands at a little under four days, so dropping down about three pints worth of money on five new maps isn’t too much of a big deal for me. I’ll get my money’s worth.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops takes us back through time or, more specifically, to one particular stretch: the Cold War. It’s another case of history being told through the eyes of videogame designers, with military vignettes being picked out and displayed on account of their raw violence. Real life soldiers don’t have checkpoints, but let’s not worry about that.

From the get-go, Black Ops looks to be doing what Call of Duty does best – bombastic scenes told with explosive relish, scripted down to the very last tree trunk. The two levels on show at Activision’s pre-E3 press conference confirm the series’ age-old mantra of if it can explode, it will explode. And things certainly do explode.

The first level, WMD, takes us to the snow-kissed peaks of soviet Russia, with an elite black ops squadron (wait – that’s the name of the game!) named Kilo One tasked with infiltrating a dodgy weapons lab. Seeing as this is Call of Duty, ‘infiltrate’ loosely translates to ‘roughly shoot everyone in the face, jab them with pointy blades and toss them off mountains’. Who’s not down with that?

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Like the developers of EA’s Medal of Honor reboot, I’ve seen The Hurt Locker – clearly a major source of inspiration for the game – and it’s a pretty grim portrayal of the politically perilous situation over in the Middle East at the moment. So, who wants to grab an M4 and shoot some terrorists right in the face?

“We’re Rangers. This is what we do,” enthuses a marine to his family over the phone, presumably directly referring to the act of shooting terrorists in the face but said to assuage his family’s fears over him being riddled with bullets or blown up by a roadside bomb. He doesn’t bother to remind the family about regenerating health and generous checkpoints.

The action takes place in the north of Afghanistan, we’re told, so we’re left to assume that the narrator is either safe in the south or simply lying to his family. In my mind, his son is waving an American flag for the duration of the conversation, although the imagery being displayed on-screen is decidedly less patriotic: an American Chinook is being destroyed by rocket fire. Crumbs. Is the child now without a father? Medal of Honor is trying very hard to make us empathise with these characters on a human level.

You do not empathise with these characters on a human level. You can’t, because as soon as the action starts they’re little more than a regular gung-ho military superhero type who blasts away scores of enemies without a care in the world. I am told this is not what it is like to be an actual marine – just like the developers, most of my military knowledge comes from old war movies and the odd documentary on the History Channel when I’ve lost the remote control – so no matter how hard EA strives for authenticity, it will forever be out of the game’s reach. Might as well toss in a few snowmobiles and explode a nuke in space, eh?

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Setting is important. Rapture was a representation of Andrew Ryan’s failed objectivist ideology; Pandora’s wastelands showed greed corrupting the world at every corner; and now Bulletstorm’s Elysium is a detailed expression of how awesome a world would be if it were the destructive playground of a swaggering muscle man with enough brute power to kick a dude thirty feet.

Over the course of a gory presentation at EA’s spring showcase earlier this week, People Can Fly’s Creative Director, Adrian Chmielarz, put game hero Grayson Hunt through a murderous boot camp of unfettered testosterone so intense it was a miracle he left the stage without beating his chest and grunting a rendition of The Village People’s Macho Man.

A generous pinch of hyperbole was to be expected, of course. People Can Fly’s previous game, Painkiller, had you playing as a gruff dude pruning the forces of hell with a gun that fired stakes and another which shot both shruikens and lightning. Bulletstorm, the developer’s new game produced in partnership with Epic Games, has you playing a gruff dude blasting away grumpy fauna and unlikable mercenary mooks whilst coming on to your sexy female sidekick.

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Sam “Serious” Stone knows how life is: the only good headless kamikaze Sirian cyborg is a dead headless kamikaze Sirian cyborg.

If you’re looking for subtlety, you won’t find it here. Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter is a self-consciously bombastic game, and one concentrating so hard to channel the spirit of DOOM it probably forgot what it was originally supposed to be doing and accidentally ended up in 2010.

In all honestly, most people probably didn’t play Serious Sam SD: The Second Encounter when it was first released in 2002, so this new bump-mapped redux will arrive without a healthy dose of historical context. That’s fine: those things on the screen? Shoot them.

But even scarier is the thought of today’s youth being so young they’ve probably not even played DOOM, the spiffing game Serious Sam modelled itself on. The closest these children have come to id’s seminal 1993 classic is through the occasional appearance of it on dodgy 90s movies, back when everyone had flat tops and mobile phones the size of lampshades. This game’s target audience is probably people that were too young to legally play Serious Sam in the early noughties, but did anyway, and are now well into their twenties.

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If Modern Warfare 2′s in-game player monitor is any indicator, Infinity Ward has already succeeded with the Stimulus Package: hundreds of thousands of people are currently playing, above and beyond the kind of numbers most developers would be happy to drown a sack of adorable puppies to achieve. Even after a quarter of a year, the world’s most successful videogame is still staggeringly popular.

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Red Steel never happened. Forget that it sold a million copies worldwide: the original game has now been relocated into the same district of let’s-forget-it-ever-happened as Tab Clear, Joey’s spin-off series and Choco Krispies. Say goodbye, nonsensical yakuza plot and wacky time-stopping powers. The new hotness is Red Steel 2, set in some sort of futuristic wild-west and feudal Tokyo mash-up and featuring a nonsensical samurai plot.

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What’s Serious Sam like in HD? Well, it’s like Serious Sam. It plays exactly, and unapologetically, like the 2001 original. Croatian developers Croteam are confident that this, along with the engine’s new jinglier bells and noisier whistles, is enough to tempt you to spend the best part of twenty quid. They also wouldn’t mind if you forgot that the alternative is rooting around a second-hand bargain bin and picking up a dusty old copy of the eight-year-old original for fifty pence.

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You only need to peek at EA’s immense marketing spend for Left 4 Dead 2 to see what all the fuss is about. Last year’s affair was comparatively muted, spurred along by word of mouth, adulation from the gaming press and a communal respect for Valve’s pedigree as a developer. Left 4 Dead 2 begins with the success of the original, creating a sequel born out of dedication, a shrewd understanding of the online market and the realisation that the first one of these was pretty dang good.

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The Zone is a hostile place. If it’s not the mutants, bandits or aggressive weather conditions putting an end to the player’s expedition around Chernobyl nuclear power plant, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s unoptimised, uncompromising engine will routinely throw its own spanner in the works and spectacularly crash to desktop.

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