The soundtrack to Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, will soon be available through iTunes and other distribution networks. The score for BO2 has been composed by British Academy of Film & Television Arts Nominee Jack Wall, and features a theme song composed by Trent Reznor. “The story surrounding the single player campaign was of paramount importance to the developers at Treyarch,” said Jack Wall. “I wanted to do my part to give that story as much emotional depth as I could with the music. I think the fans will really appreciate how deep the story is in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.”

The soundtrack will include forty tracks. You can purchase it separately or you can get it at a discount by purchasing the Black Ops 2 Hardened Edition, a limited edition package which includes a number of exciting bonuses at a low price. Along with the soundtrack, you’ll also receive collectible dog tags which can be used to unlock exclusive DLC for the game, and many other great bonuses besides. Pre-ordering the game gives you free access to the Nuketown 2025 map as well, which will only be available for free through next Monday. On Tuesday, November 13th, the game will officially be released. So order now while you can still get all the freebies and benefits!

Hopefully you know this by now—hopefully you’re already waiting eagerly for the mail to come tomorrow with your pre-ordered copy of Black Ops 2. Otherwise, you should probably be making an excuse to your boss right now so you can skip out of work early and head on down to your local Black Ops 2 release party. Black Ops 2 is now the most pre-ordered game on Amazon.com in the website’s history. There are still a few hours left to get a pre-order in, so hurry up!

If you pre-order Black Ops 2 from Amazon, you’ll get access to the Nuketown 2025 bonus map (if it becomes available later to other gamers, you’ll probably have to pay for it if you choose not to pre-order). You’ll also get an exclusive Kindle backstory called Rightful King, which will give you background information on villain Raul Menendez. Other bonuses include access to Double XP Weekend, the exclusive Amazon Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Wallpaper, and some free instant video credit. This deal will be gone in just a few hours!

With Black Ops 2 coming out in a few days, there has been a little more information released about some of the perks. One of those is called “Tombstone.” Apparently this perk will allow a player to return to the same spot where he died and to resurrect with the same weapon in hand if the perk is purchased and used. The Tombstone perk should cost 2000 points if current reports are accurate.

We’ve also learned more about the new and improved spawning system which should save players a lot of annoyances. Not only will the new system prevent spawns right in front of enemy players (and thus reduce spawn traps and system abuses), but it will also try to ensure that players won’t respawn miles away from all the action, necessitating a long run just to get back into the fight. Game designer David Vonderhaar refers to the “3-second rule” to explain how this works. The design team accumulated data on the first three seconds following spawnings. This included how many times a player could be shot at within the first three seconds following spawning and how many times that player could shoot at others within three seconds of spawning in different locations.

By compiling this data, the design team were able to work out respawn locations which minimized action during the first three seconds of spawning. How they worked out the balance with not being too far away from the action isn’t clear from the explanation. But one can see how this would prevent those obnoxious spawns where you die instantly on reappearing in the game because some person shoots you in the back before you can even move or get your bearings. Bad respawns can cost you the high score or can cost a team an entire game.

So far, Vonderhaar says the team has achieved a high rate of success with the spawning changes. This is one of the hardest aspects of a FPS game to get right, so we’re excited to see the improvements. Eliminating bad spawns could improve the playability of maps which might otherwise pose difficulty to players and should hopefully lead to greater fairness and more accurate scores for matches.

With Black Ops 2 coming out on November 13th (that’s this Tuesday for anyone who hasn’t checked a calendar), it’s time for Game Stop locations and other retailers around the globe to start announcing their midnight launch locations. As is traditional whenever a Call of Duty game is released, fans line up outside the stores the night before. Hundreds of gamers (sometimes even thousands) often show up to launch events, and they can be a lot of fun. Some retailers offer bonuses to players who come to the launch events (free T-shirts for example). It’s a great way to socialize and to meet members of the community and to take part in the excitement first hand.

It also requires standing in line in the middle of the night. If you don’t want to do that, the best way to get a copy of the game is to pre-order it in the next several days. Pre-ordering comes with nifty bonuses like the Nuketown 2025 map and the exclusive Kindle backstory if you order from Amazon (not to mention some free store credit). If you don’t pre-order and you don’t stand in line the night before, you probably will still be waiting for your copy come November 13th. Your local store doesn’t have a bottomless stock of Black Ops 2 copies, and they’re probably going to sell out to the crowd that stands in line the night before. So if you walk into a store on November 13th, odds are you’ll either be waiting in line or you won’t find any copies left when you show up, and either way you could leave empty-handed.

Pre-ordering ensures that your copy of Black Ops 2 will safely arrive in the mail on November 13th, ready to play. While you’re ordering, you might consider grabbing a copy of the Hardened Edition. This limited edition will eventually sell out completely and forever, and it comes with bonuses which aren’t available as part of the standard edition, including exclusive DLC. Ultimately it will give you access to more content and more fun, and at a great price which isn’t all that much higher than the price for the standard edition.

Yet another retailer has broken the release date for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 in Europe. The UK retailer Simply Games sent out copies of Black Ops 2 three days early. Amazingly enough, this seems to have been entirely on purpose. On Facebook, the company actually posted that it would deliver Black Ops 2 early and had a huge banner which said, “Play it TOMORROW!” The banner was changed to one which said “Dispatched within 24 hours” shortly thereafter, one rather more vague in nature. As promised, Simply Games actually delivered, and some gamers in the UK already have their copies of Black Ops 2.

It’s pretty strange for a retailer to openly admit to and even publicize its efforts to ship out a game like Black Ops 2 early. Lots of retailers break the release date for games every year, but it’s often on accident and rarely done openly. Clearly Simply Games thought this was a good strategy for getting ahead of the game and making some extra sales, but retailers can pay a penalty for breaking release dates, and Activision may not be keen to work with them in the future. We’ll see what sort of consequences befall the company, though we wouldn’t be surprised if this headline gets swept under by the deluge of news which is sure to come out this week. We suggest simply ordering from Amazon, where you can get some awesome pre-order bonuses which aren’t available through other vendors, like free store credit and the exclusive backstory Rightful King for Kindle.

While the wait has felt endless, Black Ops 2 is coming out in just three days! Treyarch has just released some images of some of the weapons which will be included in the Zombies mode (Survival, presumably, but perhaps these also apply to TranZit as well). The pictures show a number of battered-looking guns as well as some grenades. From the pictures it isn’t easy to figure out too much about the weapons. These may be the weapons from the Pack a Punch machine, which appears to be situated on a bed of lava from a screenshot which has been released. That means you’ll lose health each time you go to get a weapon from the machine and you’ll need to get away and regroup before you can make use of the weapon.

These aren’t the homemade weapons we’ll be able to craft from supplies in the environment inTranZit. A Reddit user named Gobazooba has released a leaked list of the buildable weapons, however; if you don’t want any spoilers and would prefer to solve these puzzles yourself without any hints, skip the rest of this paragraph and jump on down to the following one. Here’s the quick version of the list. You’ll be able to build a Turbine, Zombie Shield, Machine Gun Turret, or Electric Trap. Additional weapons can be made using the Thrustodyne Aeronautics Model 23 jet engine and the Navcard Usage Machine.

The TranZit mode is going to be one of the most innovative additions to Call of Duty yet. The mode will take players to a zombie-infested city, a vast open world which can be explored at any pace in any order either on foot or on the bus. The open world environment will provide for endless different adventures which can unfold in varied ways depending on the choices of the players. Choosing to use the bus or to walk will present different strategic challenges. We’ve seen images of bars, restrooms, a hospital, and a number of other everyday types of locations as well as zombies in hospital gowns with glowing electric blue eyes. An image of a supposed electric zombie boss surfaced on the web a few days ago as well, though this leaked content may or may not be for real.

The zombies will also be making a run on Nuketown, but only for players who buy the Hardened Edition, available online right now. You also still have several days left to pre-order your standard edition copy of Black Ops 2 and get a copy of the Nuketown 2025 map along with other cool bonuses. But the offer expires in just a few short days, so don’t hold off!

As we’ve been reporting, copies of Black Ops 2 have been distributed early in some parts of Europe, breaking the release date. Needless to say, but Treyarch and Activision aren’t too happy about this. It was expected though; these mistakes happen all the time. For a couple of weeks now gamers who got their hands on their copies early have been releasing screenshots and other leaked information. Most of it has been poor in quality, but these map loading screens are great. Check them out:

The lineup looks pretty good. One complaint about Modern Warfare 3 was that Infinity Ward’s maps all looked rather the same (gray). The lack of color and contrast in the MW3 maps made them difficult to play and not too exciting to look at. We’d all been hoping that Treyarch would produce colorful maps as they have in the past, and it looks like we haven’t been disappointed. The grayest map appears to be Aftermath. The rest show a lot more color and contrast. Even Overflow, which shows a dilapidated city, seems to have a lot of colorful highlights which keep it easy on the eyes. As you can see, there are no snow maps, and there is only one nighttime map. A couple of the maps take place on ships. There is a lot of variation in the environments, even down to the atmospheres and lighting on the maps.

These are just the maps which will be included on the game disk. There will be more maps which will be available as DLC during the season, and the Nuketown 2025 bonus map which comes with the pre-order isn’t shown here either. Black Ops 2 will be released on November 13th; that’s next week Tuesday! Hurry up and pre-order if you want to get the Nuketown 2025 map for free; otherwise you’ll probably be paying for it. If you get the Hardened Edition, you’ll get access to additional exclusive maps and DLC.