Call of Duty: are the kids all right? Parents of teenagers need not fear the latest war videogame – and stopping them playing it could lead to some classic tantrums ... The annual pop-culture juggernaut which is Call of Duty has again rolled into town: this year's iteration, Black Ops, is in the shops today. Given that it's a much better game than was perhaps anticipated, that is good news for gamers. But its arrival will induce a certain amount of consternation among parents, especially of teenage boys, worried that that's the last they will see of their offspring until they emerge, all but zombified, at some unspecified point in the future. Such fears are understandable but, I would contend, fallacious. Call of Duty is not a particularly unique game – there are hundreds of other similar first-person shooters, in which the player takes on the role of a soldier in startlingly realistic combat situations – but CoD is one of the highest-quality games money can buy. Despite being developed by a different company to its standards-setting predecessor, Modern Warfare 2, Black Ops has turned out to be at least as good. – UK Guardian

Dominant Social Theme: Kill 'em all. And then reload.