You can really tell that the holiday season is coming; publishers are announcing special editions of their games left and right. After Electronic Arts' announcements of the really expensive collector's editions for their Dead Space and Mirror's Edge games, Activision decided to launch a special edition of their newest release in the Call of Duty franchise, CoD: World at War.

As opposed to the bundles of DVDs or bags that you get from EA, Activision really offers something useful. Along with the game, you get a special customized metal box for it, a canteen, for all those rough nights spent playing the World War II title, and, for the multiplayer content, a full week of double XP points coupled with access to a powerful weapon that will guarantee your supremacy. All these for a reasonable 80 dollars for the Xbox 360 version or 70 dollars for the PC one.

Along with the announcement of the Collector's Edition, Activision also released the official system specifications for the PC version. In my opinion, this move shows that they are very generous, leaving Windows XP players with a slight smile on their faces.

Processor: AMD 64 3200+/Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz or better.

Memory: 8 GB free hard-drive space, 512MB RAM (XP)/1GB RAM (Vista).

Graphics: Shader 3.0 or better, 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6600GT/ATI Radeon 1600XT or better.

CoD: World at War promises to bring something new to the old WW II shooters, which have saturated the market, showing the war as it took place in the Pacific. The war was a messy affair for the infantry men. Tanks were useless, so small islands chocked up by jungles, air power and naval gunfire could only do so much to soften up the Japanese defenders. So, the infantry had to go into the battle knowing the fact that a tree is almost always home to a sniper, that a tree patch can hide an ambush force and that the enemy might suddenly pop up behind you from a network of tunnels. The rational response to such threats was to use the flamethrower on a massive scale as a weapon against both the enemy and the environment.

All in all, it promises to be a pretty good game, so it looks like we'll just have to wait and see.