Black Ops 2: Los Angeles is Burning

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was a dominating presence at E3. The latest game in the wildly successful series arrives November 13th and Activision promoted the game with the largest, loudest booth in the building.

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It seemed like the entire building was dominated by the 140-foot wide 6336×720 screen displaying a countdown clock and the world's largest game trailer. The thing played over and over and the entire area looked like Times Square on New Year's Eve for three solid days. The video above doesn't really capture how hard it was to hear anything that wasn't Black Ops while the movie was playing.

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Activision debuted this campaign gameplay trailer during their press conference and, for the rest of the week, everyone had to wait in line to see an up-close preview in small rooms tucked behind the giant screen. The storyline (co-written by Batman Begins screenwriter David Goyer) involves the U.S. drone army getting hijacked by still-mysterious villain Raul Menendez and the scene here requires you to get the President safely through downtown Los Angeles during an enemy strike.

They obviously didn't pick this scene at random, since a lot of the action takes place right outside the conference building and it was impossible not to think about Black Ops 2 once you left the building and saw the skyline again in person.

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The big reveal of the conference was the single-player Strike Force mode, a new wrinkle that will include a series of missions that let the player have an overview of the entire scene and freely jump back and forth between individual team members and drones on the battlefield.

No one's talking multiplayer yet. These guys have mastered the long, slow reveal and will relentlessly build the hype through the summer and fall. We'll be along for the ride, so keep checking back here as the news develops.