When Call of Duty's previous installment made it to the PC it had somewhat of a hard time competing with the hype that other titles like Crysis had built behind them. Nevertheless, CoD 4 proved in the long run to be the better overall game, and not only for the gameplay, but because it presented a wider range of PC gamers the best package in terms of graphics and playability, no matter how slow or fast your graphics card was.

Call of Duty 4 also furthered the genre in a number of aspects like digital distribution (through Steam despite of not being a Valve property) and a top notch multiplayer campaign that ultimately made it worthwhile to bring the game to the Mac platform as well.

With that kind of background you can imagine hype and expectation is going through the roof for Call of Duty 5: World at War that also got boosted last month by a multiplayer beta in the PC and Xbox 360 platforms.

The game should be available in the North America starting today for the following platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, DS, and PS2. Australia and Europe will receive the game a couple of days later. Expect our usual graphics card performance review of the game in the coming days.

But before you go to pick the game up from store shelves, you may want to leave your computer downloading the 1.1 patch that was made available just today. Also watch the teaser trailer after the jump.