From midnight on November 13, video games fans will finally get their hands on one of the most eagerly awaited games this year: Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

The last title in the series, which came out two years ago, grossed $1bn in just 16 days worldwide: proving more popular than James Cameron's massive box office hit Avatar, which took 17 days to reach that number.

There are equally high expectations of this latest release, as stores across the country brace themselves for fans queuing through the night.

Best Buy said that it was opening 900 stores on Monday night, about one-third of which will let customers play the game on big-screen LG 3D TVs starting at 9pm. Fans are already lining up to get their hands on a copy in some parts of the world, including one 19-year-old camped out for four days in one of the world's busiest shopping streets, Oxford Street in London.

The game, developed by Treyarch, is in its ninth iteration, and Black Ops II takes as its inspiration a similar Cold War setting to the first game.

However, once the main character and the background story have been established, the action quickly progresses to the futuristic setting of 2025.

There the player is confronted with a new bad guy - Nicaraguan narco-terrorist Raul Menendez, in a world where the US and China are engaged in a dangerous new Cold War.

Treyarch recruited Hollywood scriptwriter David Goyer - the writer of Batman Begins and the Dark Knight rises, to create the story which can veer off in multiple directions depending on the player's actions.

The future setting has allowed the programmers to include new weapons and new settings never seen before in the franchise.

In addition to the story mode, which boasts eight hours of gameplay, there's an online multiplayer combat game that many gamers spend hundreds of hours playing.

Pre-orders have already pushed Black Ops II to the top of Amazon's bestseller list, where it has replaced Halo 4 - another hugely popular first-person shooter released last month.

The games' release is being timed with the airing of a "Making of..." documentary, that was shown on DirectTV. It will feature interviews with the development team, voice actors, outside consultants and professional gamers. The documentary was shown on the Audience Network channel at 7pm EST with reruns at 10pm and 8pm the following day.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops II is available on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. It will also be available on Nintendo's forthcoming Wii U console.