Ice Station Santa is even better than the entire Season one !
First, let's start with the improvements that have been made for the episode:
1-Now you don't immediately start the game once you click on the executable shortcut .. A window will appear having various other options beside launching the game .. like an option to get to Telltale Forums .. an option for the latest hints or walkthroughs ..another option to access community contents .. such as comics , news , blogs .
-It's a great touch and the one I really like is that option for hints and walkthroughs , now I don't have to open Google and start searching for guides every time I get stuck !
2-We finally are able to play on Wide-screen resolutions like 1280 X 1024 !
and since the game does not support Anti-Aliasing .. running it on that former resolution is very handy for 17' screen owners like me !
3-An option is added for In-Game hints .. it's like a difficulty option .. you can set the hints to be rare or often or frequent or whatever .. the hint system is initiated every time you get confused and start wandering through the levels aimlessly .. once the game notices that , Max will say an innocent comment that concludes a hidden hint within it's words !
Sometimes , though .. the hint will be very clear and Max will scream at you to get your attention for the specific target .
Never the less that hint system is very useful once you start to go puzzled about all those new items and side missions !
4-Various bug fixes are made .. including the famous arrow bug .. and other bugs related to slowing of the game on certain PCs.
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As for the other portions of the game :
((Story)) : Well , the story here is very very funny .. you'll have to smile every time you hear Sam or Max speaking .. for a guy like me whose first language isn't English , I -sometimes- find it difficult to understand some jokes .. however, in this episode every thing was clear as the sun .. I really enjoyed it and I even had several loud laughs!
((Graphics)) : Well , the graphics remained the same .. and aside from the newly supported resolutions .. you can feel the attention to the detail in this episode particularly .. you can see that there is an effort to gather every thing together in a one great-looking picture .. despite that , I still hope that they'll increase the number of polygons for the characters -at least !- .. that will make the game look even better .
((Audio)) : there is no problem of what-so-ever in the voice of Sam or Max or any other character in the game .. they all sound perfect for their specified role -Especially Bosco ! - .
((Presentation)) ; After those improvements .. the whole game appears now like a well balanced pack .. the controlled cut-scenes remained funny and hilarious as always .. and the story is driven in a very believable way .. the plot isn't way too complicated like other episodes , in fact it is very understandable .
((Re-Playability)) : this Episode is fun and is easy to be digested .. I am certain that some people will find replaying it as funny and as enjoyable as the first time .
((Scalability)) : The game runs perfectly on a 6600GT 128MB , 1.0 GB of RAM , 3.14 GHz Pentium 4 and a Windows Vista Ultimate with the latest updates.
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That brings my review to the conclusion ; and as I said previously : this pack looks just right and feels just right .. I give it 9.0 of 10 .. and I hope to see more of the same for the future episodes or .. better than the same !