When Valve originally announced their plans to deliver the next part of the Half-Life story in episodic form everyone was pretty excited. Instead of waiting years for a full sequel, fans expected to get episode sized pieces every six months or so. Unfortunately, things didn't go exactly as planned. Episode 1 ended up getting delayed, and when it did come out it was a bit disappointing.

Episode 1 ended up feeling like more of the same. There were no new weapons or vehicles, and the game even took place in the same locations you visited the first time around. This really gave the game a sense of déjà vu while you were fighting the same enemies (except for one) with the same weapons in the same location. Add to that the fact that not much really happened in Episode 1 to move the plot along, and what you end up with is a game that, while fun, was ultimately disappointing.

Luckily, Episode 2 fixes a lot of the problems that Episode 1 had, making it a truly enjoyable game without any reservations. While Episode 1's weakest point was the plot, the opposite is true this time around. Episode 2 starts where you left off, with Gordon Freeman and Alyx the run from the Combine. Your goal is to make it across the countryside surrounding the outskirts of City 17 and deliver the data packet that you stole to a resistance base called White Forest. The Combine know that you took it, and will be stalking you relentlessly the entire way, making your journey (which should take between 4-5 hours) pretty exciting. Along the way you will meet quite a few new characters, engage in some pretty cool combat, and learn quite a bit of backstory. Of course actually getting there is easier said then done, and you won't believe some of the places that you end up at along the way.

These new locations mark a big change from the typical linear urban and industrial environments of the previous games, opening the game up to some new gameplay possibilities. Many of the environments are a lot more open ended then those in the previous games, giving you much more freedom this time around. A new vehicle is introduced, and you will end up keeping it for quite a long time (while getting upgrades). This vehicle adds new gameplay elements that work great with the open environments. For example, at one point in the game you will be racing around to different locations in order to protect them from a huge strider and hunter attack. To say this segment is frantic would be an understatement.

Besides new locations and gameplay, the game also features a few new enemy types. The biggest of which is the Hunter. These flechette shooting creatures usually appear in packs, and can be pretty lethal if you don't work fast to take them out. There are also two new forms of Antlions. The first is the Worker Antlion that likes to keep its distance and lob acid at you. They can also fly; making them pretty fast and mobile. Lastly, there are the Antlion Grubs. These pretty much function as health kits and light up the underground tunnels.

There really isn't much in the way of new weapons. There is the "Magnusson Device", a sticky bomb of sorts that you attack to striders by launching it with the gravity gun. Still, the Half-Life arsenal already had pretty much every weapon category covered, so the lack of new content here is not much of an issue.

The only category that Episode 2 does disappoint a bit is graphics. The Source Engine is starting to show its age. But Valve did make some new enhancements to it that should help it last a bit longer. The most impressive addition is the cinematic physics system which supports very large interactions that blend physics events with key frame animation. Examples include a house exploding or a bridge collapsing. There is also a new dynamic lighting and shadowing system, which allows the player's flashlight to cast dynamic shadows. Lastly, there is an updated particle system as well as new effects such as motion blur.

Overall, Episode 2 is a good game. It addresses all of Episode 1's shortcomings, and actually surpasses Half-Life 2 in some aspects. After Episode 1, I was a bit worried that the rest of the episodes wouldn't live up to my expectations. But Episode 2 has renewed my faith in Valve, and is absolutely worth a purchase.

After The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's release last year, Bethesda Softworks has been slowly releasing little nuggets of new content via Xbox Live Marketplace. Most of this content, while cheap, didn't add much to the game. Unlike the previous downloads, the Shivering Isles is an expansion pack filled with content, adding roughly 20-40 hours of new gameplay for those still running around Cyrodiil.

The expansion begins when you hear news about a strange island that has sprouted up in the middle of Niben Bay. Upon inspecting the island, you are greeted by a soldier standing guard outside of a strange doorway. Apparently everyone that has entered the portal has either come back out insane, or has simply not come back at all. Being the brave adventurer you are, you enter to find that you have arrived at the Shivering Isles, the realm of Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness. He has put a call out for a champion to help him stop the Greymarch; a sort of cleaning that happens at the end of every era.

The world of the Shivering Isles is divided into two regions: Mania to the Northeast and Dementia to the Southwest. Both areas are visually stunning and look absolutely nothing like anything that you have seen in Cyrodiil. Mania is very bright, vibrant, and oversaturated with plants like tall trees and large colorful mushrooms. On the other hand, Dementia is a very dark, foggy, and washed out swampland. The main city, New Sheoth, is also divided into two sections called Bliss and Crucible. The entire size of the Isles is about a quarter of the size of Cyrodiil, and is packed with tons of stuff to explore.

The main quest is pretty epic in scope and is easily on par with the one in the main game. The quests, of which many are memorable, will take you all over the Shivering Isles to complete various tasks. Your first job upon entering the realm of Sheogorath is to defeat the Gatekeeper. He is an extremely large and powerful enemy that is guarding the Gates of Madness, which is the only exit from the Fringe (a holding area of sorts that prevents those unworthy from entering the actual Isles). You can face him as is, but innovative players will find ways to tip the battle in their favor.

Another one of the early quests involves you reactivating Xedilian, which is an old dungeon that was used to deal with unwanted adventurers before the Gatekeeper was created. Once activated, the dungeon magically draws any visitors to it, at which point you can either kill or play tricks on the NPCs that find their way into its chambers.

Besides the main quest, the game offers a lot of interesting side quests, many of which are just as crazy as the people who reside in the Isles. One of the citizens of Bliss will explain to you that while he has perfected getting boats to float on the water, he has had less success in forcing the water to fly through air. Logically, a boat carried by flying water becomes a Skyboat. So he tasks you with searching everywhere for calipers and tongs to achieve the effect of keeping water airborne, and pays you gold for each caliper or tong you bring him. Another resident is afraid to sleep inside because he believes the walls will fall on top of him. So he asks you to find a safe place for him to sleep outside.

In addition to the new quests, the expansion also includes new weapons and armor, some of which you can craft from raw materials found in various dungeons throughout the Shivering Isles. Players will also get some new spells along the way, the most interesting of which are a few summons. Also, those who like to create their own potions will find a huge amount of new ingredients to experiment with.

Overall, the Shivering Isles is pretty good. It features all of the stuff that you would expect from an expansion pack: an interesting plot, a good amount of quests, new weapons, armor, ect. Not to mention that this expansion offers more hours of gameplay then other full priced retail games, making the Shivering Isles a convincing reason to revisit an already excellent game.

Star Trek fans have had some pretty funny luck when it comes to video games. For every good game like Starfleet Command or Elite Force there is an Star Trek: Encounters or Star Trek: Pinball. Luckily, Star Trek: Legacy is a pretty decent game, although it is clear that it had the potential to be a whole lot better. On paper, Legacy sounds like a great Star Trek game. Give the player control of lots of ships, cover every series, include the voices of every Starfleet captain, and tie it together with a storyline that would actually make a good Star Trek movie. And for the most part the game is pretty good.

You start the game off as Captain Archer in the NX-01 before moving on to the Enterprise, Defiant, and so on. The ships are modeled pretty accurately, and behave as you would expect. The combat offers a good amount of depth without getting absurdly complicated like the Starfleet Command games. The starship combat revolves around maneuvering your ships, either together as one task force or individually, into position to get your enemy into the firing arcs of your weapons, while trying to stay out of theirs.

Most ships have both phasers and torpedoes. Phasers are good against shields and they run off of energy which recharges after firing. The amount of damage they do increases over time, so allowing them to fully charge before firing again is a good tactic. Torpedoes are good against the hull of a ship and they do a constant amount of damage. However, you have a limited number of them, so you will want to make sure you have a good lock on the target before firing. The strength of your weapons lock depends on your position and distance from your target. And if you are able to get in close enough you have the option of targeting specific subsystems in the enemy ship such as weapons or engines.

You can also manage your speed. Besides going to warp, you can run at full, ½ or ¼ impulse. Slowing down allows you to turn faster, but also makes you an easier target to hit. In addition to changing speed, you also have control over your power systems. Rerouting power can give you a boost to the system (engines, shields, weapons) that you need the most at any specific moment. For example, you can take power from your shields and route it to weapons for faster recharge and longer range at the cost of defense. Lastly, you can issue repairs on certain ship systems, but repairing will drain energy, making your ship less effective in battle while the repairs are underway.

There are of course other tactics that you can take advantage of such as hiding ships in nebulas and beaming away teams to space stations once the shields are down to capture it, but these are more mission specific and you wont find yourself doing them very often.

As you complete each mission, you are given points that you can spend on buying new ships for your task force. You can have up to four ships directly under your control at one time. Ships fall into different ****s such as cruisers and destroyers, and it’s up to you to decide how many ships you actually need and of what type. These points carry over from one mission to another, so it’s a good idea to try to save as many credits as you can or you may find yourself facing heavy opposition with not enough points to buy more powerful ships to even the odds.

The missions offer a pretty good variety of things to do. They are not all “go here and kill everything” missions that you might expect. While some will task you with doing just that, there are also missions where you will be evacuating people from poisoned planets, sneaking across enemy lines in a cloaked ship to conduct hit and run attacks, and defending Deep Space 9 from the Borg. The game is at its best when it throws you into these huge battles. Seeing these beautiful ships fill the screen and explode is pretty exciting.

However, the game also has some low points. This is mainly the result of your inability to save during the missions. So if you fail, you are suck restarting the mission from the beginning. With some missions lasting nearly an hour, this is really unacceptable. At the very least the game should offer a mid-level checkpoint. Sometimes mission objectives are not completely clear, leaving you trying to figure out what it is that you are supposed to be doing. One mission where you save planets from falling interstellar debris proved especially annoying because of a rather narrow margin of error. Luckily this is the exception rather then the rule. I only had to restart one mission the entire time, although it did take three or four tries until I finally got it. But for the most part the mission design is fine.

The storyline is actually surprisingly good. It tells the story of a Vulcan scientist that discovers the remains of a Borg ship during the early days of the Federation, and figures out a way to become their queen. It’s a pretty good plot device that ties all of the eras together, that is if you can follow it. If you find yourself feeling like the story is missing something, that’s because it is. A few missions were cut, particularly from the end, of the game in order to get it out in time. You still get the gist of what is going on, but it’s not as clear as it could have been.

While the storyline is pretty cool, the way it is presented is not. Missions often open up with long winded narrative by one of the captains while the camera just circles around the ship. This is a pretty boring way to tell the story, and it’s surprising that they could not find a more interesting way to tell it. However, the voice acting is pretty good for the most part, and having all of the captains voice their lines makes these sequences bearable.

Online, the game doesn’t have much going for it. There are only two modes of play available. The first is a deathmatch game where you simply try to destroy your opponents either by yourself of in teams. The second is a co-op survival game where you and your teammates try to survive wave after wave of enemy ships. Both can be fun for a while, but it’s not something that will hold most people’s attention for more then a few games.

Overall, Star Trek: Legacy is a good game. The starship combat is fun and has a good amount of depth to it, while the missions offer enough variety to keep you playing for a while. There is also a good mix of achievements that give some incentive to go back and play certain missions over again. Although it is a little disappointing to think about how much better this game could have been if they spent a little more time on it and added a few more features like checkpoints and more multiplayer options. Let’s hope Mad Doc Software gets a shot at a squeal, and are given the time they need to make it amazing.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series of games have seen a whole lot of change over the years. The series started out as a slow, tactical, shooter with a heavy emphasis on planning. When the series made its jump to the Xbox with Rainbow Six 3, the game dropped the planning stage to attempt to appeal to a broader audience, while still retaining a tactical shooter feel. The game was extremely successful, becoming one of the most played games on Xbox Live. But after a well received expansion, the developers took a sharp turn and moved the franchise into arcade shooter territory. The majority of the fans were disappointed, and the game was a critical failure. But don’t worry Rainbow fans, Ubisoft has indeed learned from their mistakes. Vegas is the most intense and tactical Rainbow Six game, making it easily the best in the series.

Rainbow Six: Vegas takes place in Las Vegas as you probably have guessed. Most of the story unfolds while you are playing the game, either in helicopter briefings while you are flying to your next target or while you are on foot from an audio and video feed in the top left of your screen. This is a pretty nice change from the text briefings before missions that Rainbow Six players are used to. Without giving too much of the plot away, terrorists have attacked various casinos in the city, taking some hostages and planting bombs. You play as Logan Keller, a team leader for a group of highly skilled soldiers, and it is your job to go from casino to casino and take care of business. If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. We have all heard this same basic story dozens of times in other games and Hollywood action movies. But while the storyline isn’t exactly original, it is good enough to keep you at least mildly interested. What really matters is the gameplay, and that is where the game truly shines.

If you have ever played Gears of War, your might be surprised how similar the two games play. They were in development around the same time, so it’s hard to say if any copying was going on, but both games have a heavy emphasis on cover, requiring you to use anything you can hind behind to stay alive. However, the cover system in Vegas works quite a bit better then it does in Gears. You have a lot more control when it comes to moving around cover and shooting out. Also, the cover seems more important in Vegas then it did in Gears, mostly because you can take much fewer shots in Vegas before going down.

Another element both games have in common is a squad of teammates that you fight along with. Controlling the team works similar to other games in the series. You can still tell your squad where to move, whether to hold fire or shoot on sight, to stack up behind doors before throwing in a grenade and storming in as well as all of the other commands you could give in the previous games. However, there are a few additions. For example, you now have a snake cam that allows you to peak under doors. Using this device, you can then give your team priority targets in the next room, to make sure they take down the most important enemies first when they enter. Your teammates also have some pretty good AI. They know how to take cover and engage enemies, meaning you really don’t have to worry about them that much. They also do a great job taking down terrorists, making them very useful.

Besides commanding your squad, the game has other features that allow for some complex tactics. Many of the rooms have multiple entry points. Using the snake cam you can scout out the room before determining how you want to enter it. You can even use two entrances at once, by having your team stack up outside one door while you go to another. Then you can order your squad to barge in guns blazing at the same time you enter from another door. You also have the option to do some repelling during some points of the game, which adds another entrance, the windows, to a room.

Your large selection of weapons also allows you to take in some tactical considerations. Vegas features a ton of assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns, and pretty much any type of gun you can think of. Each of the weapons offers some level of customization. Pistols can have things like extended magazines or laser sights, while rifles can be fitted with different types of scopes depending on what is needed. Once you have selected your guns, you can choose from items like explosive grenades, C4, breaching charges, flash grenades, and more.

With the cover system, team controls, multiple entry points, and a large selection of weapons, Rainbow Six: Vegas offers a lot of choice when it comes to tactics.

But the single player campaign is only half of what the game has to offer. Rainbow Six: Vegas has a fully featured and expansive multiplayer option, which easily makes it the best on-line shooter on the Xbox 360. The core of the multiplayer experience is what the developers call the P.E.C., or “Persistent Elite Creation”. When you first start out, you create your own character and have a limited access to different types of gear like body armor and weapons. After every match, your character gains experience, allowing you to go up in rank and gain access to more items. It’s a neat feature that rewards you for playing, yet doesn’t make the game feel unfair for new players that don’t have access to all of the items. Different armor makes you choose between mobility and protection, while other weapons may be more powerful but are harder to control.

There is a good selection of game modes to choose from that range from objective driven modes like attack and defend, to more standard offerings like solo and team deathmatch. The levels are varied and well designed for the most part. Though some, such as the Calypso Casino level, were clearly designed with attack and defend in mind and can be slightly unbalanced in other game modes like team deathmatch due to one team having a better spawn point. But if you are not into competitive gaming against other players, Vegas offers cooperative gameplay over live for the entire single player campaign with up to three other players. Or you can play “terrorist hunt” which is a mode that puts you and your friends in a level with a bunch of randomly placed terrorists that you need to take out.

Overall, Rainbow Six Vegas is a great game with a lot of value. The single player is challenging and offers a lot of depth, and the multiplayer packs in a lot of features. You could easily find yourself playing this game until the next Rainbow Six game comes out. It is not often that developers try to reinvent such a successful series, but Ubisoft gave it another shot and ended up creating the best Rainbow Six game so far.

Conker: Live and Reloaded is a remake of the classic Nintendo 64 game Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Bad Fur Day came out towards the end of the N64’s life, right about the time Nintendo was starting up the Gamecube hype machine. So it would be understandable if you have never heard of the game. Not learning from their previous mistake, Rare released Live & Reloaded at a similar time in the Xbox’s life when everyone’s attention was on the Xbox 360. So once again it was overlooked by most, which is unfortunate considering that Conker: Live & Reloaded is not only one of the finest platformers ever created, but it is also quite possibly the funniest game ever made.

You play as the entire game as Conker, a small red squirrel with an alcohol addiction. After a night of partying and heavy drinking, he tries to stumble his way home to his girlfriend, but wakes up to find himself lost. He sets off to find his way home, but can’t seem to get anywhere without getting in a bunch of trouble. You won’t believe what happens to him all in the span of one day.

The gameplay is similar to some of the other great platformers like Donkey Kong 64 or Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie. As you would expect, you will be jumping, smashing, shooting, and solving puzzles for all of the games 12 or so hours of gameplay. The game also makes good use of context sensitive action, something the original game was one of the first to do. You basically walk over certain pads and press a button to do any number of certain things. A few of the boss battles make good use of that mechanic, requiring you to use them to win. It seems pretty basic now but when the game came out it was pretty new. The third person shooting action controls great and some of the later stages of the game feel as if you are playing a 3rd person shooter.

There are a few negative things that you could say about the gameplay though. For a good part of the game, your only weapon that you have is a baseball bat. So combat will basically boil down to running up to an opponent, whacking them, and then jumping out of the way to dodge their counter attack. But then again, the game doesn’t focus much on this type of combat. The only people you will be whacking are those that are walking around the environment that are in your way while you are going about your business. The main focus of the game is solving puzzles, jumping around, and boss battles. And when you get to the later portion of the game, you will have weapons and even vehicles which will make this a non-issue. Also, there are one or two sections of the game that are pretty difficult, such as a race over some lava while dodging dinosaurs that will probably take you 5 or so attempts to finish. But overall, these are just minor complaints that should not hinder your enjoyment of the game much.

The world of Conker is great. Instead of feeling like a bunch of separate self contained levels, all of the areas of the game are connected and you can usually pick the order in which you want to do things. The massive graphical upgrade the game got really helps make the world feel alive. The environments are very detailed, and the fur on the characters looks awesome. Conker: Live & Reloaded is easily one of the best looking games on the Xbox. The graphical style of the game is similar to that of Kameo for the Xbox 360 with lots of lush settings and cute characters that cover up some pretty brutal and mature gameplay.

What sets the game apart from other platformers is its great sense of humor. Some of its humor comes in the form of crude jokes, but most of it comes from parody. For example, there are a few sequences in the game that parody movies like The Matrix or Saving Private Ryan. Surprisingly, these sequences are still pretty funny even though those movies came out quite a while ago. Other parts of the game, like the entire sequence when you battle the Mightypoo, are so outrageous and crude that you can’t help but laugh. The dialog in the game is also well written with a lot of humor, but obviously intended for a mature audience.

After you finish the game’s excellent single player campaign, there is a whole new online component that Rare created. The multiplayer games are large scale class based battles with vehicles. Matches pit the Tediz against the Squirrels in a variety of scenarios. If you can imagine a smaller but more action packed Battlefield 2 then you should have a good idea about how it plays. Some of the matches are set to a World War 2 theme where the Squirrels play as the Allies and the Tediz play as the Nazis, while other matches are set in the future. All of them are a blast to play, making the online extremely addicting.

Overall, Conker: Live & Reloaded is an extremely fun game. If you never played the single player game before, Conker will offer some of the best platforming gameplay out there. If you have played the old game before, the updated graphics and the whole new addicting multiplayer component makes the game worth buying over again. Every Xbox (and Xbox 360) owner that enjoys platforming games should check out Conker: Live & Reloaded.

Small Arms is a four-player fighting game in the style of Super Smash Brothers. But here the game puts a much heavier emphasis on using guns take down your opponents. The combat is pretty action packed and fast, but it’s not exactly complex either. While it does play pretty similar to Smash Bros, the overall experience is not as deep.

While in Super Smash Bros. all of the characters are familiar faces, each with their own personality, special moves and abilities based on whom they are. In Small Arms, all of the characters are pretty much random. Among the 12 characters to choose from, there is a dinosaur, a ninja, a cat and a robot. The characters look decent, but they don’t offer any personality like those in Smash Bros. Also, the only difference between each of the characters is which weapon they start off with when they spawn. There are no unique moves or anything like that.

The single player campaign takes you through a series of battles against AI controlled characters. These fights get increasingly harder as you go along and sometimes they throw multiple opponents against you at once. Once you reach the last level, you will fight against a boss that is actually pretty simple to defeat but is still pretty cool nonetheless. The game also features a challenge mode that is best described as a survival game where you fight enemy after enemy until you finally die. Lastly, the game also has an extra shooting range game where you have to shoot at paper targets as they go across the screen to get bonus points. While the single player gametypes are interesting enough to warrant playing and do give you good practice, the Xbox Live play is where the real action is.

The weapons in the game are much more interesting then the characters, which is great since they are the main focus of the game. All of the weapons have two different firing modes. For example, the freeze gun can shoot either ice shards or freeze enemies in one blast of ice and the sniper rifle can shoot normal bullets or it can drop mines at your feet. Overall, there is a pretty good selection of weapons, and they all behave pretty differently from each other. This means that you will probably have one or two favorite weapons, but all of the weapons are pretty useful. You can shoot the guns in any direction by aiming with the right analogue stick. This adds a good amount skill to the game, requiring you to be able to aim all while jumping around and dodging enemy fire. In fact, the game can be pretty difficult until you get used to how the characters control and how to aim their weapons. But once you do, the controls feel pretty natural.

All of the weapons run on energy that you deplete when you shoot. The good news is that ammo (in the form of batteries) as well as new weapons spawn into the arena pretty often. This makes watching and controlling the spawns a pretty important. Knowing when you are low on ammo and making a run for a newly dropped weapon or ammo before other players can get it is an important part of the game.

When you do manage to run out of ammo, it is possible to get in close do some damage. But while there is a decent amount of depth in the weapons, there is little depth in the melee system. The only attack available for you to use is punching. It would have been nice to be able to string together punching and kicking combos or something like that. But since all you can do is punch, your best bet when going up against an armed opponent is to run away by making good use of the dash button to grab a new weapon or some more ammo.

The levels (along with the weapons) are the highlight of the game. All of the levels are designed pretty well for four players. There isn’t a single level in the game that falls flat. One of the more interesting levels takes place inside a tornado while you jump from one piece of flying debris to another. Another level has you jumping from car to car on a speeding train. The levels a pretty impressive graphically considering this is an Xbox Live Arcade game. The weapon effects and furry characters also look pretty good.

Overall, Small Arms can be pretty fun, but it lacks the personality and depth that Smash Bros. has. But then again, Smash Bros. is a full retail game while Small Arms sells for just $10. Considering that it has some pretty fun online gameplay as well as some interesting weapons and levels, Small Arms is a worthy Xbox Live Arcade purchase.