Halo 2 Review & Storyline

Halo 2 Box Art

     Today I decided I wanted to start doing sequels to games I've already reviewed.  So today I decided to review on one of the father's online multiplier experience and a universe so epic it hurts. This ladies and gentlemen is Halo 2.  The second installment in the Halo franchise, unlike it's processor Halo 2 supported Xbox Live. This feature allowed gamers to hook up with other players via the Internet and were no longer restricted to LAN parties as seen in Halo: Combat Evolved.  On release, Halo 2 was the most popular video game on Xbox Live,  holding that rank until the release of Gears of War for the Xbox 360 nearly two years later. By June 20, 2006, more than 500 million games of Halo 2 had been played and more than 710 million hours have been spent playing it on Xbox Live; by May 9, 2007, this number had risen to more than five million unique players.  
     Halo 2 is a first person shooter and is the best-selling first-generation Xbox game with at least 6.3 million copies sold in the United States alone. Critical reception of the game was generally positive, with most publications complimenting the strong multiplayer component of the game. The campaign was the focus of criticism for its cliffhanger ending in which I will explain later.  The game was released November 9, 2004 on Xbox and later for Windows Vista on  May 31, 2007. Players use a combination of human and alien weaponry and vehicles to progress through the game's levels. The player's health bar is not visible, but are instead equipped with a damage-absorbing shield that regenerates when not taking fire, it is seen above the player's mini map. 
     Certain weapons can be dual-wielded, allowing the player to trade accuracy, the use of grenades and melee attacks for raw firepower.  The player can carry two weapons at a time (or three if dual-wielding; one weapon remains holstered), with each weapon having advantages and disadvantages in different combat situations. For example, most Covenant weapons eschew disposable ammo clips for a contained battery, which cannot be replaced if depleted. However, these weapons can overheat if fired continuously for prolonged periods.  Human weapons are less effective at penetrating shields and require reloading, but cannot overheat due to prolonged fire. The player can carry a total of eight grenades (four human grenades, four Covenant) to dislodge and disrupt enemies. New in Halo 2 is the ability to board enemy vehicles that are near you and traveling at low speeds. The player or jumps onto the vehicle and forcibly ejects the other driver from the vehicle.
    The campaign takes place shortly after the events of the novel Halo: First Strike, Halo 2 opens with the trial of a Covenant Elite commander aboard the Covenant's mobile capital city of High Charity. The Elite is stripped of his rank, branded a heretic for failing to stop the humans from destroying Halo which happened near the end of the first game. Thel 'Vadamee (the Elite) is tortured by Tartarus, the Chieftain of the Covenant Brutes. On Earth, the Master Chief and Sergeant Avery Johnson are commended for their actions on Halo. Lord Terrence Hood awards the soldiers alongside Commander Miranda Keyes, who accepts a medal on behalf of her deceased father, Captain Jacob Keyes. Jacob Keyes was killed in the first game upon being taken over by the Flood Gravemind, in which he resisted it's control and denied it the location of Earth.  A Covenant fleet appears outside Earth's defensive perimeter of satellites and ships The fleet then begins an invasion of the planet.
     While the UNSC repels most of the fleet, a single Covenant cruiser carrying an important member of the Covenant hierarchy, the High Prophet of Regret, assaults the city of New Mombasa, Kenya. The events of Halo 3: ODST revolves around this certain event. The Master Chief assists in clearing the city of Covenant; with his fleet destroyed, Regret makes a hasty slipspace jump, and Keyes, Johnson, Cortana and Chief follow aboard the UNSC ship "In Amber Clad". The crew discovers another Halo installation; realizing the danger the ring presents, Keyes sends the Master Chief to kill Regret while she and Johnson find Halo's key to activation, the Index.  Meanwhile, the disgraced Covenant commander is presented before the Prophet Hierarchs, who acknowledge that though the destruction of Halo was his fault, he is no heretic. They offer him the honored position of Arbiter so that he can continue to fight for the Covenant. The Arbiter is a fictional ceremonial, religious, and political rank bestowed upon alien Covenant Elites, in which they go on suicide missions to fulfill the will of the Prophets, their spiritual leaders. On his first mission to kill a elite heretic commander, the Arbiter discovers 343 Guilty Spark, the moniter of Installation 04, or the first Halo ring discovered. Who the Covenant calls an "oracle," and brings him back to High Charity. Responding to Regret's distress call, High Charity and the Covenant fleet arrive at the new Halo, Installation 05, just before the Master Chief kills Regret. Bombarded from space, the Chief falls into a lake upon escaping the orbital explosions and is rescued by a mysterious tentacled creature. 
     The death of Regret sows seeds of discord among the races of the Covenant, as the Hierarchs have given the Brutes the Elites' traditional job of protecting them in the wake of the death. The Arbiter is sent to find Halo's Index and captures it, Johnson, and Keyes before being confronted by Tartarus. He reveals to the Arbiter that the Prophets have ordered the annihilation of the Elites, and sends the Arbiter falling down a deep chasm with his magical hammer of death. The Arbiter is saved by the tentacled creature and meets the Master Chief in the bowels of the installation. The creature, Gravemind, is the leader of the Flood on Installation 05. Gravemind reveals to the Arbiter that the Great Journey would destroy Flood, humans, and Covenant altogether. Gravemind sends the Arbiter and Master Chief to different places using the rings teleportation system to stop Halo's activation. The Master Chief is teleported into High Charity, where a civil war has broken out among the Covenant between the Elites and Brutes; the "In Amber Clad" crashes into the city, and Cortana realizes that Gravemind used them as a distraction to infest the "In Amber Clad" and spread the Flood throughout High Charity. As the parasite overruns the city, infecting the Prophet of Mercy in the process, the Prophet of Truth orders Tartarus to take Keyes, Johnson, and Guilty Spark to Halo's control room and activate the ring. 
    The Master Chief follows Truth aboard a Forerunner ship leaving the city; Cortana remains behind to destroy High Charity, The Flood, and Halo if Tartarus succeeds in activating the ring.  Meanwhile, the Arbiter is sent to the surface of Halo, where he rallies his allies to assault the Brute's position at the control room. With the help of Johnson, he confronts Tartarus in Halo's control room. When the Arbiter tries to convince Tartarus that the Prophets have betrayed them both, yet Tartarus angrily activates the ring in proclamation that the Brutes, not the Elites, will begin The Great Journey, and a battle ensues. The Arbiter and Johnson manage to kill Tartarus after a long annoying battle involving energy swords and lots of sticky grenades. Keyes removes the Index after Tartarus has been put down  Instead of shutting down the ring entirely, a system wide fail-safe protocol is triggered, putting Installation 05 and all the other Halo rings on standby for activation from a remote location, which Guilty Spark refers to as "the Ark". Aside from not being energy efficient for all the rings to be on standby, this is also very dangerous.  As Truth's ship arrives amidst a raging battle on Earth, Hood asks Chief what he is doing aboard the ship. Chief replies, "Sir, finishing this fight." 
     This probably was his best one-liner in the Halo franchise. In a post-credits scene, Gravemind is seen arriving on High Charity, where Cortana agrees to answer the Flood intelligence's questions. Then everything fades to black and there in-lies the biggest  cliffhanger in the history of man that left the world, myself included, dumbfounded and wanting more. Probably why Halo 3 was in the top five most sold games of all time, but that's for another day. Overall I'd say Halo 2 was one of the awesomest games of all time and got four-and-a-half stars, almost five if IGN wasn't such a hard ass about reviewing awesome games. The game is no longer sold at stores but is available if you check eBay or Amazon, I'd recommend Amazon.  Sadly the game's Xbox Live support was terminated April 15, 2010 along with all other remaining Xbox games.  It was awesome while it lasted, I still talk to my old clan and we reformed on to Halo 3, then Halo: Reach, and were talking about transitioning over to Halo 4, but we'll probably stick to Reach cause we like it more than Halo 4.  The game is good none the less and I know you'll love it.  I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you next week.  This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off.

Official Halo 2 Trailer

Colin McRae: Dirt Review

American Box Art

I decided in celebration of the holidays to do a non-violent game for my last review before Christmas, so I choose Colin McRae's Dirt. (Commonly known as DiRT in America)  Dirt is a racing game and the sixth Colin McRae Rally series, it is also sadly the last game in the series that was published before McRae's death.  The game was developed and published by Codemasters.  The game was released in June 15, 2007 in Europe and June 19, 2007 in North America. The single player game plays out through 3 modes. Career, Championship, and Rally World, which is a single race set up. The Career mode is set up in a stylized pyramid that has 11 "tiers", with the bottom tier having 11 different events. Each event consists of one or more race events of a single type requiring a specific type of car. The player earns up to 10 points for their placing in all the races within the event. Most events require a specific number of points within a specific tier to unlock, and thus as the player earns points, more of the pyramid becomes unlocked, moving up to the "Champion of Champions" event at the very top. By winning races and earning money the player is able to purchase cars and liveries (skins) for the cars. In total there are 46 different cars and 186 liveries. The amount of money earned is based on the difficulty level picked by the player when selecting the event; higher difficulty levels have more challenging AI opponents and more realistic damage effects. Completed events can be repeated at any time, although unless challenged at a higher difficulty level, the player will earn significantly less money than when they first raced it. In Rally events with multiple races, the player has the opportunity to repair damage between races, but is only allotted 60 minutes of damage repair at each point based on time estimates to fix each component of the car. Championship mode offers up a series of races in which the player's combined time throughout each stage is cumulative. Multiplayer allows the player to race up to 100 other players in rally races through solo competition, as there are no other cars, ghosts or players present on the track. Fastest time determines who wins. DiRT is a good racing game overall and its sad that Colin McRae died and with him, the series.  Hope you have enjoyed this post and I will see you in two weeks. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!! This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off. 

Left 4 Dead Review & Storyline

Left 4 Dead box art

Honestly by my opinion one of the best zombie games of all time, Left 4 Dead has received numerous awards and still immensely played throughout the planet. Released in November 2008. developed by Turtle Rock Stories, but purchased by Valve during development, and also published by Valve.  Left 4 Dead (abbreviated as L4D) is a cooperative first-person shooter arcade-style video game. The game uses Valve's proprietary Source engine, and is available for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and Mac OS X. Development on the game was completed on November 13, 2008, and two versions were released digitally: A downloadable digital version, released on November 17, 2008, and a digital retail disc version, with a release date determined by region. The digital retail disc version was released in North America and Australia on November 18, 2008; and in Europe and Japan on November 21, 2008. Set during the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic, the game pits its four protagonists—dubbed the "Survivors"—against hordes of the infected. There are four game modes: a single-player mode in which allied characters are controlled by AI; a four-player, co-op campaign mode; an eight-player online versus mode; and a four-player survival mode. In all modes, an artificial intelligence (AI), dubbed the "Director", controls level pacing and item placements, in an attempt to create a dynamic experience and increase replay value.  One of the first experiences like, this makes the difficult and fun at the same time, making you constantly having to think outside box in order to survive.  Pennsylvania suffers an outbreak of "Green Flu"; a highly contagious virus causing extreme aggression, mutation to the body cells, and loss of higher brain functions. Two weeks after the infection four immune survivors—Bill, a Vietnam veteran; Zoey, a college student; Louis, an IT analyst, and Francis, an outlaw biker—make their way through the city of Fairfield, only to discover that the virus is creating more dangerous mutations. After narrowly avoiding these new infected, along with hordes of others, the survivors are alerted to the presence of an evacuation point at the nearby Mercy Hospital roof by a passing helicopter. Fighting their way through the city's streets, subway and sewers, they are rescued from the hospital's roof by the pilot, only to discover he is infected.  When Zoey is forced to kill him, the helicopter crash lands in an industrial district outside the city. Finding an armored delivery truck, the group uses it to make their way to the town of Riverside. However, they find the road blocked, and travel the rest of the way on foot. After an encounter with an infected lunatic in the local church, they discover that the town is overrun, and decide to head to a nearby boathouse for rescue. Contacting a small fishing vessel, they manage to reach the city of Newburg on the other side of the river, only to find much of it in flames. Seeking cover in a large greenhouse, their rest is interrupted when a military C-130 passes overhead, leading the survivors to travel through the city's business district towards Metro International Airport. Upon arrival, the group see that in an attempt to contain the infection, the military had bombed the airport while infected pilots crash planes in an attempt to land; the runway however is largely intact, allowing the survivors to fuel up and escape in a waiting C-130. Despite this apparent rescue, it crashes as well, and the survivors once again find themselves alone on the outskirts of Allegheny National Forest. Following a series of train tracks through the area, the group find themselves at a functioning, but abandoned, military outpost. After answering a radio transmission, the survivors make their final stand against hordes of infected, before a military APC arrives to transport them to Northeast Safe Zone Echo, supposedly the only uninfected area yet to be overrun. Instead, they are kept at a military installation and informed that even though they are immune, they still carry the virus. They are temporarily held by the military before the base is overrun with infected. The four escape via train and travel south at Bill's insistence; Bill believes that they can find long-term safety from the infected on the islands of the Florida Keys. At the portside town of Rayford, they find a boat but must raise an old rusty bridge powered by an aging generator to get the boat into open waters, assured that the machinery noise will alert a large horde. Bill sacrifices himself in order to restart a generator when the lift jams, so that the others may reach safety.  So for me I wanted to cry when Bill died, him being awesome as he is.  So Bill's tale ends here for the greater good.  Overall the game is awesome and never gets old, the zombie better is Left 4 Dead 2, which I might do a blog on next year.  So I hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you Thursday.  This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off. 

UK Introduction Teaser Trailer   

The Impossible Game Review

The Impossible Game Logo

The Impossible Game is a Xbox Indie Game and a App for the iPhone that was released November 23, 2009 for Xbox, couldn't find out when iPhone version was released. The game was developed by FlukeDuke and is an Indie Game, meaning that it wasn't published by a company, just made by a single person. The iPhone version was remade into a small compact version by cocos2d which is my favorite app of all time. Gameplay is really simple and straightforward it just consists of an automatically fast moving square through a level and while you make your square jump over smashing objects the game becomes more and more exciting and interesting. As the name already tells you, the game is really impossible and when you fail, and believe me you will undoubtedly fail, you will be more excited to start over and over again. There is a practice mode, so starting this mode you can place flags down as you progress through the level so you could restart from your last dropped flag. Although, the thing that makes this game really impossible is that if you do not play in a practice mode but you must beat all the levels from start to finish only with one life. It takes a lot of practice and motivation to accomplish. Impossible Game is known as the “Insanely Addictive” – the music consists of techno beats and it increases your focus as well as the tension. The soundtrack is synced with the game to make it ever more suspenseful  Each time you start the game you will experience something new and harder. However, if you are a person who is capable of beating the Impossible Game levels, then you are definitely an exceptional one. l You will feel you have beaten something amazingly difficult that only a few could do globally (just kidding, but it really is hard to beat the game). The Impossible Game is available on the Xbox Market Place for only 80 Microsoft points and $.99 on the Apple App Store. Hope you enjoy it and I'll see you next week. This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off.

Lot harder than it looks, trust me

                                                      

Half-Life Review & Storyline

Half-Life box art

I think PC gaming really got going when Half-Life came out. A Valve game released for Microsoft Windows November 19, 1998 in America. Published and developed by Sierra Entertainment. As of 14 July 2006, the Half-Life franchise has sold over 20 million units. Half-Life was followed by the 2004 sequel Half-Life 2, which also received critical acclaim and praise. Half-Life has had a notable cultural impact with its community mods and sequels spawning a large fanbase and other praising communities. Half-Life is a first-person shooter that requires the player to perform combat tasks and puzzle solving to advance through the game. Unlike its peers at the time, Half-Life used scripted sequences, such as a Bullsquid ramming down a door, to advance major plot points. Compared to most first-person shooters of the time, which relied on cut-scenes to detail their plotlines, Half-Life's story is told entirely by means of scripted sequences, keeping the player in control of the first-person viewpoint. In line with this, the game has no cut-scenes, and the player rarely loses the ability to control Gordon, who never speaks and is never actually seen in the game; the player sees "through his eyes" for the entire length of the game. Half-Life has no "levels"; it instead divides the game by chapters, whose titles flash on the screen as the player moves through the game, I do miss cutscenes though. Progress through the world is continuous, except for breaks for loading and when the game has to save. The game regularly integrates puzzles, such as navigating a maze of conveyor belts, (which is a pain) or using nearby boxes to build a small staircase to the next area the player must travel to, also annoying. Some puzzles involve using the environment to kill an enemy, like turning on a steam valve to spray hot steam at their enemies. There are few "bosses" in the conventional sense, where the player defeats a superior opponent by direct confrontation. Instead, such organisms occasionally define chapters, and the player is generally expected to use the terrain, rather than firepower, to kill the "boss". Late in the game, the player receives a "long jump module" for the HEV suit, which allows the player to increase the horizontal distance and speed of jumps by crouching before jumping. The player must rely on this ability to navigate various platformer-stylejumping puzzles in Xen toward the end of the game. The game is entirely campaign with no multiplayer, which is fine cause this is a really long game. Most of the game's setting takes place in a remote desert area of New Mexico in the Black Mesa Research Facility, a fictional complex that bears many similarities to both the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Area 51, at some point between the years 2000 and 2009. The game's protagonist is the theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman, an MIT graduate. While I personally think is cool, that you get to be someone that hasn't had years of combat experience or handled a gun before, its a new experience Freeman becomes one of the survivors of an experiment at Black Mesa that goes horribly wrong, when an unexpected "resonance cascade"—a fictitious phenomenon —rips dimensional seams, devastating the facility. Aliens from another dimension known as Xen subsequently enter the facility through these dimensional seams (an event known as the "Black Mesa incident"). As Freeman tries to make his way out of the ruined facility, he soon discovers that he is caught between two sides: the hostile aliens and the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit, a U.S. Marine Corps special operations unit dispatched to cover up the incident by eliminating the organisms, as well as Dr. Freeman and the other surviving Black Mesa personnel. Throughout the game, a mysterious figure known (but not actually referred to in-game) as the "G-Man" regularly appears, and seems to be monitoring Freeman's progress. Ultimately, Freeman uses the cooperation of surviving scientists and security officers to work his way towards the mysterious "Lambda Complex" of Black Mesa (signified with the Greek "λ" character), where a team of survivors teleport him to the alien world Xen to kill the Nihilanth, the semi-physical entity keeping Xen's side of the dimensional rift open, really complicated to explain.  The rest is history, which you can find out for yourself, you can get the game on Steam for $9.99 or get the Playstation 2 version, which I haven't played personally. Hope you've enjoyed and I will see you Thursday. This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off. 

Official 1998 Gamespot Trailer 

Halo: Combat Evolved Review & Storyline

Halo 4 came out today and I'm looking forward to it.  Even though it looks awesome I am still bent on the fact that 343 Industries is making it instead of my beloved Bungie, who I still miss. For those of you who do not know the last six Halo games have been made by Bungie; and they did an awesome job at making every single one.  So in memory of their awesome games, I decided to begin where it all started; Halo: Combat Evolved.  The first installment in the Halo franchise caught the world by surprise, but was quickly welcomed with open arms. Selling a record-breaking high of over five million copies worldwide by November 9, 2005, the highest sold video game of its time.  Developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Studios. Bungie is responsible for the last six game Halo games, but for an unknown reason handed over the reigns of the series to 343 Industries about a year ago, and if your a die-hard-Halo-fan like me, I was saddened by this.  343 looks likes it shows some promise, but I don't think their ever going to be able to fit into Bungie's shoes all the way.  They are more than likely making Halo 4 because they want to make a name for themselves, but its gonna be pretty damn hard to make it better than Halo: Reach.  But I gotta give them credit for going all or nothing like this, they are either going to receive love or hate from the long time fans of the series, including me.  Anyway about the game.  Halo is set in the twenty-sixth century, with the gamer assuming the role of the Master Chief, a cybernetically enhanced supersoldier part of the Spartan II program, he is also supposedly the last Spartan alive.  The player is accompanied by Cortana, an artificial intelligence who occupies the Chief's neural interface.  Players battle various aliens of the Covenant as you attempt to uncover the secrets of the mysterious Halo, a ring-shaped artificial world.  The game has an awesome story, award-winning mutiplayer and never gets old.  Beginning immediately after the events of Halo:  Reach, the game opens up as the Pillar of Autumn exits slipspace near a mysterious ring-shaped artificial world, called "Halo" by the enemy of the game, the Covenant.  Also in-lies the title of the game and why its named Halo.  A Covenant fleet attacks and heavily damages the Autumn.  Captain Keyes initiates "The Cole Protocol", a procedure designed to keep the Covenant from finding Earth, in which could find out by capturing Cortana.  Thus, to prevent this he orders Master Chief to escape with Cortana and protect her at all costs.  While Keyes prepares to land the ship on Halo, Chief and Cortana escape via escape pod, which then crash lands on the ring. Cortana and Master Chief are the only ones who survive the impact of the escape pod crash.  Keyes survives the  Autumn's crash landing. but is captured by the Covenant.  In the second and third level of the game, the Chief and Cortana gather human survivors and rescue Captain Keyes, who is imprisoned aboard the Covenant ship Truth and Reconciliation.  Once rescued, Keyes orders the Chief to beat the Covenant to Halo's control center and to discover what the Covenant want with Halo.  Chief and Cortana travel to a map room called the Silent Cartographer, which leads them to the control room.  There, Cortana enters the systems and, discovering something urgent, suddenly sends the Master Chief to find Captain Keyes while she stays behind.  While searching for his commander, the Chief learns that the Covenant have accidentally released the Flood, a parasitic alien race capable of spreading itself by overwhelming and infesting other sentient life-forms. Keyes falls victim to them while looking for a cache of weapons.  The release of the Flood prompts Halo's AI monitor, 343 Guilty Spark, to recruit Master Chief in retrieving the Index, a device that will active Halo and prevent the Flood from spreading beyond the facility.  After the Chief retrieves and prepares to use the Index, Cortana re-appear and warns him against the activation.  She has discovered that Halo's defense system is a weapon designed to kill all sentient life in the galaxy, which the Flood requires to spread, a revelation which Guilty Spark confirms.  Faced with this information, the Master Chief and Cortana decide to destroy Halo to prevent its activation.  While fighting the Flood, the Covenant, and Guilty Spark's Sentinels , Cortana discovers that the best way to prevent its activation is to cause the crashed Pillar of Autumn to self-destruct.  However, Captain Keyes' authorization is required to destroy the Autumn, forcing the Chief and Cortana to return to the now-Flood-infested Truth and Reconciliation to search for him.  By the time that they reach Keyes, however, he has been infected beyond the piont of no return by the Flood.  The Master Chief retrieves Keyes' neural implants directly from his brain and retreats to the Autumn, where Cortana activates the ships self-destruct sequence.  However, 343 Guilty Spark reappears and deactivates the countdown, discovering the record of human history in the process.  The manually destabilizes the Pillar of Autumn's fusion reactors, and he and Cortana narrowly escape the destruction of Halo via a long sword.  Outside the campaign you could team up with friends, although considering that Xbox Live did not exist, you had to team up with friends on a LAN party.  Overall the game is awesome and is still available as an Original on the Xbox Live Marketplace.  I'd also like to say thanks to Bungie for making these last ten years of Halo awesome all the way and I'm gonna miss you guys.  So get the game, start where it all began, remember all the good times, and hopefully look forward to more good memories.  Heirs to the next ten years of Halo.  Farewell and see you Thursday.  This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off.    

Halo Combat Evolved: E3 2000 Trailer

Star Wars: Battlefront II Review

If you haven't heard already, a new Star Wars movie is coming out, which I completely mortified about.  I know most of you are all exited about this announcement, but I'm not.  This is just like the Call of Duty Black Ops II and Halo 4 situation: they just don't want to let it die when they should.  We can all agree that Star Wars had one hell of a run and it's time to just look back and smile at the past, not frown at the future.   All the actors are older or have passed, which will not allow them to build off the original plot cause Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford are too old to resume their former characters.  It also means that they might try to make a new story line with a new hero and on top of all this crap Disney's making it!  Disney!  Look when I was six I loved The Lion King and Aladdin, but come on, it wont be the same as when Lucas Films was making it, which also means George Lucas isn't even writing the script anymore, which means its not Star Wars, which means its going suck, which also means that there will be no more Star Wars games cause they sold their trademark to Disney.  Anyway, in memory of the good times I decided to do a review on the best Star Wars game of all: Star Wars Battlefront II.  Even though the game is pretty old, its the best, fun for all ages, and probably was one of the best games ever when it was still on Xbox Live.  The game came out in October 31, 2005 in Europe and  November 1, 2005 in North America.  The games platform is on the original Xbox.  It was published by LucasArts and developed by Pandemic Studios. Battlefront II is fundamentally similar to its predecessor, albeit with the new gameplay mechanics.  The general objective in most missions of the game is to eliminate the enemy with lethal force.  Like the first game, Battlefront II, the game is split into two eras, the Clone Wars and the Galactic Civil War.  Players have the ability to choose between six classes during gameplay, each with their own different abilities.  Four of these classes are common to all factions; infantry , heavy weapon  sniper, and engineer.  In addition to the four standard classes, each faction has two unique classes which are unlocked by scoring a certain number of points   For the Rebellion faction, the Bothan Spy and the Wookie; for the Empire, The Officer and The Dark Trooper; for the Republic, the Commander anf the Jet Trooper and for the CIS, the Magnagaurd and the Droideka.  You can also play as heroes, such as Luke Skywalker, Mace Windo, Bobo Fet, Darth Vader, and other such characters.   This game is just awesome and is fun to play with friends, local or system link.  It deeply saddens me to inform you that the game is no longer online via Xbox Online, and I miss it almost as much as Halo 2 online.  They don't sell the game new anymore, but you can probably get it on Amazon or eBay, I have my copy from when the game first came out.  So find the game, get it, and love it.  Hope you've enjoyed and I will see you next week.  This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off.