Anyway, Research and Development. Requires Half-Life 2: Episode 2, which you probably already own because it was part of The Orange Box and god knows everyone's played Portal and some of us enjoyed TF2. This is almost a puzzle mod, much like Portal, except there's quite a bit of action to it. There's no weapons except for the environment, the gravity gun, and the antlion pheromone pod. It starts off with some pretty basic physics puzzles, then it starts to get into WTF physics mode, and by the end you're doing some really elaborate tricks. It's Portal-short in length, but that's not a bad thing. It's absolutely enjoyable without overstaying it's welcome.

I'm not going to throw out any spoilers here, even though there's not much of a plot, because there's some pretty good gags. With a couple more levels and some spit-shine, I could see this being included in the next Valve release if it weren't so vanilla Half-Life. I mean, this is fun and well done but there's nothing that really differentiates it from the other Half-Life games like TF 2 and Portal did. You can't look at a Half-Life level 2 and confuse it for Portal. As it is, any of the levels in R&D could be dropped into Half-Life 2 and no one would know the difference.

Don't let my negativity about it getting picked up by Valve stop you though. If you own Half-Life 2: Episode 2, you should play this. It's pretty awesome.

Neotokyo has been described as Ghost in the Shell meets Counter-Strike and that's not far off the mark. It's class-based and centered around a capture the flag variant called Capture the Ghost. The ghost is a limb-less torso that requires the capturor to drop his primary weapon in exchange for the ability to see all enemies within 50m of the capturor. In a pinch you can put the ghost on your back to arm yourself with your pistol or knife but if you have any teammates alive around you, you're better off holding the ghost and telling the rest of the team where to shoot. The setting is near-future (30-40 year) Japan, so while you have things like thermoptic camouflage and all manner of alternative vision, there's no lasers or rocket launchers. The armature is strictly SMGs, assault rifles, long rifles, and pistols.

I'm not entirely sure why I enjoy this so much. I play recon, which is the lightest class, and I almost never survive a whole round. It's fun to sneak around back and try to get the drop on as many members of the other team as I can before I'm inevitably sniped. The game doesn't count assists or else I'd probably score much higher but I'm usually in the top five.

I started this entry to provide counterpoints to other people's gripes about it but that's an uphill battle, in the rain, wearing greased shoes. The official forums aren't up so there's no real outlet to voice your approval to the dev team so I'm just going to do it here. Keep it up, Studio Radi-8! Neotokyo is pretty bad ass!