As famed horror writer, Michael Arthate, you arrive at Blackwood Manor, your newly acquired home, an old Victorian house lost in the outskirts of a small English market town. While the ominous weather bodes of darker days, you are initially charmed by this peaceful and quiet place. The pleasant stillness is soon broken, however, as the rooms of this exquisite, if faded glory, mansion speak of past events, their tales echoing through its walls. As the odd noises in the basement grow ever louder, you set about solving your sanctuary's long-held mystery.

Isolated by a washed out road, and in search of clues, you delve into every dark corner of the mansion and its untended grounds via a point-and -click interface. Examining, probing, and hunting your way through musty rooms, an overrun greenhouse, a sinister chapel, and a forbidding crypt, your investigation deepens, and you slowly become aware of one terrifying fact: you are not alone.

Deciding to make the best-selling Halo 2 Xbox game a Vista-only title is likely driven by Microsoft's desire to get people upgrading to the new version of the Windows.

Minimum specifications for Vista (formerly called Longhorn) will be released in the summer but information gathered from reviews of pre-release versions have given clues about its hunger for computer power.

With Vista, Microsoft has made big changes to the way it handles graphics. Unlike other versions of Windows, it will need an advanced video card to get the most out of it.

It is also likely to demand a lot of computer memory and a sizeable hard drive. While these requirements are likely to be met by dedicated players who want to get the most out of games, many less keen players could struggle to comply.

But we're not idiots and we're not jerks. We realize that the underlying sentiment here, is that there are a lot of XP (and Mac) users out there, who feel like something has been wafted under their nose and then snatched away. Well, that's simply not our intention. We want as many people to enjoy as good a version of our game as possible, but the fact remains that when Microsoft publishes Halo 2 for PC - it will have released its new, bigger, better operating system and our game will take full advantage of that fact, and Microsoft will take full advantage of our game.

Take-Two spokesman Jim Ankner acknowledged in an Associated Press interview that the questioned scenes were created by Rockstar programmers. "The editing and finalization of any game is a complicated task and it's not uncommon for unused and unfinished content to remain on the disc," he said.

In a statement, the president of the Entertainment Software Rating Board said the sex scenes were programmed by Rockstar "to be inaccessible to the player."

But ESRB chief Patricia Vance also acknowledged that the "credibility and utility" of the industry-run board’s initial "M" rating had been "seriously undermined."

Many retailers sell "M" rated games, which "may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older,” according to the Entertainment Software Rating Board, but won’t sell "AO"-labeled games at all.

GameTap provides subscribers an "all-you-can-play" gaming service accessible from up to two household computers. To access GameTap, players securely download and install Turner-developed client software from www.gametap.com that acts as a gateway to the GameTap library. Because games reside securely on the PC, not across a network, they act just as if they were still on the console or at the arcade. Fast response times, 3D effects, colors, and characters are all present and accounted for. GameTap supports navigation and game play using both keyboard and mouse, as well as most USB peripherals.