I apologize for the lateness of this article. A full month of straight Otakon coverage cut right through the gap between this and the previous article in this series, so that volume 5's entry ended up being postponed over and over again. The next Bebop post should be up relatively soon.

In its penultimate volume, Cowboy Bebop picks up some of the steam that it lost in the previous four episodes. The action is brought back in full swing, as is the great writing that defined the earlier episodes. But most importantly, the stories have more weight to them than the previous volume's episodes.

The first episode, "Wild Horses," is without a doubt the best on the DVD. Its combination of space action, a puzzling enemy, and great side-characters are the things that make people remember Cowboy Bebop long after they watch it. The episode's primary side-character, a young, energetic black mechanic named Miles, is a big fan of the baseball team the Blue Socks, and he religiously listens to their games over the radio. This theme of Miles' love for his radio and his baseball team is strewn throughout the episode, and the way it ties in with the plot that unfolds on the Bebop is pure brilliance. Plus, Bebop surprised me once again with yet another reference to 20th century culture, in the form of a refurbished space shuttle Columbia. It only alluded to until the end, and the revelation is worth quite a gasp.

I have always been addicted to the zombie genre, so it was natural that Left 4 Dead made me feel, as the old proverb states, "like a kid in a candy shop." "Crash Course" is the newest offering served up by Valve via DLC for both Xbox 360 and PC.

You start off with a downed chopper in front of you and your teammates beside you, complaining about a zombie pilot. The city is littered with the usual flipped cars, random burning fires, and lots of great dark places for you to get yanked and made a four course meal of. The gameplay is the same fluid shooter experience you have likely come to expect from L4D, with no real tweaks or changes. The level design, however, is excellent. It's a little on the linear side, but it is cramped and filled with obstacles, which really helps to give players that feeling of claustrophobia and total fear.

"Crash Course" suffers from a few setbacks. Sitting at only two chapters of actual gameplay, it's far too short; it only took me and two other people a total of 30 minutes to complete a pick-up game. Versus is a different story altogether though; a few pick up games took us a total of an hour and a half to finish, so that made up for it. For PC gamers this DLC is totally worth it (since its free), but for Xbox gamers it costs the significantly less-free 560 Microsoft points. I don't know if I can blame Valve for this, but I fully believe that I can blame Microsoft. I have also come to find it a little annoying that they didn't make any changes to how you fight the horde. Its the same "bunker down, get ready, and unload mounds and mounds of ammunition into the undead onslaught" pattern.

I'm not sure what to think at this point. I mean, it's certainly good. Great even. But Cowboy Bebop seems to have lost some of its kick by the fourth volume. It's hard to pin down, but it feels almost like the episodes have less significance than they did before. The earlier episodes might have seemed like stand-alone vignettes, but they all had an ending that was important. I felt as if the crew of the Bebop had left their mark on the universe, for better or for worse.

In volume 4, Watanabe and Nobumoto seem to lapse into what I can only describe as a filler arc. While most Naruto fans consider "filler" to be tantamount to "Believe It!" on the Kakashi-sensei Evil Words Scale, I'm not trying to say that these are completely inconsequential episodes that are hastily put together without regard for the main story. I just mean that they predominantly serve as meaningless fun. Two of the episodes are backstory-related, but neither provides any very compelling information, as "Ganymede Elegy" did for Jet or "Ballad of Falling Angels" did for Spike. Another has a twist that ties it into one of the characters' backstories, but it mostly serves as a prolonged joke about twentieth century video formats.

The fun continues as I delve further into the classic nineties anime series Cowboy Bebop. In volume 3, I began to notice something very fascinating about Bebop. Of course, it is clear to any first-time viewer that Yoko Kanno's distinctive music pays tribute to a wide variety of musical styles. One episode, titled "Asteroid Blues," will feature the bouncing beats of the blues, while another, titled "Heavy Metal Queen," will showcase rocking metal music. But what really makes Cowboy Bebop fascinating is that is extends this allegiance to a variety of styles, incorporating it into film-making genres as well.

The first episode on the disc, "Toys in the Attic," is pure horror-movie, with its sparse depictions of a mysterious creature that poisons the ship's crew members one by one, until Spike must face it alone. The next two episodes form a distinct arc revolving around the backstory of Spike and his longtime rival Vicious. In this story, titled "Jupiter Jazz," Kanno focuses her attention on the slow, contemplative sounds of jazz, while director Shinichiro Watanabe and writer Keiko Nobumoto create a film-noir narrative full of sin and suffering. Finally, episode fourteen, "Bohemian Rhapsody," imitates the over-the-top pastiche that is Queen's famous song. The kinetic music serves as a strange – but not altogether inappropriate – backdrop to the light-hearted crime drama that unfolds in the plot.

I'm finally watching Cowboy Bebop. I know, I know, it's been a long time coming, but I hadn't picked up the DVDs until a recent 50% off sale in the Best Buy anime department spurred me to grab the classic late-90's anime series. And so far, I love it.

The first two volumes serve primarily to introduce viewers to the characters and standard situations that will presumably define much of the rest of the series, which revolves around a crew of misfits and bounty hunters on the spaceship "Bebop." By the end of the second volume, there has been at least one episode devoted to each member of the Bebop's crew – laid-back bounty hunter Spike, his calm, collected partner Jet, beautiful thief Faye, crazy super-hacker girl Ed, and cyber-dog Ein.

What has astounded me so far about Bebop is that Keiko Nobumoto and Shinichiro Watanabe's screenplay does something that I so rarely see in anime: episodic storywriting. The medium is often defined by its linear storylines, but it can be truly refreshing when a show works fully-formed stand-alone episodes into that framework. That's not to say that Bebop is nonlinear – it is certainly building toward something, but each little half-hour vignette also has its own set of characters whose (extremely well-crafted) interactions lead to a satisfying conclusion that stands independent from the central story.

Welcome to our very first "Impressions" post. In this series of features, our staff will briefly tell you their opinion of an anime, manga, or game based on their current impression. They're less like reviews and more like little journal entries, so don't expect fully-formed opinions just yet.

Though Far Cry 2 (PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360) has been overshadowed by much "bigger" releases this holiday season, a small handful of game journalists have spoken up on its behalf. After hearing Joystiq's Ludwig Kietzmann talk it up for over a month, I figured it was time to give this open-world shooter a try.

No, this is not a continuation of the original Far Cry, so before you ask, you don't need to have played the previous game. In this iteration, you are a mercenary sent to an African country to kill an arms dealer called "The Jackal" who has been pitting the two sides of a civil war against each other. When you enter the country, however, you catch malaria, get caught in a firefight, and miss your chance of catching The Jackal. Now you've got to fend for yourself in this war-torn country while working toward completing your mission.

As far as I've seen in the Xbox 360 version of the game, the open-world design is really working out well. Driving a car around a beautiful African savanna is cool enough, but when guerrillas drive by and start ramming your car, filling you full of bullets, things really heat up. In my first hour or so of play, I was randomly attacked by rebels at least three times, and one time they wrecked my car, causing me to stop and fix it (yes, you have to fix it yourself) before moving on. Another time I decided to hop on a small motorboat instead of fighting, and rode the boat off into the sunset.