Microsoft picked up the venerable MechWarrior gauntlet with its impressive-looking and -playing MechWarrior 4: Vengeance. Fans of that game, and of the franchise itself, have a lot to look forward to when the new Black Knight expansion pack stomps its way onto shelves. It uses the same graphics engine and requires MechWarrior 4 to play, but it adds an entirely new campaign and 20 new missions. Black Knight will allow players to play the missions in any order they like, even repeating some of them as they wish.The new missions are nice, but the most dramatic change was made at the request of the legions of MechWarrior fans who believed that the vanilla story in MechWarrior 4 didn't live up to BattleTech's dark, feudal roots. The new story casts you as a Black Knight, a mercenary working for House Steiner (the bad guys from the previous game). Our Microsoft rep grinned with glee when he described how your first missions in Black Knight will be to hunt down the characters from MechWarrior 4. The character on the top of the fans' hit list? Annoying wiseass pilot Casey.New to the game will be the black market, which is an area where you can buy or sell equipment for your Mech Lab. This gives you an even better reason to be precise with your shooting, as you can salvage more equipment from your adversaries. New multiplayer modes will also be available. They include Absolute Attrition, Strongholds, Siege Assault, Giant Killers, and Clan vs. Inner Sphere. --Andrew Bub