The Orange Box is a compilation featuring Half-Life 2 (and its two continuations, Episode One and Episode Two); Portal; and Team Fortress 2. All of these games use Valve’s Source engine and the Valve Corporation produced and published the game for the Xbox 360 on October 10, 2007.

Any of these games on their own would be great, but all of them together is awesome!

Half Life 2

Half life is probably one of the most critically acclaimed and popular games of its time. The universe is a sci-fi dystopia that has so much depth you will never catch all of its nuances simply in gameplay. The challenge level is perfect (maybe a bit on the hard side) and keeps you consistently engaged and searching for hidden health whenever possible. It’s amazing physics engine is fun to play with, and the game encourages you to do so throughout the game. You spend a good section just figuring out what weird things you can throw at your enemies with the infamous gravity gun. My only criticism of the game itself is that you kind of stop using the gravity gun for a rather large part of the game and it only comes back at the end as a one trick pony hopped up on steroids. During that time though you are using huge insects as cannon fodder, setting turret traps, and guiding missiles, so you end up not missing it too much. The worst part of this game though is actually the controls, specifically when using vehicles and An auto-save right before you die is pretty damn annoying too. It just keeps reloading to the same spot and you dying over and over again until you have to load a save from like an hour before… ugh.

Portal

As for portal, I am a huge portal fan. I love me some puzzles, but this game brings it to a whole new level. As boring as it might seem on paper to work yourself out of one maze after another, its use of portals and physics is simply genius. There is also an overarching storyline and with the robot overlord antagonist, Glados spitting out quite discouraging remarks throughout the whole endeavour, the game stays incredibly interesting and fun. The puzzles get progressively more challenging and interesting with small additions. You explore all kinds of uses for your portal gun, like using gravity to help you, or sending objects through instead, hell even freakn’ laser beams! The game does a really great job with letting you discover a bit about the lab rat situation you’re in too, and a great deal about a promised cake, by stumble upon other “survivors” hideouts and such. The boss battle is a bit underwhelming I must say, but all in all, a truly fantastic game that carves a path all of its own. I might say the Portal series is probably the best puzzle games ever created. Plus the end song is great too.

Notice the refrence to black mesa, thats a tip of the hat to half life.

Team Fortress

As for Team Fortress, in short, it’s a whole lot of fun too, but I have not played enough of it to give a good pro and cons list, yet. I might have a guest author in to fill in this gap though or just get my gaming on some more.