The Orange Box review (PC)

In case you haven't played the two already-released games in the Half-Life 2 saga, they tell the story of Gordon Freeman, your silent protagonist. At the end of the original Half-Life, the scientist was placed into stasis by a mysterious, nameless figure known outside of the HL universe as the G-Man. This governmental-looking guy pops up right at the beginning of HL2 to awaken Gordon and, apparently, place him on a train headed into City 17. This is a very different world than the one Gordon left behind. Time has passed, though it's unclear how much. The alien invasion from the first Half-Life has resulted in the Seven Hour War, at the end of which humanity surrendered to a force now known as the Combine. But even with the human race under complete lockdown, there's still a group of rebels out there fighting for freedom. Some of these rebels are scientists that come directly from the Black Mesa facility where the original Half-Life took place. You quickly hook up with the rebels and the "good" aliens, the vortigaunts, all of whom speak of you in hushed tones, as though you were a legendary hero. Half-Life 2 is a very lengthy adventure with somewhat odd pacing. The game contains two very long vehicle sequences that perhaps go on a bit too long, but let's let sleeping dogs lie. This 2004 game is an absolute classic that should be played and enjoyed by almost anyone that comes into contact with it.

Episode One picks up right after the events of Half-Life 2 and serves as a sort of epilogue to the Half-Life 2 story. Without going too deep into the plot events, City 17 is about to blow up and you are way too close to it to survive the blast. Joining you is Alyx Vance, a girl that pops up to fight alongside you at various points in Half-Life 2. Here, she's with you for most of the game, for better and for worse. On the one hand, she's a great computer-controlled gunner who feels almost indestructible, which means that you can sit back and let her do most of the fighting if you feel like it. On the other hand, her excitable nature can be a little grating, and it feels as if she's along for the ride just to point out stuff that the developers wanted you to see. Most of her speech seems to follow the formula of "Hey, Gordon, look at this [key item you need to interact with to proceed]" or "Whoa, look at this [scripted sequence of things falling down or exploding]!"

The story is probably the weakest point about Episode One, considering that nothing really happens. You start playing, and your goal is to delay the blast; you do that, and then escape. Along the way, though, you'll experience some neat gameplay, much of which is built around the use of the gravity gun. Compared to the huge adventure in Half-Life 2, Episode One was a weird way to continue the adventure. Now that you can play it as a three- or four-hour chunk of a larger package, it works much better.

By comparison, the graphics in the Half-Life games and in Portal are vastly different, even though all of these games are running on variations of the same engine. The Half-Life 2 games do a great job of showing you torn-apart human cities and postapocalyptic landscapes, and they still have some of the best facial animation you'll see in a video game. Portal has a pristine laboratory look to most of its levels that really fits with the game's premise, and the effects for the portals themselves are pretty cool. TF2's unique visual style sets it apart from the cookie-cutter military shooters out there and injects some humor into the proceedings at the same time.

The package also has wonderful sound across all of its games. Half-Life 2 and its additional episodes probably have the best (and most) music of the bunch, and the soundtrack in the Half-Life games is really great. Portal and TF2 definitely have some good music, as well. Likewise, there's a healthy amount of voice acting across the five games, and most of it is quite good. The Team Fortress 2 classes all have specific voice taunts that add to their personalities. Portal's computer voices are outstanding, and the different characters in Half-Life 2 turn in terrific and believable performances.

With The Orange Box out on both the PC and the Xbox 360, it's worth noting that there are a handful of differences between them, but it's hard to go wrong with either version. For starters, the PC version is $10 cheaper and, provided that you have modern hardware, it also looks better than the Xbox 360 version. The 360 version doesn't run as smoothly, though its frame rate is hardly a problem, either. Furthermore, the textures used throughout Half-Life 2 simply don't look as good in 2007 as they did in 2004. Consequently, viewing them on a large HDTV doesn't really do them any favors, though the 360 version utilizes high dynamic range lighting that gives you more realistic-looking effects than Half-Life 2 had on the PC at its time of release.

Of course, the 360 version has achievement points. In fact, it has 99 separate achievements, more than any other game to date, though they still total up to 1,000 points overall. Spreading the 1,000 across five games means that no single achievement is worth very much, even though some of them ask you to do some out-of-the-ordinary things, such as playing through the entire Ravenholm chapter using only the gravity gun, or finishing Episode One and firing exactly one bullet over the course of the entire game. Each game has an achievement browser that shows you the achievements that relate to that specific game, though some of the achievements for the Half-Life 2 games cross over from one game to another.

The achievement browser that Valve has built also shows your progress in some cases. For example, there's an achievement for smashing every single antlion grub in Episode Two. The catch is that there are 333 grubs in all. It's nice to know how many you have left. On the PC, Valve has rolled an achievement system into Steam, its digital content delivery system. The community side of Steam now lets you look at how long players spend playing each game, and the same achievements used in Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Episode Two are also present in your Steam profile. The difference is that they don't tie back into your Microsoft-branded gamertag, and there's no point count associated with each achievement on the PC, either. It's an interesting addition to the service, which is becoming quite a service these days, though we're still patiently waiting for a fully digital burrito-delivery system to be implemented.

But that's beside the point. You don't need burritos, sealed dealer cases of baseball cards, or fully integrated fitness systems thrown in at no additional charge to make The Orange Box a great deal. It's practically guaranteed that if you enjoy video games, you'll find at least one thing to like in this collection, though there's also a very good chance that you'll really enjoy all of it.