Game review - The Orange Box

I have a confession to make. I've never played Half-Life. Never. Now, I know to some of you that might sound blasphemous, but I'm not much of a PC gamer so it's not that big of a deal to me. The biggest reason I wanted to check out The Orange Box was for Portal, and Portal was the first game from the collection that I played.

This was a very cool game. Great concept, great execution, and incredibly frustrating difficulty at times. The story, while too short, was compelling and humorous. It's the extras that bring the hardcore difficulty. The extra challenge maps, super hard versions of the last six rooms in the story, were hard but doable. It's the medal challenges that will have most people pulling there hair out. The last six rooms each have three medal challenges, one for the least time, the least steps taken, and the least portals used. I'm telling you, even with cheat codes some of these are obscenely hard. But overall, this is a very fun game that is totally worth the time to play through. I only wish it had been longer.

Moving on to Half-Life 2. I actually really enjoyed this game. Like I said earlier, I never played the first game, though I did read the Wiki article on it before playing this. Half-Life 2 turned out to be a fun shooter, but with some pretty nasty difficulty, especially if you're going for all the achievements. All three games, Half-Life 2, HL2: Episode One, and HL2: Episode Two, had some achievements that would have been really difficult if it hadn't been for one thing: cheat codes. Hey, I'm not proud, I don't mind using them. I paid my dues on the NES and SNES back in the day.

Anyway, these are some pretty fun games if you want to take the time to go through all of them, and you can get the achievements pretty easily as well. The story is very cool, also, but I'll warn you that Episode Two ends on a cliffhanger. I have no clue when Episode Three will be out, or if the 360 will even be getting it. I know The Orange Box came out a few years ago, and I haven't heard anything about Episode Three yet.

The only game in the collection that I didn't get to was Team Fortress 2. It looks like a cool online shooter, and I've heard a lot of good things about it, but I don't know anyone else who has the game. I don't usually like playing team games with random people, so I never checked it out. Maybe someday I will, and I'll write a review on it then.

My final verdict: This is a great collection of some really fun games. If you see it cheap somewhere and you're looking for a good shooter or a really unique puzzle game, pick it up.