What I'm Playing: The Orange Box Edition

The Orange Box is a new collection from Valve that includes Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. It's really the last two that are the most interesting.

Portal is a single player game that is a bit mind bending. It's like a first person platformer, but you're equipped with a "portal gun" that allows you to create a portal that connects one surface with another. For instance, you can shoot one side on the wall, and one side on the ceiling, walk through, and you'll be falling from the ceiling. It gets really interesting when you start thinking about momentum, which the game handles really well.

Team Fortress 2 is the sequel to, you guessed it, Team Fortress. TF2 is class based, and as you can tell from it's name, is very team orientated. What's somewhat unique about it are the cartoon-like graphics. Given how wacky the classes are (Pyro, Demoman, to name a few), it actually seems to work better than life-like graphics would have.

Anyway, I'd highly recommend the The Orange Box. It's out for the 360 and PC, and a PS3 version is on it's way. Portal and TF2 are worth the price of the game alone, and if you haven't played any of the HL2 games, that's just an added bonus.

http://orange.half-life2.com/