The Orange Box
 

Are there any other Half Life fans out there? Valve recently came out with a package of games, including Half Life 2, HL2 Episodes 1&2, Portal and Team Fortress 2. They are all fantastic. If your computer strong enough to run these games there is not a better gaming bargain on the market today.

Portal has been especially fun and new. It is a mix of first person shooter and puzzle solving game. Players have a portal gun. It shoots blue and orange doors. When you go into a blue door you come out the orange door, and vice versa. In the game you have to use the portals to solve a series of spatial problem in complex 3d environments. For example, to reach a certain goal you might have to place one door high up on a wall and the 2nd door at the bottom of a high cliff. The character will then jump into the portal at the bottom of the cliff. The momentum of the fall carries over when she comes out the other portal (the one on the wall) launching her across the room, and hopefully to her desired destination. It is one of the funner and more unique gaming concepts I have ever seen.

The other games in the package are highly polished FPS.

HL1 and 2 were awesome, and revolutionary for their time. I trudged through ep1 and found it fairly dreadful, so ep2 isn't an exciting prospect. TF2 looks awesome, but I fear the call of multiplayer games. I am susceptible to their wiles. Portal seems like it'd be a great three hours of fun, but I'd need to get it by itself.

Well I liked episode 1, and episode 2 is getting better reviews. So maybe you will like it.

The Orange box would be worth it just for Team Fortress 2 and Portal, but if you want to avoid some major time-wasting material, you should probably avoid them (and CG for that matter).

I played a bit of HL-2 when it came out and seriously enjoyed it. I would've purchased the orange box the day it came out but my three-year-old laptop doesn't have it in itself to run the games. Also I cannot justify to my better half that the expenditure is worth it (yet).