The Orange Box

Contrary to what posts here might suggest, I do actually play games other than WoW (though the stability of my system and the low requirements for WoW, and the general, you know, crack cocaine nature of the game, means WoW is my primary electronic passtime).

As most gamer folks, at least the non-wow and non-johnny come lately console jockeys, know The Orange Box came out this week. Which means a) the next Half-Life episode (if you don't know Half-Life please back your head against the wall several times and then go buy it) and somewhat more importantly b) Portal and TF2.

I'm a little torn about HL games, they're very good, and the storyline is nicely paranoid and I like them, but it game out a bit before I got into FPS games, and ultimately most single player FPSs leave me a little cold. My normal routine is to finish 70-90% of a Half-Life game, turn on god mode and finish off the rest to see the end of the storyline. That said, it's still the big daddy of large scale shooters, all the frat boys drooling over Halo 3 should pause for a moment of silent reflection, because this shit? This is what dragged FPS's kicking and screaming once and for all from the shareware ghetto.

That said, Half-Life, and to a lesser extent HL2 are the 900 lbs. gorilla of modding platforms. No game has spawned so many good mods as this franchise.

Portal is good. Short, but reasonably fun (and unexpectedly atmospheric at a few points). Apparently the brainchild of a group of DigiPen students it's a nice simple idea (Portal Gun! Puzzles!) executed rather well. And luckily it avoids most truly shit bits of the 'puzzle' sections from Half-Life and HL2 (namely all those crap bits about moving stuff around to build bridges, especially all those ones with floating objects in water, because holy crap is the HL mechanic for picking up and putting down objects bad, and yes the gravity gun is included in that, it was utter crap, deal with it). It avoids the feel of 2D platformer badly ported to 3D for the most part as well. There are a few finicky bits, and a few moments where I'm sure I managed to launch myself in the right direction with appropriate momentum by blind luck alone, but it was good enough for me to play till 4.30 in the morning so I could see the ending.

Team Fortress is the granddaddy of non-deathmatch online fps. Classes? Objectives? They started here (admittedly they went back to the even then tired well of CTF, but no one's perfect). TF2 is pretty much what you'd expect in all the good and bad ways that suggests. If you didn't like previous incarnations of TF, you'll probably dislike TF2. If you did like them, you're in luck, TF2 is TF with improvements (shockingly). Most stuff plays exactly the same (a few tweaks to the medic, but by and large everything plays just like it did), just with better art direction (the taunts are classic, and are different for each weapon, be sure to try them all). It's still fast, and like it's predecessor much closer to the old school Deathmatches from which it was born than new uber-organized games (like the Battlefield series), but it's still very very fun.