Insert Coin #6 The Cake is a lie

Continuing my trend of post titles that only really make sense if you are very familiar with the subject matter, I present this Insert Coin. Hopefully, the Title ignites the curiosity enough to investigate further. This is another edition of Insert Coin, so it's already known that it's going to be about games, and I finally succumb to buying a copy of The Orange Box.


I know, I know it's been out for what seems like forever since the Orange Box came out. So much time in fact, that they have now released Portal separately for the PC. For those not in the know, The Orange Box is effectively 5 games in 1. There is Half Life 2 + episodes 1 and 2; There is Team Fortress 2 (class-based multiplayer) and there is Portal.
Now Portal is the one game out of the five which I've played the most. I took a brief look at Team Fortress 2 and if I'm honest, I found it quite skittish and loose. However the visuals are awesome, cel-shaded and very cartoonish with exaggerated body shapes etc. I think I'll just need to spend a bit more time with that to get a true idea if I like the game or not. Half Life 2 and the episodic content is something I embarrassingly have not played at all. When Half Life 2 came out I did not have the rig to be able to run it. I remember when Half Life 2 was released on Xbox and that suffered from really bad frame rate, the 360 shouldn't suffer from any of that. Anyways, with the coming of GTA4 (initial impressions coming soon), I'll have to check out the Half Life 2 series at a much later date - gravity gun yum.

Fortunately there was enough time to check out Portal. Now I had heard a lot about Portal. Pretty much everywhere I turned, people were praising the game, there was even echoes of game of the year, which are not entirely misplaced. Opinions I had read promised a truly awesome puzzle game with the great writing that Valve have become well known for.
Well I can only agree with those many opinions, it is a great game and luckily I had not exposed myself enough to spoil the story of the game. What I will say that it is indeed a puzzle/platform game, the general premise being that you are faced with a room in which you have to use your portal gun to move yourself and other objects around in it. You shoot two portals and you then walk through one and then out the other.
It is very cool, I ended up playing for pretty much a whole afternoon and in that time I had pretty much completed all the levels - I got stuck once and had to look up for a bit of help (sorry!). So in reflection it's quite a short experience, but something that is incredibly enjoyable throughout. Also with completing the game it has unlocked an arcade mode of sorts; challenges finishing rooms in the quickest time, finishing with the least number of portals and also reworked levels to make them much much harder. I tried the first hard level and I was making some progress but gave up as I was getting hungry. Anyways, that is pretty cool and the Orange Box will definitely be revisited after the GTA4 buzz calms down.

I wholeheartedly recommend the Orange Box, five games in one speaks really good value. For those like me which have put off this purchase especially with the handful of awesome games we got in the second half of 2007, then don't delay, I can only comment on how much of it I've played so far - With all the Half Life 2 content still to play it's so good in terms of monetary value plus there's the fact that Valve are quality game developers, so it will deliver on actual game play too. Just get it.