The Orange Box

Time: Thu Oct 11 19:48:13 AUSEST 2007

Status: Completed

Just finished Episode 2 with a positive feel. This episode has improved upon the original Half-Life2 game-play considerably. Semi-linear action packed story's the biggest plus in this episode installment, and more Gman was always desirable. There's plenty of original Half-Life references within the cut scenes, while Gman manages to keep the player puzzled about the "behind the scenes" happenings (actually he managed to make me look into WordWeb on more than one occasion to figure out what he was saying). ;)

Variety of gameplay terrains ranges from caves, forests, mountains, bridges, to underground bases. Ambientish music & sound within the game were worth putting up loud on HD555. And finally this episode seemed to be quite longer than HL2:EP1. Personally I'll be glad to see Episode 3 be the last 'episode' installment. Valve's initial reasoning behind the episodes concept has been largely due to faster ability to pump out new releases. Turns out at the end of the day each episode release took much longer than expected with Valve's almost usual promise-and-delay saga.

Team-Fortress 2's looking quite promising. Gameplay's quite different compared to Counter Strike Source in terms of nearly everything looking "bulky" and cartoonish giving it a feel of non-precision oriented gaming. I'm yet to properly play it though. Glad to see Internode's got plenty of TF2 servers around. I wonder how long before half of them are shut down...

And lastly Portal's quite an interesting game concept, contrary to my initial expectations. For those who like in-game physics, don't miss out!