The Orange Box

Whatever you thought a game could deliver, think again. The Orange Box packs so much quality content into one $60 title that it sets an almost dangerous precedent for all other developers and publishers. Good thing we like danger.

The Orange Box is actually five games in one, or three, depending on how you look at it. The cinematic single-player shooter Half-Life 2 anchors the collection. Revived and rebuilt after its mediocre showing on the original Xbox, it’s now joined by its add-on adventures Episode One and Episode Two. As a bonus, the disc also offers the multiplayer-only shooter Team Fortress 2, and – if you act now – the first-person action/puzzle game Portal. They’re all wildly different from one another, but since they share some technology, it made sense to throw all five titles onto one disc and let all of us 360 folks drown in content.

It’s okay to call Half-Life 2 a thinking-man’s shooter because it stars a thinking man —Gordon Freeman, gaming’s most celebrated hero scientist. Five years after the incident at the Black Mesa Research Facility, you find yourself in City 17, a dingy totalitarian realm where Dr. Breen appears on video monitors, telling reassuring lies about the alien culture that sits poised to take over the planet and reminding everyone how grateful they should be now that they no longer need to reproduce. You’re a stranger and this is definitely a strange land, filled with faceless guards and, as in any good fascist state, a healthy underground resistance movement. Before you know it, you’re on the run, crowbar in hand, piloting vehicles (which could handle better for our tastes) and generally learning about the world as you explore and absorb it. Unfortunately, our travels included some noticeable pop-up, something we thought we left in the last generation.

That “alienation in an alien nation” vibe gives context to Gordon’s often-solitary trek, but the best parts of the game come in the company of Alyx Vance, who would be the best sidekick in gaming history if that title didn’t feel like such an insult. She’ll intelligently blast enemies by your side, give you crucial info, and yes, flirt here and there, too. By the time you’ve played through all three segments, HL2’s characterization — a successful combination of excellent writing, spot-on vocal performances, and impressive facial animations — will make you care about these people, dammit.

Better still, all three HL2 chapters give the player credit for being a critically thinking human being. You solve puzzles not by collecting keycards, but by simply looking around and seeing what you can do with what you’ve got. You’ll solve lots of physical puzzles — throwing switches, moving cinder blocks, shifting weights, and using enemy fire to blast open passageways. Those potential solutions open up tenfold when you get the object-hurling gravity gun, easily one of the coolest playthings in any FPS ever. Launching a sawblade through the midsection of a headcrab zombie is a defining moment, for both Half-Life 2 and the gamers who play it.

Swap the gravity gun for a cannon that rips holes in the fabric of space, and you’ve got Portal, the first major advance in puzzle gaming since Russians started dropping blocks. Trapped in Aperture Science’s sterile testing facility, you’ll need to navigate 19 treacherous levels by blasting entry and exit portals in the walls, floors, and ceilings of your surroundings, then stepping through them. Your only guide is a sing-songy computer voice with a sinister sense of humor; it often glitches out when discussing safety, repeatedly promises you delicious cake, and cheerfully reminds you that the taste of blood is not part of the tests. The physical puzzles — involving switches, moving platforms, turrets, forcefields, weighted cubes, incinerators, and the negation of petty concepts like “up” and “down” — make Portal the best brain-twister in years. Even more interesting: if you pay attention, you’ll discover a link between Aperture and Black Mesa…and Valve swears the all-too-brief Portal is just the beginning.

That leaves Team Fortress 2, which has finally emerged from its nine-year development cocoon. After all that, it’s a pretty straightforward objective-based team shooter — 16 players split into two teams to capture a flag or fight to control territories on just six maps, each of which is locked to a specific game type. The game’s cartoonish look and humor are a welcome change from über-serious shooters, and we were impressed with the nine well-balanced, visually distinct, strictly defined roles for players, ranging from an invisible spy to a lumbering heavy-weapons monster. But with Halo 3, Shadowrun, and Call of Duty 4 already serving up multiplayer mayhem, do we really need another team-based shooter on 360? Despite its obvious quality and visual charms, TF2 suffers from brutal load times, doesn’t offer interoperability with PC players, and simply didn’t draw us in the way we’d hoped; it felt balanced, but not really new or compellingly different from the other games we could play.

But even if you never touch TF2, the extended Half-Life 2 saga and the delightfully devious Portal will give you ample reasons to buy and love The Orange Box. Sometimes, more is more.