The Orange Box: A Review
As I've already talked about Team Fortress 2 and Portal in earlier LJ posts (linked to just now), and I reviewed (and commented on) Half-Life 2 in multiple posts ( here, here and here) when it first came out, this review of The Orange Box will mostly concentrate on Half-Life 2:Episodes One and Two, and Peggle Extreme.
Half-Life 2: Episodes One and Two
I can't actually remember much about Episode One, other than that it had a highly enjoyable first part with the Super Gravity Gun, and a rather annoying part with lots of attacking Zombies in the dark. As I can remember most of the original Half-Life 2, this leads me to believe that Episode One was either really short, or very unmemorable.
Episode Two, of course, I've just finished, so I can remember a lot more about it. Like I vaguely remember Episode One being, it was very much a curate's egg.
Some of the acting and characterisation was pitch-perfect, and surprisingly strongly written. Not just the unexpectedly affecting ending, but the overall scripting and moments of humour. Speaking of which...
The Vortigaunts in Episode Two are both impressive (best fight sequence ever, versus the Antlion horde), and amusing. Actually, I'd have liked even more Vortigaunt presence in Episode Two and was disappointed that Uriah, for example, was a relatively brief cameo in the rushed seeming final section.
The Much Mooted Hunters were... mixed. While I'm impressed by their difficulty, and their cool look and weaponry, I also found them rather annoying to fight. Part of this is my own fault, of course-I'm a terrible shot with the physics-based projectiles that the Gravity Gun provides you with, and I tended to spend much more time missing Hunters and then being shot full of darts, or charged at, while I scrambled to pick up more ammunition than I did nailing them with their own primed-to-explode darts. And this was on Easy, too. Part of me holds a deep resentment that Valve gave Hunters partial immunity to shotgun blasts, too (they take 1/5 damage or something, from shotguns only), since that's my default weapon for most of HL2 and the Episodes.
I've come to the conclusion that the final battle against Hunter-escorted Striders was actually irritating for a combination of the difficulty I have killing Hunters and the pressure of the imposed time-limit on killing the Striders. With a much longer time-limit, or less Hunters, I think I'd have been able to relax a lot more and actually enjoy the experience.
On the opposite side of things, those which went on for Too Long, the Antlion tunnels sequence started out impressively different (and, I believe, impressively new, in that the roughly-cut flooring is a difficult thing to model in the Source Engine), but stayed a little past its welcome, even with the addition of the Vortigaunt companion.
The best bit of the game for me, though, was the assault on the Combine Gun Platform, just for the hordes of amusingly-on-fire Zombies and the bit with the unexpected Fast Zombie Torso. It also lasted just long enough for the experience to remain novel.
The driving, I was ambivalent about, especially since I immediately missed the pintle-mounted Gauss gun from the similar buggy in Half-Life 2 (and speaking of things I missed, how about the Antlion-assault sequence from the original-I'd love to have an army of Antlions to besiege Hunter packs with...), and because (while I didn't have the level of annoyance that rimspace had) I did find it sometimes a little harder to handle than I expected, especially when trying to run Zombies (or Hunters) down without getting stuck on the environment. (Despite this, I managed to beat Dog in the race to White Forest...)
Overall, though, Episode Two was a lot more memorable than Episode One; perhaps a little more Plot, a little less Hunters and a (dare I say it) Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device would make Episode Three finally as near perfect as Team Fortress 2 and Portal...
Peggle Extreme
I think Peggle Extreme only comes with the Steam version of The Orange Box, but I'm not certain. In any case, its a special edition of Peggle, a game which is sort of like Pachinko except with considerably more over-the-top stylings. And Ode To Joy.
I can't possibly do justice to the addictive perfection of this game, so I'll pass you over to the guys at Rock Paper Shotgun, who made Peggle one of their 24 Top Games of the Year.
Ranking and expectations
It's interesting that the three games I've most enjoyed in The Orange Box have been those which have less plot structure (okay, so Portal has a plot, but the point is the puzzles and the character of GLaDOS, really). I think that this is related to the issue of expectation and unconscious goal-setting; Portal is clearly a "puzzle game", so I engaged with it on that level. Half-Life 2, and the Episodes, are very much "interactive stories"-albeit interspersed with plentiful action scenes-as such, I found things that "got in the way of the story" to be more annoying. Unfortunately, this included pacing issues such as the overlong Antlion section, and the climactic Strider Assault in Episode Two, which probably went a long way to my dislike of those parts.
Overall, three excellent games and three very-good games with flaws.
Roll on Portal 2 and Episode Three, eh?
Half-Life 2: Episodes One and Two
I can't actually remember much about Episode One, other than that it had a highly enjoyable first part with the Super Gravity Gun, and a rather annoying part with lots of attacking Zombies in the dark. As I can remember most of the original Half-Life 2, this leads me to believe that Episode One was either really short, or very unmemorable.
Episode Two, of course, I've just finished, so I can remember a lot more about it. Like I vaguely remember Episode One being, it was very much a curate's egg.
Some of the acting and characterisation was pitch-perfect, and surprisingly strongly written. Not just the unexpectedly affecting ending, but the overall scripting and moments of humour. Speaking of which...
The Vortigaunts in Episode Two are both impressive (best fight sequence ever, versus the Antlion horde), and amusing. Actually, I'd have liked even more Vortigaunt presence in Episode Two and was disappointed that Uriah, for example, was a relatively brief cameo in the rushed seeming final section.
The Much Mooted Hunters were... mixed. While I'm impressed by their difficulty, and their cool look and weaponry, I also found them rather annoying to fight. Part of this is my own fault, of course-I'm a terrible shot with the physics-based projectiles that the Gravity Gun provides you with, and I tended to spend much more time missing Hunters and then being shot full of darts, or charged at, while I scrambled to pick up more ammunition than I did nailing them with their own primed-to-explode darts. And this was on Easy, too. Part of me holds a deep resentment that Valve gave Hunters partial immunity to shotgun blasts, too (they take 1/5 damage or something, from shotguns only), since that's my default weapon for most of HL2 and the Episodes.
I've come to the conclusion that the final battle against Hunter-escorted Striders was actually irritating for a combination of the difficulty I have killing Hunters and the pressure of the imposed time-limit on killing the Striders. With a much longer time-limit, or less Hunters, I think I'd have been able to relax a lot more and actually enjoy the experience.
On the opposite side of things, those which went on for Too Long, the Antlion tunnels sequence started out impressively different (and, I believe, impressively new, in that the roughly-cut flooring is a difficult thing to model in the Source Engine), but stayed a little past its welcome, even with the addition of the Vortigaunt companion.
The best bit of the game for me, though, was the assault on the Combine Gun Platform, just for the hordes of amusingly-on-fire Zombies and the bit with the unexpected Fast Zombie Torso. It also lasted just long enough for the experience to remain novel.
The driving, I was ambivalent about, especially since I immediately missed the pintle-mounted Gauss gun from the similar buggy in Half-Life 2 (and speaking of things I missed, how about the Antlion-assault sequence from the original-I'd love to have an army of Antlions to besiege Hunter packs with...), and because (while I didn't have the level of annoyance that rimspace had) I did find it sometimes a little harder to handle than I expected, especially when trying to run Zombies (or Hunters) down without getting stuck on the environment. (Despite this, I managed to beat Dog in the race to White Forest...)
Overall, though, Episode Two was a lot more memorable than Episode One; perhaps a little more Plot, a little less Hunters and a (dare I say it) Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device would make Episode Three finally as near perfect as Team Fortress 2 and Portal...
Peggle Extreme
I think Peggle Extreme only comes with the Steam version of The Orange Box, but I'm not certain. In any case, its a special edition of Peggle, a game which is sort of like Pachinko except with considerably more over-the-top stylings. And Ode To Joy.
I can't possibly do justice to the addictive perfection of this game, so I'll pass you over to the guys at Rock Paper Shotgun, who made Peggle one of their 24 Top Games of the Year.
Ranking and expectations
It's interesting that the three games I've most enjoyed in The Orange Box have been those which have less plot structure (okay, so Portal has a plot, but the point is the puzzles and the character of GLaDOS, really). I think that this is related to the issue of expectation and unconscious goal-setting; Portal is clearly a "puzzle game", so I engaged with it on that level. Half-Life 2, and the Episodes, are very much "interactive stories"-albeit interspersed with plentiful action scenes-as such, I found things that "got in the way of the story" to be more annoying. Unfortunately, this included pacing issues such as the overlong Antlion section, and the climactic Strider Assault in Episode Two, which probably went a long way to my dislike of those parts.
Overall, three excellent games and three very-good games with flaws.
Roll on Portal 2 and Episode Three, eh?