Attention Gamers: The Orange Box is out!
WOOHOO!!! 5 games in one box! 
If you haven't played the Half Life series yet and love well written sci fi, it's a must play. For the old fans you have a new episode to dig into. PLUS Team Fortress 2 and Portal look sweet indeed! It's available for PC and Xbox360. Check out the review here:
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/acti...opslot;title;4
If you haven't played the Half Life series yet and love well written sci fi, it's a must play. For the old fans you have a new episode to dig into. PLUS Team Fortress 2 and Portal look sweet indeed! It's available for PC and Xbox360. Check out the review here:
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/acti...opslot;title;4
Comments
Blue Box, Red Box, Yellow Box, etc.
How do I buy HL2: Episode 2 by itself? I have played HL2, HL2:Ep1 already. I might have to check Steam. OK through Steampowered.com USD$29.95 for HL2:Ep 2
From what everybody is saying about Team Fortress2 and Portal you should probably go Orange Box.
One thing worth mentioning is that only the Xbox version has the improved HDR right now. The rumors are that it will make it's way to the PC version eventually though. Of course, it will be updated for through Steam if that's the case.
Check out this Half-Life fansite: http://www.hlfallout.net/
Here's the thread about the Xbox 360 enhancements: http://www.hlfallout.net/forums/inde...howtopic=61522
Try this, or wine, to run steam on your mac.
Has anyone tried the Orange Box on a standard MacBook? I tried the HL2 demo in Boot Camp a while back, but couldn't get decent framerates...
Wow. I don't know if I would bother trying. I bought mine for my Xbox 360.
Hope you can find a way to grab this collection cause it's a steal. I bought it because I loved Half Life 2 back when I had a pc but the rest of it is also a blast. Portal is great and Team Fortress is a hilarious multi-player game. I had to mute my mic cause I couldn't stop laughing when I first tried it. I guess I took too long to mute it too cause someone hit my rep with a "disruptive" rating on Xbox Live.
As for HDR, HDR in HL2:Ep1 was pretty decent. In fact, I'd still love the HL2:Ep1 engine with Ep2 characters, story, action etc. That the Ep2 engine has probably been updated somewhat for PC, that's the icing on the cake. Orange Box, huh? Very very tempting, I must say...
Wow. I don't know if I would bother trying. I bought mine for my Xbox 360.
Yah, I'll probably just wind up slapping together a gaming rig out of spare parts lying around.
Does anyone know how the Half-Life 2 on a MacBook at 1280x800 guy managed it? That looks like a solid 30fps at least, and I'm pretty sure that's a standard MacBook he's running there--I could be mistaken. Extra RAM beyond 1GB shouldn't make a huge difference, would it?
Yah, I'll probably just wind up slapping together a gaming rig out of spare parts lying around.
Does anyone know how the Half-Life 2 on a MacBook at 1280x800 guy managed it? That looks like a solid 30fps at least, and I'm pretty sure that's a standard MacBook he's running there--I could be mistaken. Extra RAM beyond 1GB shouldn't make a huge difference, would it?
That means nothing when he's playing in such a slow area where hardly anything is happening though. I betcha the frame rates would become unplayable in areas as active as the final scene.
I've got a PC and an XBox 360. Any recommendation for which version I should pick up?
Depends on your pc's specs. I would ask Valve tech to be certain.
Does anyone know how the Half-Life 2 on a MacBook at 1280x800 guy managed it? That looks like a solid 30fps at least, and I'm pretty sure that's a standard MacBook he's running there--I could be mistaken. Extra RAM beyond 1GB shouldn't make a huge difference, would it?
I played it right through on a Mini under Crossover. It uses DirectX 7 though, which makes it run faster but looks a bit worse. I actually thought it was ok and the framerate was pretty smooth. You have to use certain settings though or it will crash quite quickly. With those settings, I got 3-4 hours straight gameplay at about 20-30 fps.
Under Bootcamp, it didn't run that well at all even using the same settings and DirectX 7 flags. Also, only Half-Life 2 was playable. Episode 1 just wasn't happening under either Crossover or Bootcamp. Due to having no hardware T&L, there were lots of graphics glitches. Some explosions and water splashes would just crash the game, which was very annoying.
I certainly wouldn't expect Episode 2 to play on a GMA chip. I personally wouldn't have minded playing it but I'm not going to buy another game from Valve for the PC. I tried to sell on my old copies of Half-Life to a friend and the serial number is linked to your Steam account for good. At least you can resell console games. It's no wonder that they sell so many copies if you can't buy a preowned version.
I hate Steam because sometimes my internet went down and Steam couldn't verify my account so I couldn't play until I was back online. I'd probably hesitate to buy Orange Box anyway because Episode 1 kinda sucked. Way too short. Also, I'm not really too bothered about Portal or Team Fortress so it would just be for episode 2 itself and I can wait for that. You do miss out if you don't have a machine capable of pushing the graphics up because when I played HL2 on a more powerful machine, it looked like a different game in some parts with all the reflections and HDR.
From what everybody is saying about Team Fortress2 and Portal you should probably go Orange Box.
I'm gonna say that Portal itself would be worth the Orange Box alone. My freind is getting the Box mainly because of Portal. It looks like a really kickass game. here is a link to the preview.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRCu5gTZw08