Evan Sims

A Quick Review of Orange Box

Here’s a quick and dirty review of Valve’s “Orange Box”, containing Half Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal (along with the original Half Life 2 and Episode One, both of which I’ve already taken a look at in previous blog entries.)

Half Life 2: Episode Two

Short and sweet, would be my best description of it. I got about five hours of gameplay out of the episode. While it’s far shorter than Episode One was, and certainly a fraction of what Half Life 2 was, I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much work Valve had put into the quality of this release.

The expansive new outdoor environments are just stunning to experience. Beautiful, really. The action was pretty intense too, especially the second to last chapter in which you’re faced with using the gravity gun to toss explosives onto Striders and blow them up. The Strider sequence was the most challenging for me, and certainly one of the more intense experiences I’ve had in a game in recent memory.

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ZOMG Hai!

Who missed me? *counts hands* Hm, well even so, I’m home and glad to be back. We had a fantastic time in Ireland, but decided to cut the trip a week short due to the looming possibility of a union strike for the Airline we were booked with and more importantly word of my grandfather being admitted to the hospital. He’s doing OK, thankfully, but we didn’t want to get stranded without a way back if things didn’t south. Besides wanting to be with my grandfather, we couldn’t be stuck in Ireland with my Dad’s obligations and contracts.

At any rate, things are good! We visited a lot of cool places and had a wonderful, relaxing vacation. It was great having a couple of Mom’s friends come along this trip- it really mixed things up from our usual trips over there. We toured a lot of spots on the coast, but spent most of our time in Lahinch, a beautiful coastal town in the northwest of the country. It’s a big surfing spot, apparently, so it was quite busy during the weekend. However, it was quiet during the week and we pretty much had the town to ourselves for most of our stay, which was kind of nice.

I’ve posted quite a few photos on my Flickr account, and have put together a little compilation video of our travels: