The Orange Box (Xbox 360)

If you’ve played a video game in the past ten years or so, you probably have heard of Half-Life. It revolutionized first person shooters, yadda yadda yadda. If you’ve played a video game in the past year, you’ve probably heard of The Orange Box. It collects five games produced by Valve: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episodes 1 and 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. It’s sequel mania!

I’m going to skip TF2, since I don’t play online, and get right to the Half-Lives. At its core, Half-Life 2 is an excellent, exciting FPS with tight controls. The only problem is its length. In an attempt to make the game last longer, though, Valve felt the need to put in segments of the game that are more frustrating than enjoyable. Vehicle sections, which are the work of the devil, pop up twice in HL2 and again in HL2E2. All of the games involve multiple instances of shooting down helicopters or stalkers (spindly War of the Worlds robot things) with rocket launchers that require you to stare at them so the rockets can be guided via laser to their targets. While the enemy has free rein to shoot at you. Yeah, fun. And then of course there’s the “avoid the helicopter/stalker shooting at you as you run around blindly trying to figure out where to go next” parts in HL2 and HL2E1. These are all parts of the game that repeatedly caused death followed by much swearing from me. Plus, Valve has to show off their physics engine with the same damn physics puzzle in every game: put heavy objects on one end of an inclined plane to raise the other end so you can continue. Exciting.

I’m also a bit disappointed that Valve recruited some great voice talent, namely Robert Guillaume and Michelle Forbes, and barely used them. Pretty much the only character that shows up for extended periods of time is your friend Alyx Vance. (Oh, by the way, if you were wondering about the story, it’s basically: aliens took over Earth so humans are fighting back in dystopic Eastern Europe.) And, this being a FPS, your character is mute, so nobody ever asks you if you want to do something ridiculously dangerous, you just get ordered around. Being Gordon Freeman is really a pain. Oh yeah, and where does he keep all those guns? He totes around a pistol, revolver, machine gun, shotgun, rocket launcher, pulse rife, gravity gun, crossbow, grenades, and that damn crowbar. Seriously, he must have some major back problems by now.

Anyway, this is not to say the games are bad. I really enjoyed running through the streets of City 17, blasting away Combine soldiers. And HL2 features a foray into survival horror as you creep through the zombie-infested Ravenholm. It’s just annoying when you get tripped up by these parts of the game, especially when they take up precious time in the very short HL2E1 and E2, which took me 3 ½ and 4 ½ hours to complete, respectively. (HL2, incidentally, required about 15 hours of play.)

3 out of 5 (Half-Life 2)
2 out of 5 (Half-Life 2: Episode 1)
2 out of 5 (Half-Life 2: Episode 2)

Let’s move on to Portal. There’s been a lot of nerdlove slathered on this game, particularly stuff like the Weighted Companion Cube, “The Cake Is A Lie”, and “Still Alive”. If you can manage to ignore the irritating memes spread by Internet geeks, you will find that Portal is a clever, innovative puzzle game. It’s set up as a FPS, except instead of shooting things, you get a gun that shoots portals: one blue, one orange. This magic technology, on loan from the Road Runner, I think, allows you to travel from one place to another by stepping through said portal. What ensues is a series of puzzle challenges, as you’re “guided” by the often-hilariously-deadpan computer GLaDOS. It’s a short game, one that you can finish in an afternoon (I think it took me 3 hours), but there are a number of challenges that are unlocked after you finish it, if you’re a competitive sort or a completist. Or just addicted to gaining gamerscore. My only complaint with Portal is that the pacing is really thrown off in the last third of the game. It goes from a series of challenges that last around 3-5 minutes to one long, unbroken section. But aside from that, Portal is well worth playing.

4 out of 5 (Portal)

Well, there you have it. Five games for the price of one, although considering the length of three of them, it’s more like three for one. It’s certainly a good value for Valve/Half-Life devotees, but the rest of us would do well to tread with caution.

3 out of 5 (The Orange Box)

A Thought On Ratings

I didn’t give much thought to the ratings system when I set up this site. I just went with X-Play’s system of 1 through 5, because it was the simplest. Since, after all, Metacritic is the ultimate arbiter of what rating a game should get nowadays, I figured any rating I gave would be pretty much meaningless. So for what it’s worth, here is the interpretation of my rating scale, retroactively:

5 – Buy the game. Shut up, don’t question me, just buy it.
4 – Buy the game if you like the genre it’s in. At the very least, rent it, even if you don’t like the genre. You might be surprised (like I was with Bioshock).
3 – Only buy it if you’re really into the genre. A safer move would be to rent.
2 – Rent it if you’re curious, but don’t spend a lot of money.
1 – Don’t bother touching it.

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Xbox 360)

This is a repackaging of Lego Star Wars and Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy. There are a few new bells and whistles, like a couple new missions, but for the most part it’s the same two games over again. If you haven’t played these games, they are pretty much what the titles imply: retellings of the two Star Wars trilogies, with Lego characters taking the part of seemingly every character in the entire movie series, including random droids and Bossk, the reptilian bounty hunter that was on the Star Destroyer in The Empire Strikes Back. It’s amusing seeing the Lego-ized Star Wars scenes being played out in pantomime, albeit with some changes to the story (I don’t recall the Jawas stealing R2-D2 and C-3PO back after Luke bought them).

The games were designed with children in mind, so they’re not really “difficult” in the traditional sense – you have infinite lives, and most of the puzzles are solved by blowing something up or building something with Lego bricks scattered around the levels. The real challenge is collecting enough Lego studs to purchase all of the characters, vehicles, and powerups, and finding all of the hidden stuff in the levels, which requires at least two playthroughs for each level.

This isn’t a very deep game, but it’s fun to pick up for an hour or so, and I appreciate the fact that it’s a two-player co-op game, something that seems to be lacking these days, so my boyfriend and I can play it together.

3 out of 5

Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams (Xbox)

Silent Hill 2 is a creepy, psychology-driven survival horror game in which you play James, a guy who’s looking for his lost wife. (No points for originality on this one, as the original involved a guy who was looking for his lost daughter.) I say psychology-driven, because you really need a degree in psychology to understand what the hell’s going on here. Every monster you fight is some manifestation of his subconscious, and the endings are extremely abstract and obtuse. I don’t know, I never took psychology in college. Of course, I never graduated, either.

On the subject of gameplay, the game eschews the survival horror trappings of tank controls and fixed camera angles, making the town’s gibbering inhabitants easier to deal with -- almost too easy, in fact, because since I was always flush with ampoules of health medicine and ammunition for the various firearms you pick up, I was never in any serious danger. Danger is an important part of survival horror; you know, the survival part?

Now, as an aside, I play games on the easiest setting. I do this because I’m not a hardcore gamer, nor am I a masochist; I just want to have fun. Sometimes, however, the developers make the easy setting a little too easy – a few challenges never killed anyone. I think they did that here.

The design, however, is wonderful. The town looks so disgusting, corroded, and decaying, it sets the atmosphere perfectly. The difficulty on the puzzles can be selected to be easy or hard, and since I chose easy, they wouldn’t make a mentally deficient caterpillar scratch its head twice. This I don’t mind – I’m playing Silent Hill, not a Dreamcatcher game.

Finally, this game is short. I think it took me about ten hours to beat. And most of those involved trying every single door in every single building, which is the most annoying and tedious part of this game. If there’s one thing the town of Silent Hill needs, it’s a locksmith. Whenever some poor soul gets sucked into the demonic town, the first thing they learn is that 90% of the doors in the town have broken locks or otherwise won’t open. Regardless, it’s an enjoyably creepy experience that relies on atmosphere over cheap scares (I’m looking at you, Resident Evil).

3 out of 5