Half Life 2: The Orange Box (PC)

- I'm only an hour or so into the game. It's basically more of the same which isn't necessarily a bad thing when it comes to HL2. The good part is it will run fast even on average machines. I'm running 1600X1200 easily on my rig at around 40-60fps.
- I picked up the retail box from best buy for $37 (price matched to Circuit City). I also had a $5 reward coupon so $32 for me. It comes with 2 dvd's and a single sheet quick start with the key on it. I fired up steam, activated the key, then I inserted the discs and installed. This copied over 7GB into my existing steam account. After that it was another 15 min of updates and it was ready to go. I updated my nvidia drivers to the latest ones and rebooted. When I fired up steam again I ran into an error but there is an easy and quick fix.
- After that I was up and running without issues.
- The new gift system is way cool. When activating the key it knows if you already purchased hl2 and ep 1 before and credits you with gifts for those games so you can give them to somebody else.
- The new steam community does a great job of copying xbox live. Here is my profile
There's avatar pics, IM, voice chat, groups, view achievements online, rankings, and other stats. I'm guessing these achievements are the same ones on the 360 version. You can also access all this in the game by hitting shift tab I think. It's actually a very slick system (mostly because 90% of the features are stolen directly from xbox live) and better than the ms vista version of live. The main thing it lacks is a trueskill match making like system.
- I'd like to pick up the 360 version too when I can find it for used and cheap.

UPDATE: 12/16/07
- So I've finished portal 3 times now (once on pc, once on 360, again on 360 with directory commentary). I highly recommend you at least play it a second time with director commentary. I'm working on the advanced challenge levels now.
- Finished hl2 ep2. I was surprised where this episode ended. Man how depressing.