Supplier: Valve Software
Reviewed By: Rogue5
Price: $59.99 (MSRP)

Words cannot describe how wonderful Valve’s The Orange Box is. That is to say, written communication just isn’t capable of properly articulating the amount satisfaction that this package supplies. Awesome, joyous, amazing, magical, all seem mundane… they aren’t extravagant enough. Not luxurious enough.

You see, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are perfect games. Yes, I said it; perfect. Let me explain; games are an interactive form of entertainment which can be broken down to two basic types – competitive play and narrative play. Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2, Episode 1 and 2, as narrative-based games, do what video games are supposed to do…nay; what they were meant to do – they use their interactive (and in the case of HL, innovative) gameplay, and solely their interactive gameplay, to propel the story. Everything else -- graphics, audio, point-of-view, etc. – are secondary (supportive) to the gameplay when it comes to driving the narrative, and that’s the reason they are perfect games.

Gameplay can only be found in video games, and hence, gameplay is where a game’s objective “perfection” should be judged. For example, you may not like FPS or adventure games or platformers, but if the gameplay as it pertains to the story/competition is sound – if it’s perfect – then the game is as well. Sure that’s a simple and objective way to look at it, but it helps me sleep at night knowing I can use that as a base or gauge to fall back on. From there, looking at things like graphics and audio and how they affect that gameplay would give you a more accurate description and better judgment on subjective terms. I’m not naïve, if the game runs at 10fps, it’s obviously going to screw up the game (and, not surprisingly, the gameplay.) But, for example, if you look at a game like Tetris, the simple visuals don’t hinder its awesomeness or addictiveness.

I say all of this because The Orange Box goes a few steps beyond objective perfection. It not only has incredible innovation in the form of Portal, awesome art direction and style with Team Fortress 2, or amazing story-telling via the HL series (all of which adhere to the use of awesome interactivity/gameplay), but it’s also incredibly cheap. Everything in the box could have been fleshed out further and sold at $60 a pop, but Valve decided NOT to dilute any of the experiences by artificially lengthening them and instead decided to package them as five shorter but tightly-knit games in one box. It’s a bold move in the favour of the consumer and I can’t think of any other developer/publisher who has done that in the games industry.

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