Dominik Diamonds are Forever - The Orange Box, Part 1: Introduction

The Orange Box – Part One: Introduction

I’ve never been much of a PC Gamer. I still have tragic flashbacks to my youth when I used to attempt to play Actua Soccer 2 on my Windows 95 Packard Bell, which had a whole 16 MB (Count em!) of memory and a graphics card that would have barely challenged a ZX Spectrum.

I’ve just never really taken the time to properly invest in the sort of PC you actually need to play games with any reasonable joy. I did have “The Movies” on my old Windows XP PC as well as FIFA 07 and they ran reasonably well but they were also hardly games that required a lot of graphical power and processing speed.

As a result of my PC woes, I’ve been pretty much exclusively a console gamer through the years and thus I wasn’t a member of the cherished “PC First Person Shooter Appreciation Club” of the late 90’s and early 00’s. I did play Deus EX but that was on the PS2. My review of that is wildly simple, It's bloody good but I could never be bothered to finish it.

I briefly played the original Half Life on the PS2 and found it to be a strange and unnerving experience. From what I recall, it involved walking around some sort of super-secret science lab and the game wouldn’t let me do anything until I pushed a tray, possibly containing deserts and assorted liqueurs, into some energy thing, which promptly caused everything to hit the bloody fan and the entire world went to crap.

I then spent the better part of 15 minutes walking around with a crowbar, not knowing what the hell to do, before falling down an elevator shaft to my death. This being the days before you could hop on You Tube and watch a video walkthrough, I instead opted to switch the PS2 off and slink away with my tail firmly betwixt my legs.

When Half Life 2 came out on the PC I never played it and I didn’t care to play it when it was released on the X-Box 360 either as a part of the curiously titled “Orange Box”. For those who aren’t aware of said Clementine Holding Device, “The Orange Box” contains 3 games on one disc, these games being “Portal”, “Team Fortress” and “Half Life 2”. TOB was originally released way back in 2007 but I never bothered to check it out.

However, I recently watched the Zero Punctuation review of The Orange Box and it made me want to finally take the plunge and play it. So thus I purchased it and over the next 3 reviews I’ll be reviewing each game on the disc, starting with Half Life 2.

 

I've not got a specific timeline as to when all this will be done and I may do other blog posts in between. All I will say is that you can expect me to finish this review before North New Hampshire Wanderers win the World Soccer Super Bowl Series Challenge Cup (I'm hoping this will manage everyone's expectations to a satisfactory level)

So brace yourselves people, cos Mike’s going to be playing some games, and he’s probably going to do a really bad job at it! Huzzah!