I used to be From Axel With Love, so it's not like I'm not on the staff, here...

Well, I got a late Christmas gift of $60, and being me, I decided to blow it immediately. Unfortunately, instant gratification got in the way of me reserving Metal Gear Solid 4, and I purchased the Orange Box.

It wasn't bad, to begin with.

I can only review two of the games off the Orange Box, because I can't be bothered to waste another several hours on Half Life, waiting for the story to advance. It takes forever. However many hours of gameplay you're supposed to get out of those games, I'd bet that at least 50% of that is dialogue.


Portal: 9.5/10

I decided I would play Portal first, because it was the game that made me want the Orange Box in the first place.

I'm going to get my complaints out of the way, because it's a short list.

- The game is rather short, taking only a couple hours to beat if you're a normal-speed thinker, though I personally stopped to play with the turrets quite often.

- There's a few jagged pixels, but only if you really get up close and look for them, it seems.

- The game is short.

- Chell runs slower than a dead turtle.

- The GLADos boss fight is entirely the hell too easy and obvious.


That's out of the way. The game is innovative in so many ways. With most games, they either take themselves far too seriously, or they try very hard to be funny, and fail miserably. This game has a dark sense of humor, and it's hilarious.

At one point, I actually turned to my friend while I was stuck on a challenging level, and said, "That cake had better be damn good."

The Portals in the game are rather amazing, and I found myself spending time trying to use them to see Chell's face. Didn't work too well.

Usually, the puzzles look very, very complicated, but then, you take a step back, and figure it out. It's really, really, different.

A pretty large amount of time is spent, for me, messing around with the portals, suggesting that this game has a decent amount of life left in it, and when I get home, I'm gonna resume playing the challenge levels.


Team Fortress 2: (7/10)

First off, this game looks cel-shaded, automatically putting it in deep water with me. This game is a lot of fun- for a while, but when the only CTF map gets played out, there's not much left, unless you enjoy versions of King Of The Hill, and things like that.

This game's balance is off quite a bit. The Pyro unit is so much bullshit- you can toast anyone, and even if you barely catch them, they remain on fire, and that by itself makes them entirely too powerful. In the previously mentioned KOTH maps, a team of Scouts wins easily simply by being faster and running to the capture points. So long as there's more than one of them, they automatically begin capturing the base, and it's a short time before you find yourself bitching about having lost. Oh, and no Deathmatch mode. No free-for-alls= disappointment galore.

Load screens. Even if the idiots you're playing with voted to remain on the same map, it has to reload it from scratch, causing a good portion of your gameplay to be wasted on waiting for load screens, or, in my case, dissecting my PSP for entertainment to see how I can mod it.

The animation is pretty good, and the framerate never drops, unless you have an army of pyros onscreen. This game is decent entertainment, but there just isn't enough replay value to warrant a good grade. It's a lot of fun to begin with, but after a couple matches, it gets tiring. However, there is still a lot of fun to be had in knifing people in the back as the Spy.