I didn’t grow up with a gaming PC, and didn’t make a Steam account until my late teens when I built a rig with my high school boyfriend before🅷 we swiftly broke up. While I went without a prom date, at least I had a freshly constructed gaming machine and Borderlands 2.
This meant I missed out on a lot of classics, ones I’d discover at university or the years that followed as I tried to play catch-up. Games like Half-Life, Thief, Civilization, and so many others passed me by. I still prefer playing on consoles, but that doesn’t mean I don’t don my master race cap every now and then when the feeling strikes me. As a teenager, however, I never needed to when a certain bundle rocked up and gave me everything I'd ever needed from Valve for a fraction of the cost.
Prioℱr to The Orange Box, Half-Life 2 was only glimpsed on console in a surprisingly competent port for the original Xbox. No such luck for the PS2.
Launching for Xbox 360 on October 10, 2007 (and a few months later on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation 3), The Orange Box cost the same as your typical triple-A game - but within it you’d find Half-Life 2, Half-Life Episodes One and Two, Team Fortress 2, and an anxious newcomer in the form of Portal. The latter was a fun little freebie at the time, not something Valve expected to immediately become a new benchmark for puzzle game design and a beloved classic in its own right. When I picked up a pre-owned copy a year☂ or so after the initial release, I couldn’t believe the amount of bang I was getting for my buck. As a kid who had to sell games to get games and could rarely afford new ones, suddenly I had in my hands a bundle that would potentially last me months.
And it did. I chipped away at the trio of Half-Life 2 campaigns after school for weeks, oblivious to the fact I was playing an inferior console version. That didn’t matter though, as each game still transformed my perspective on first-person storytelling and what🍒 the genre was capable of outside of Call of Duty and BioShock. Walking out onto the streets of City 17 for the first time before being caught up in the midst of an alien revolution is a moment I will remember forever, while the two episodes that followed built on the narrative and characters in ways that were cutting edge back then. Half-Life 3 was a hotly anticipated game at that point, not a hilarious meme that would soon outstay its welcome. So I ate it all up, replaying the campaigns a couple of times for Achievements and even indulging in a spot of developer’s commentary. When the cliffhanger hit me at the end, I was left stunned in ways I can stil🌌l recall so vividly. Turns out I’m still waiting for a resolution.
Team Fortress 2 in the Orange Box has become a charming time capsule over the years. Its PC counterpart has long morphed into something entirely different with massive updates and patches, leaving its roots behind that the console versions were never able to abandon. You might struggle to find a full lobby these days, but it&𒀰rsquo;s fascinating to experiment with a hero shooter like this filled with so many iconic archetypes and maps trapped in a permanent state of infancy, unbalanced, unrefined, and uncompromised. We’ve grown used to modern online games updating in perpetuity, but as its audience waned and Valve ceased development on new projects, it had little reason to care about a console version of TF2, and I’m glad it left it alone for us to explore all these years later. I have a soft spot for jumping into empty maps just to explore, noting changes in visual design and topography as I jump from class to class, seeing exactly how much has changed.
Then we had Portal. The cake is a lie etc. It feels overplayed a decade and a half later, but it is still an immaculately paced and superbly atmospheric puzzle masterpiece that considers the value of restraint at every turn. Glados guiding you through a series of test chambers all designed to challenge you with increasingly difficult headscratchers still feels amazing, while the unsettling narrative playing out behind the scenes is not only a fun bottle episode within the Half-Life universe, but a fundamental expansion of its mythology that wouldn’t be evident until years down the line. Valve allowed a creative yet small group of creators time to cook, and the results speak for themselv💧es, so they spruced it up for the whole world to see.
Nowadays, we&rsq🌼uo;ve grown accustomed to subscription ecosystems and live-service models that are happy to provide us with oodles of content and hundreds of games without a word, but there was a time when buying a new game meant you’d have to scrounge pennies together, trade in half of your collection, or wait until a birthday or Christmas to roll around before asking for whatever tickles your fancy. Game Pass and PlayStation Plus transformed our perception of value when it comes to video games, but even with those considerations, The Orange Box is still lightning in a bottle. An example of Valve confidently delivering a slew of masterful titles to a new audience with all the trimmings at a bargain price. In th𝓀e context of 2007, there was nothing else like it, and as a consequence, it has somehow aged beautifully.
