The product of a US government special forces training program, The Orange Box is a green box with some orange covering up on it, which contains five actual games. Now, this may sound fairly interesting and amazing, until you realize that this game is a ripoff of Kirby Super Star for the SNES. The reason is fairly simple: both games have more than one game in the game, yet while Kirby offered the greatest deal that you’ll find outside of Costco, this game is simply two old games, a puzzle thing, some type of gameplay simulator for online, and a sequel for the old games. What you end up with is lame games, all sold together because nobody would ever buy them individually ever.
I think I’ll talk about each of the games, then I’ll talk about the game.
So, the first game is Half-Life 2. I’ve never played Half-Life 1, but I read the Wikipedia article. It seems to be about this scientist man who has to go to the outer space place and defeat a creepy baby. Anyway, this is Half-Life 2, and it’s horrible. Basically, you still play as the scientist man, but I only assume that, because you never get to look at him and see his face, not even if you look into a mirror because there are evil aliens. Basically, the aliens have taken over a city where everyone speaks in an American accent despite it being European. Europe isn’t America. These aliens have taken over the world and make people throw their trash away, and you have to blow up things while playing with the Havok engine.
See, this game pretends to be a shooting game, where you have a gun and shoot things, but you get a gun which lets you pick things up and that’s the only thing that a lot of the game wants you to use. Isn’t that why you have arms? You also have to run a lot and jump around on ledges. It seems like the guys at Valviclads said “Let’s make a platforming game where all you use is the Havok engine a lot”, and they made it, and then they decided to turn it into a shooter. It didn’t even have the fun regenerating shields that shooting games should have, because instead you have a box in the lower left which says “YOU HAVE THIS MUCH HEALTH!” It’s horrible.
After you play this horrible game, you can move on to Episode One. This is the same, except really short and short and it’s also short. That’s because it’s too short. You play for about fifteen minutes and then there’s a screen that says “You’re done, have fun not playing it tomorrow.” The whole thing isn’t that bad, though, since it doesn’t change anything and I didn’t really want to play it too much.
But then you go play Episode 2, and it is weird, because that same Valviclads designer decided to say “Hey, let’s move some of the game outside and put a gnome to carry around in a car while a helicopter shoots the car but you have a gnome.” That’s an achievement. You have to do all sorts of horrible and lame things, like killing baby ant things, which you shouldn’t do because killing things is mean, and killing babies is even worse, because they’re babies. Valve, you have no soul.
The main thing is that Half-Life 2, episode 1, and episode 2 are all pretty much the same game, just different. You never talk to anybody, see yourself, do fun things like not carrying a crowbar and hitting crabs, etc. The story makes no sense, and there isn’t really a lot of one, and why are the bad people named after harvesters at a farm? The whole game is absolutely horrible in at least 4 of 5 possible ways.
So, let’s say you’ve beaten these horrible games, which are essentially one game, and you decide you want to play something that’s actually fun. So you decide to play the other game, called Portal. In this Portal game, you get a gun that can’t shoot things, but instead you get to make holes in the floor and step through the holes to come out other holes. There are also a lot of boxes. What basically happens for Portal is that you get a gun and have to solve a bunch of puzzles, but there’s really only one puzzle that’s actually good. For the first 18 levels you just go a few feet and shoot some portals, then you beat the level in a couple of minutes. After all this, you play the nineteenth level, which takes an hour and then you listen to a song.
Portal isn’t really about anything. All you have to really have not fun doing is completing tests for this robot girl who talks about cubes with hearts on them. I would rather not go into more detail, because I played this game last time I played it and realized how bad the game was, which made me sad because I thought it would have been good and I paid $60 American Dollars for this game. There isn’t any music except the song, which isn’t very fun, and again you don’t get to see yourself. Why don’t mirrors exist?
So, finally there’s a game called Team Fortress 2. I never played Team Fortress 1, but in this game you basically don’t fortress while being a team. Now, when you play it you may be thinking something like “But I didn’t think this game was going to look like the Pixar movie, I thought it was going to be a game.” The problem is it does. This game looks like the Incredibles, that movie they made for kids, but it’s actually a horrible game. See, you have six maps which only have one game each, and there’s no Team Slayer or Oddball or something fun. Again, there are no mirrors. Why do people hate mirrors so much?
Basically, you play as a different character and do things like hold a gun, hold a gun, hold a rocket launcher, hold a gun, hold a wrench that you use to make guns, or hold a gun. Seriously, the game is horrible, I guess you can be a medic, but nobody does because there shouldn’t be a medic since health should regenerate, which it doesn’t.
Now, for some reason all the achievements are worth nothing at all, and there are too many of them. You have to do things like killing a ton of zombies in this dark city while only throwing saw blades while learning physics, or carrying a gnome a lot, or having to fall a lot by making holes in the ground. It’s like everything else in the game, which is lame.
The end of this all is that you have an orange box, which is green, and for the Xbox 360. It has a lot of games, but none of them are very fun at all and none of them will actually entertain you for more than a few minutes. After a while you’ll want to buy palm trees instead of this, because a palm tree is more fun than the Orange Box, which is green
Posted by massany7 