just played through the games in valves orange box recently which includes half life 2 episode 2, portal and team fortress 2 and found that portal was the best of the bunch. episode 2 was good but far too short. at about five hours worth of game its taken them just over a year and a half to put this out, what were they doing? taking excessivly long tea breaks. team fortress is just another dumb online shooter imo, its just running around blasting other online players [no bots] who are doing the same thing to you and for me this sort of gaming is dull and moronic. portal however is a different matter. its a puzzle game which has you using a gun that creates portals which you can jump through, so if you put one portal above an out of reach ledge and another in the floor you can drop through onto the aforementioned ledge. it requires you to think before you act, has no violence and is over in about three hours which is a real shame, if only the had ditched team fortress 2 and doubled the ammount of levels for both portal and ep 2.

if you want a taste of portal without having to fork out for the orange box then you could have a go at narbacular drop. nd was made by the same people who made portal [before working for valve] and is free to download, including loads of custom maps but be warned, nd is bloody difficult, a bit buggy and isnt as good or as polished as portal but you may find it interesting non the less as a taster.

I gave up on anything by valve when they introduced that horrible control freaky steam thingy , I could wait to get HL2 off my system and I've never felt like reinstalling it again.


shame really because it wasn't a bad game.



seems like THQ are heading in a similar direction too judging by the way Company of Hereoes - opposing fronts forces you to register an online account and download a whole bunch of patches before you even get to play the damn thing, shame really because they make some decent games but I won't be buying any more of them .


piracy may hurt sales but I have a feeling some of these anti-piracy measures that game companies are resorting to will have an even more detrimental effect in the long run, same as those games that overwrite the drivers for your dvd drive etc. but at least that's mainly just EA and their dull souless games aren't worth buying in the first place.

the online registration pisses me off too, its like being forced to be online just to play certain games. still, its better to have the games available rather than the developers going bust due to piracy. i just wish they wouldnt take so long putting thier games out, bug free preferably.

piracy is a problem no doubt but then again I doubt Valve would be where they are now without it, Counterstrike didn't become the most popular online phenomena ever from all the legitimate sales of HL that's for sure, same thing goes for ID software with doom, quake, etc.



it's a tricky issue to address and it's true that the video game industry is one of the most difficult to succeed in but the current attitude of developers isn't going to help their cause any, I wouldn't mind so much but quite often their ill thought out hacks to try and prevent piracy actually cause a whole myriad of other problems from security holes to to devices ceasing to function which just is not acceptable.



maybe they need to look at reducing their overheads and offering their products for a more reasonable price, can anyone really say that having 100+ people working on one single game (in many cases) has really made that much difference to the quality of the gaming experience ?


I'm sure there are other things that could be done aswell but the way things are going at the moment seems like the worst possible way to go I can see the game industry committing suicide just as the music industry is doing right now.

I thought much the same about HL2.1 Again as in HL2 WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWay to much time spent with the wanky grav gun but the game time was a quarter of what I expected and there was far too much boring gameplay for me to want to replay it. I really wasn't impressed so I haven't bothered this time around.