A red letter day.

The Orange Box
Until this year I had never played Half-Life. It is kind of embarrassing to admit. I guess the equivalent would be saying that I had never seen The Godfather or listened to Revolver.

I am not quite sure how it happened. 1998 was the peak of my desktop gaming. I wasted my time with weaker efforts built around the Quake engine - like Quake - and played practically every Sierra Entertainment game released during this timeframe. Yet for some mysterious reason, Half-Life never popped up on my radar.

To atone for my wasted youth, I impulsively bought the complete Half-Life set off Steam before launching into The Orange Box.

While Half-Life certainly feels 11 years old, it is easy to see why it was heralded as a giant leap forward in the first person shooter genre. Unlike the typical FPS of the era which forced you through a gauntlet of non-sensical and non-linear levels, Half-Life is holistically designed: levels flow naturally together and items are placed organically in their environment according to internal logic of the game. Even the quarreling enemy forces suggest a world larger than the scope of the game itself.

Surprisingly, the most dated and distracting element of Half-Life is not the graphics, but the physics -- principally, a lack of friction. In old-school first person shooters, you tend to glide over objects like a massless apparition, which wouldn't be a problem if Half-Life didn't rely so heavily on platform jumping. Playing through the game a decade late gave me a whole new appreciation for the attention designers now pay to physicality.

Would I recommend Half-Life to a contemporary gamer? Not unless he was looking for a history lesson. Unfortunately, first person shooters aren't exactly vintage wine: they age poorly.

Half-Life 2, in contrast, could be released today and still be considered one of the greatest games of its generation. Despite being imitated by practically every subsequent FPS, Half-Life 2 did it five years earlier and, more importantly, better.

At its core, Half-Life 2 is a fairly basic FPS. Beyond the Source physics engine and attending Gravity Gun, which you can see echoes of in the now seemingly mandatory telekinesis feature in just about every game, Half-Life 2 does not fundamentally challenge the boundaries of the genre, so much as perfect and refine them.

Anybody who has played Portal, knows that Valve makes economical and exceptionally smart choices. The first thirty minutes of Half-Life 2 are a master-class is establishing mood. I hate to reach for cinematic analogies, but as I was herded through the security checkpoints of the post-apocalyptical City 17 while a Big Brother-eqsque demagogue spouted doublespeak, I couldn't help but be reminded of Children of Men. And the analogy doesn't stop at visual or tonal similarities: both employ the in medias res narrative strategy of forgoing clunky exposition and leaving you to piece everything together.

And even if Valve doesn't subvert the mechanical trappings of the genre, it certainly has fun deconstructing the narrative consequences of them. Throughout the game there is a wry self-deprecating humor over the disconnect between narrative content and game mechanic (ie. Gordan Freeman using his PhD in theoretical physics to turn switches). But more intriguing is a playful innuendo with the messianic subtext that has accompanied every FPS since Blazkowicz embarked on his suicide mission against Hitler, or more explicitly, the unknown soldier and his kamikaze path through the legions of hell.

Only four minor nuisances mar what is otherwise a flawless game:

1) Load times. More frequent and lengthier than they should be.

2) The vehicle controls are comically bad. Like how did this possibly make it out of beta bad.

3) Heat-seeking Rocket Launchers. Maybe there is some secret here that I just don't get, but I never quite got the hang of the rocket launchers. Which is a shame because all of the most difficult battles require them. A curious problem given how well the game orients you on every other facet of the control set-up.

4) The ending. A terribly unsatisfying attempt at recapturing the calculated cynicism that ended the first Half-Life. Luckily, in the context of the The Orange Box, it doesn't really matter: you can, and probably will, move immediately on to the next episode.

Well, maybe. You could easily skip Episode 1 without missing a beat. Although it is hard to complain about more Half-Life 2, just about everything in Episode 1 feels redundant. You go to the Citadel, again. You battle striders, again. All in all, everything is wrapped up in under three hours and not much is resolved.

Episode 2, in contrast, does what all of the best sequels accomplish: dramatically increasing the stakes. The set-pieces are exhilarating hair-benders with Valve ratcheting up the pressure incrementally past your breaking point. The climactic battle at White Forest needs to be played: it is quite possibly the best recreation of the Battle of Hoth in or outside of the Star Wars gaming universe.

When all is said and done, however, I do have to question Valve's decision to release the continuing story of the Half-Life franchise in an episodic format. Episode 3 is not expected to come out for another year, and even that release date is tentative. 2010 will mirror the approximate distance in time between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and I can't imagine the three episodes collectively are going to be as satisfying as if Valve had just held off for a more traditional sequel.

Regardless of these minor qualms, at $20 The Orange Box is easily the best console gaming value on the market. Portal alone is worth the price of admission. My only recommendation might be to wait until Episode 3 has a firm release date so you are not stranded in narrative limbo like the rest of us.

And remember: the cake is a lie.

Grade: A+
Half-Life 2: A
Half-Life 2 - Episode 1: B-
Half-Life 2 - Episode 2: A-
Portal: A
Team Fortress 2: INC [I'm not playing with tweens on XBOX Live]