Rock, Paper, Shotgun

[I've been saving up rants about the Orange Box for a while now. Pretty much all of them feature the word "Paradigm", so be warned: sit down, pour a drink, prepare your rotten vegetables to throw. This one's probably the most essential one, so it's going first, just to make sure I remember to do it.]

The Orange Box: Christ, it’s bloody funny, isn’t it?

Now, we, as PC Gamers, were kind of expecting bits of it to be funny. Team Fortress’ character shorts had prepared us a little for the tone of the game, and the graphic style was obviously a radical break from the Marines (Space, or otherwise) FPS monopoly. But when Portal was discussed, we tended to dwell upon it taking Narbacular Drop‘s reality warping puzzle-play and bringing it to the people – that is, we were interested due to its mechanics rather than anything else. And as for Episode 2… Half-life’s Half-life. If it’s funny, it’s in a random character moment as a break from the normal Orwell-does-a-disaster-movie tension. We were expecting them to be GOOD. But we weren’t expecting Team Fortress 2 to be as rampantly hilarious, Portal to be so funny that it’s driven us all a little bit mad and even relative-straight man Episode 2 to play up its wit to an unprecedented level.

While we’ve a few months to go, it’s increasingly looking like the Orange Box will be the definitive PC “thing” of 2007. Absolutely the heart of the mainstream zeitgeist in the way that Doom or World of Warcraft or Starcraft or the original Half-life were in their respective years. And it’s funny. The heart of PC Gaming is funny.

This hasn’t been true since 1991.
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Are Valve big meanies? Apparently folk who bought the retail version of Valve’s Orange Box from online stores that flog cheap – but legit – boxed copies from foreign climes such as Russia and Thailand are finding that, after a week of happy play, they’re suddenly punished for saving a few bucks… How? Read on.

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Greetings, people who should be playing Team Fortress 2 but are for some reason reading websites instead. Below is the first instalment in a nine-part series of semi-reviews in which we critique (or at least babble enthusiastically about) the various classes of TF2. Don’t worry, they won’t all be by me – other members of RPS will be along to say something far cleverer than I very soon.

Currently, we’re arguing amongst ourselves about who gets to write-up what, but I managed to sneak my stand-out favourite out of the pack while the others were distracted by all the hair-pulling and face-scratching. I’m still pretty much stricken with the sheer joy of playing him, so the following is perhaps not the most objective discussion of him. Still, that’s love for you. Rearrange the words ‘more’ and ‘read’ into the correct order to continue.

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Valve’s Orange Box will be released on 12th October (and apparently the 10th in the US) and it gives us a number of reasons to be cheerful. It’s a bundle of games – and that’s something we don’t often see these days, especially when all three games are brand new. We can look forward to Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal all at once: which one will you play first? You can barely imagine another developer being able to do this: to deliver three different games, each with its own palette of potent ideas, for release on the same day. Valve are beginning to scare me.

After the clickhop: some rambling thoughts on the Valve box of goodies. (Because I am a thought-rambler.)
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