You can buy HL2 ep2 alone if you want on steam, it costs $30 though I think, so it's really not worth it considering the Orange Box is $50, and ep2, portal + tf2 are worth $80 total, and all 3 games are great. Just think of it as HL2 and ep1 being free bonuses you can give away as gifts to someone else. =)

I kinda wonder how much they were planning on selling the black box, cause the orange one is already really cheap. 

Orange box is insanely good value for money, even if you already own HL2 and EP1.

Hell its worth the entry fee for TF2 alone, and with the amount of custom maps that are no doubt gonna be released for Portal it will have a huge lifespan if you enjoy the 1st person puzzle gameplay.

I would seriously pick it up Shambler... 

Soldier Of Fortune: Payback

www.sofpayback.com

Built on engine used for Chaser.
No demo released. 

The 2 first games were fairly average, and the gratuitous violence completely puts me off now. 

i hate marketing like that. let's all not buy the game. 

Ordered the game yesterday, playing it today. Just what I felt like.

For anyone who was worried it might wildly deviate from it's HL2 + bullet time shooter on rails theme, don't fret...

It's fun though, and the slow mo deaths are great - shooting some dude jumping off a platform in slow-time and blowing him back onto the platform, very nice.

Does what it says on the tin, though that's a pretty small label. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS8utQ5x0oM 

That looks pretty nice - the soundtrack is pretty manic / insane though. 

Yeehaw, finally finished this sucker (years after everyone else)! And what great fun it was. Some missions were super hard because of the "bad" movement and control (laggy compared to Quake, but one gets used of it). I love the car feeling, greatest fun driving I have yet encountered in any game. I wish there was a patch to give a higher distance "cut-off" of the buildings and especially the entities. It's pretty weird to turn your back and make cars behind you disappear.

All the npcs are pretty cool characters. NPC AI sucks big time, I had to restart missions so often because of it.

The open ending is kinda nice, I have 50% completion (played 13 hours apparently, but this probably does not count reloads, duh) and will have fun exploring the city. Can't wait to try a race in the stadium. Also I need to get 6 stars. :>

But what a disappointing ending sequence. No, dear development team, you are NOT cool or famous or whatever enough to justify a 10 minute movie-style name text-wall with gay music and still pictures of the city which is not interruptable by the player. Nice wanking there...

Well, San Andreas is waiting for me. And its shiny manual & map already gave me the impression it will rock even more (seriously, what a great manual book!) :) 

There is a fun GTA Vice City multiplayer mod. Easy to install and great fun to play even with only 2 people (played with a friend last weekend). It's basically exploration, hunting down the other player, pursuit, racing, whatever you want it to be.

http://www.vicecitymultiplayer.com 

I'd sure like to give it try. Maybe even with a few more players (#tf?). 

This indy game has been in the works for quite a while, it's finally been released, and there's a demo, might be worth checking out. It's a 2D underwater exploration/action game, looks fairly pretty, and the basic gameplay seems nice and smooth.

http://www.bit-blot.com/aquaria/demo.html 

 

Ah yeah... seems their whole site went down cause of too much traffic I guess, they had quite a bit of publicity going. =\ 

Shivering Isles is to me final, definitive proof that Bethesda's designers and scriptwriters are largely unimaginitive and witless nerds, who just happen to be fortunate enough to be working on a vastly ambitious and successful game series. It really doesn't add up.

To set the expansion in the Realm of Madness was a brilliant move; if anything, Oblivion's dodgy-as-fuck NPC AI could be largely excused under the pretense that, now officially at least, everyone is meant to be badger-boilingly batshit.

Whilst it's true that everyone in the main Oblivion game still comes across - completely unintentionally - as barmier than a bag of carrots, unfortunately transitioning into the Realm of Madness doesn't amount to much more than the NPCs adopting a slightly eccentric theme to their conversation topics. Let's see, you've got that Orc who's a bit camp and calls you "Sweetie", then there's that one who talks in made-up words (but not that far-out so you can still kind of follow the conversation), Oh yeah then there's that lizard guy who steals forks...

To make the quests in the expansion so bloody mundane (the majority are basically just your standard dungeon-crawling fetch quests), and the NPCs such banal, one-dimensional, and childish caricatures of what are supposed to be "mad people", is a huge missed opportunity. The voice acting is just as painful as it ever was in Oblivion, but coupled with the turgid, humourless "crazy talk" of the expansion, meant that it was a race every time to skim read through the text dialogue and exit the fuck out of the conversation menu before I popped a blood vessel from cringeing too hard.

When all's said and done though, like Oblivion, I'm still playing the bollocks out of it and I can't see that changing anytime soon. 

...right after I finished the main questline. I kinda hated it, which is saying something, because I've been a Bethsoft fanboy since Elder Scrolls 1.

It kind of felt like the crew from Monty Python just came in and jerked off all over the game. And not in a particularly hot or even caring way. They were all drunk, and just didn't give a shit.

Oblivion certainly has it's flaws, but this expansion was being oh-so-witty in a "hey, wow, look at this! We're really wacky!" way that was seriously annoying to me.

If you want something good, check out the Lost Spires mod. It adds an archeologist's guild, and an extended questline and really does kick ass (at least so far...I think I'm about halfway through it).

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=3295 

 

 

Its just my opinion man!!! 

Internet crisis averted.
That was close though. 

playing this at the moment, very very nice. 

Thing is, Oblivion is still one of my favourite games of all time, for what it does brilliantly - the way it immerses you in a massive open world. The problem is that because it tries to do so much, so many aspects of it suffer from mediocrity.

Of course there are some areas where you really have no excuse to be shit - the NPC character modelling and animation is fairly piss-poor and you shouldn't really be able to get away with that these days. You've gotta love the way they rigged male and female alike with the exact same set of movement anims - having all the men mincing along, wiggling their hips is something I don't think I'll ever be able to "not see".

Likewise the not-particularly-well-conceived structure of skills and abilities ends up collapsing in on itself when you're given a million ways of breaking the game through "fortify" magic abuse - there isn't really any such thing as balance in this game and to be honest I don't think there could be with the ropey way they've handled the character's levelling.

But yeah, still one of my all-time favourites. 

I agree with everything you've said Kinn, still can't wait for another game like it... Gothic 3 was a bit similar, the locations were more varied and nice though, but it was pretty much unfinished. Maybe now with all the community patches it's had it's better.

Back to oblivion, I think the leveling system, although flawed, was still an interesting concept, and could maybe work nicely if implemented better. 

Likewise the not-particularly-well-conceived structure of skills and abilities ends up collapsing in on itself...there isn't really any such thing as balance in this game

That's all very well put. Oblivion is one of those games where you'll get to a certain point, in both familiarity with the game and character development, and you have to make a decision: "Do I want to play the game "as intended" or do I want to bust it all to hell and become completely unstoppable?" (And, hell, that applies to Morrowind, and I believe Daggerfall and Arena too, from what I remember.)(I'm old.)

In a way, those exploits can give the games even more mileage, and offer a lot of sandbox play after you've made your way through it in a more normal manner. Or perhaps I'm just a bit too much of a Bethsoft fanboy. 

Yeah, I'm pretty weak, I stopped playing Oblivion the day my gear gave me full 100% damage reflection, I could have just changed gear, but whatever. I rushed through the main story quests and stopped playing. That was after more than 100 hours of play time though.

Gahd I hope the new Fallout is good.