I remember hearing the 'Still Alive' song from Portal play over the jukebox in L4D2 and I was so interested what it was and where it was from and researching was how I found Portal and then The Orange Box. I am so glad that series of events happened because The Orange Box has to be one of the best collections of amazing games out there. There is a combination of story, puzzles and combat between all the games and is a great way to get introduced to Valve's catalog.

Portal is one of the best puzzle games out there with an equally amazing story.
Half-life 2 and it's episodes really are a worthy succesor to the original Half-life, still with some of the best physics and physics puzzles in a game to date.
Miss the old 360 TF2 servers (before the modders ruined it and it died out) I enjoyed how everyone just had the default weapons and it felt like more of an even playing field. Spy crabs and sniper humping everywhere

I’m going to write this review as if I were writing a review for 5 different games. After that (here at the top) will be a summary of all 5.

The Good: All 5 games are solid and stand on their own, Portal is one of the most clever games ever made, HL2: EP2 evolves the story wonderfully, TF2 is a blast, HL2 and EP1 live up to their age, cleverly planned achievements, not having to deal with Steam

The Bad: Not enough puzzles for Portal, not enough maps for TF2, HL2 isn’t complete yet, the HL games are very short

Overall TOB is one of the best deals in video game history. With Valve’s ingenious talent backing this package, there’s no stopping it. Everyone has to pick this masterpiece up because there is something in here you’ll love.

Half-Life 2=9.0/10


The Good: One of the greatest stories and worlds ever created, great graphics and voice acting, memorable everything

The Bad: Graphics are showing it’s age, no online play, too few weapons and enemies, not for the traditional FPS fan

I bought this on my PC about 2 years ago and played it to death (including ALL the mods). Even if you’ve played it on your PC you’ll love it even more on your 360 (or PS3) due to the achievements, and for people who can’t run the game very well, can experience the game in all it’s glory. You are Gordon Freeman who has mysteriously wound up in City 17 between a civil war against Dr. Breen and the Combine thanks to Gman. You and your sexy companion, Alyx Vance, have to reach the Citadel and take down the Combine. Instead of explaining what you already know I’ll explain what’s new. Nothing really. Just the achievements involved (and they are cleverly thought out). You have all the same weapons, levels, and monsters. Just sit back and enjoy the first part of the HL2 saga and you’ll have the best 8-10 hours of your life. Back when the game was released I gave this game a 9.5, but due to its age, it drops half a point.

Half-Life 2: Episode 1=8.5/10


The Good: Evolves the story, even more, great new scenarios to play through

The Bad: Cliff hanger ending (that left us hanging for more than a year), recycled stuff from HL2, nothing new at all

The story takes off after the Citadel blew up and you now have to escape and stop the reactor before all hell breaks loose. With Alyx once again by your side, you have to push back the Combine once more. While EP1 uses the same engine as HL2 with no enhancements (literally every thing’s recycled to death) you still get a great experience. Well, there is one new thing ZOMBINES FTW!!! While the game is a bit more on-the-rails-cinematic than HL2 you get more clever puzzles this time around along with some memorable fire fights. In the end, if you’ve played EP1 on the PC there’s nothing new here either, but for first-timers, it’s a blast.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two=8.5/10


The Good: Some solid new content, great evolution of the story, more cinematic than ever before

The Bad: Still the same aging HL2 engine, another cliffhanger ending

While this is the best HL2 entry yet with more cinematic gameplay, and some NEW content you’ll love this one the most. After escaping the Citadel and City 17, you and Alyx must head through White Forest to her dad to stop the Citadel portal from letting loose monstrosities beyond our imagining. In EP2 we finally get new content such as acid ant lions, antlion larvae, Combine Hunters, a new vehicle, and an evolved story. EP2’s story is more touching than ever before and we finally get some background on Gman. EP2 is a couple of hours longer than EP1 and you’ll want to play through it more than once.

Portal=9.5/10




The Good: The most clever idea since gaming itself, great next-gen graphics, cleverly thought out level design, great story

The Bad: Short, very short, very very short, no downloadable puzzles (still), advanced challenges can be kind of impossible to solve, the cake is a lie

This is a whole new creature. Portal is the introduction of brand new technology. You are an unknown tester for Aperture Science and you are given a Portal gun which you use to solve puzzles. This is probably THE most clever puzzle game ever made…ever. You use velocity to launch yourself over obstacles, use portals to navigate through rooms and to even move objects. The game is just so clever it really works your mind but in such a way to where you won’t get frustrated. The game has a next-gen engine and looks fantastic as well. After you beat the 3-4 hour game you can go back and beat the advanced maps and challenges for more achievements. There’s nothing more than I can say than to pick TOB for just this game…it’s worth the $60. The game even sports an awesome, and memorable, story that you’ll joke about for years to come…THE CAKE IS A LIE!!!!

Team Fortress 2=8.5/10




The Good: Unique graphical style, perfectly balanced characters, and maps can be really funny at times

The Bad: Not nearly enough maps (still), no new characters either (still), no offline bot fragging (sorry Silver guys)

I remember playing TFC back when I bought HL1 Anthology and it was a blast. TF2 sports a unique graphical style and wonderfully balanced characters to use. You all know what the characters are unless you’ve been hiding under a rock this whole time. You have a heavy weapons guy who is as slow as molasses in January but packs a serious punch, a spy who can disguise as the enemy, and sneak into the other side, a sniper who also sports a machete and a machine gun. This is why I love TF2 so much. Everything is perfectly balanced. Instead of being a vulnerable sniper with just a pistol you get a moderate machine gun. Instead of being a slow heavy weapons guy you get a shotgun. Instead of being a weak Pyro with a flamethrower you get a shotgun as well. If you love online gaming TF2 will keep you hooked for hours. This is just the 5th reason to buy TOB and you’re bound to be happy.

Fable II is another Western RPG that really tries to use a lot of action mixed with RPG elements and tagging a good story in it. Fable was a big deal when it came out because it was one of the few games that let you choose to be good or evil with every single task they threw out at you. Everything you did affect how the game turned out and these included things from terrorizing towns with crude expressions to giving money to a church. Fable II continues this is tons of things for you to do and tons of way to go about doing so. When you start the game out your introduced to the story and you get to choose your main character; whether it be a boy or a girl is your choice. As a child, you go about performing small tasks to get used to the idea of how to play the game. These range from finding things for people to helping children fend off bullies. This is also a crucial point in the game for heading down your good or evil path. You can choose to give arrest warrants that you find to the sheriff or give them to the criminals for a reward.

The whole game evolves like this and it really makes an impact later on. Once you get the hang of the game you can equip better weapons, buy food, potions etc. One great thing about Fable II is that you get a dog by your side and he helps you hunt out treasure chests and places to dig. You can upgrade him by finding or buying books that will upgrade his treasuring hunting abilities. Your dog also helps you in battle and if he gets to hurt you can heal him; also, mind you, that he can play a part in expressions (more on those later). Surprisingly the AI for the dog is done very well and he looks, sounds, and acts like a real dog. Rarely did he get in the way or couldn’t find his way around an obstacle, and same goes for enemies as well. While you can buy more powerful weapons (blunt, slashing, stabbing you know the type) to kill enemies there is no armor for you to buy.


All you can do is buy clothes and these just add to your looks which affect other things in the game (more on socializing later). The game consists of three different elements to upgrade with and that’s skill (ranged weapons), will (magic), and strength (melee). You upgrade yourself by absorbing the appropriate orbs after defeating an enemy or using the appropriate potion. It takes awhile to start getting the higher level stuff, but once you get further into the game you earn experience more quickly. You can customize your character a lot by buying tattoos, getting makeup done etc. You can also even dye your clothes now which is cool.

Combat in the game is pretty simple yet satisfying: You use X to attack, Y for ranged, B for magic. Melee attacks can be charged while ranged weapons have other abilities like a TPS (third person shooter) mode, lock on etc. Magic is a bit different this time around since you have a “Magic Tree” that you access by holding down the RT and this brings up a series of bubbles. Each bubble is a higher level and you just equip which spell you want in each bubble. For example, if you have a level 1 shock, level 2 blades, and level 3 wind you hold down the B button and let go when you get to the spell you want. This is really easy to use and I found this very useful. While combat is a large portion of the game socializing has always been a huge part of Fable and Fable II expands on this quite a bit. You can now get jobs and these range from blacksmithing to bartending. While these jobs are tedious they are almost required to earn a lot of gold to buy better items. These jobs are timing mini-games and can be pretty difficult to master. Each job has five different levels and you have to earn a certain amount of gold on that level before moving on. One important thing to note is you can never die! When you “die” you just lose all the experience that’s lying around on the ground…this can either be great or bad for you depending on your playing style.


Now Fable II has a whole marriage, child, sex thing and it’s very useful if you want it. You have expressions you learn in the game by becoming more renowned in the world by completing tasks. certain expressions can be used to flirt, be rude, make people laugh etc. When you do these expressions you’ll attract people and eventually someone might start liking you so much they’ll offer gifts and even fall in love with you. When they do you offer them a wedding ring and set your home (more on buying property later) as the marital home and you’re married. You have to go back sometime and visit your spouse or they start hating you eventually will divorce you. You can have sex (yes it’s blacked out you pervs!) either protected or unprotected and this can lead to childbirth. Sometimes having unprotected sex with prostitutes can lead to STDs…and well you don’t want to get those. Often you must come back and give your child a gift and use good expressions on them to keep them happy.

Expressions are really a good way to also scare people during combat or to get your way in towns. You can also buy property and houses and even buy furniture and furnish them to your liking. If you don’t want to move into one you can rent it out even. The same goes with stores and you just accumulate income as time goes on. If you want you can set a budget limit for your family to keep them happy so you can visit them less. This is great once you start buying a lot of property in the world. While the world is huge with lots of areas to visit they are all broken up with fairly long load times (even when the game is ripped to the HDD). There is a lot to do in the world of Albion such as solve Demon Door quests, hunt for treasure, finish jobs and side quests etc.


You really never run out of things to do it’s just when you decide the game is over; that’s all up to you. The game looks absolutely amazing and you often stop and look at the scenery and take it all in. Fable II is one of the best looking games right now and the sound is even marvelous too. Fable II is just such a charming game (the pub games are confusing though!) with a few minor flaws that can be overlooked though. Often does combat feel tedious after a while and the main story is still pretty short. While there is a lot more to do it’s all repetitive quests and other things to do. If you get to bored you can join in the co-op play, but even then you’ll get bored after about 20 hours or so.

half life is reinvention. when that combine told us to pick up that can, the players of 2004’s shit was rocked. valve shows off their new tech that would continue to sway gaming as we knew it into a new direction, same as it did with half life 1, and same as it would do with vr in alyx. for this reason alone, the complete overhaul of the landscape, it deserves masterpiece status but oh we’re not done.

it always treads the razor sharp line and holds its balance with mastery between progression, difficulty, pacing, story i mean it is unlike anything i’ve played. each chapter puts you in the trenches and once on the other side, you get the opportunity to fight back, it reflects the world, the story, and it feels so fucking good. valve gives you such vast gameplay opportunity, they give us permission to bend whatever rules there are and by the end i felt like i hadn’t squeezed every bit of fun this game had to offer yet. the clues are there, but it doesn’t hold our hand in solving these scenarios with the tools we’re given, it rewards the player's ingenuity and that is something almost unheard of nowadays, it’s beyond addicting.

the story puts us in an orwellian landscape as we slowly rise through the ranks but reinforcing a devastating sense of nihilism throughout. the mute freeman, a stand-in for us, acting as a messiah against earth’s oppression is proven futile again and again, despite reaching the top of the mountain we’re introduced to an infinite set of worlds that are vaster than we can comprehend, mere puppets to serve a purpose with third party forces leading us to it without our knowledge. it’s pathetic. but the act of trying to save what’s left is what keeps our flame alive and unwavering, it fuels the player. a unified humanity fighting off the combine, just all consuming monotony just for a chance to live on a bit more. that even in a land so devoid of life, i especially find comfort in these empty monochrome scapes. highway 17 is one of my favorite sections in all of gaming just because of its emptiness of its coast, it is all consuming but you get the chance to breathe in its quietness.

while it significantly dips towards the end, this is one of my favorite games and i mean just fucking play it already.

I hate the term "movie game," but I would probably consider this to be more of a movie game than the majority of games that people give that label. It took me a bit to get into it but once I did I was loving it. Potentially the best looking game I've ever played, it's hard to choose a highlight between the graphics, combat, and characters. It definitely suffers from a lot of JRPG tropes and the story/characters are infuriatingly stupid at certain points, but it's not enough to bring it down too much. Seeing the characters grow from the beginning of the journey to the end was done perfectly.

I will add that Hard Mode is absolute nonsense. Prohibit using items, yet the rewards for doing pretty much anything optional (side quests, exploring) are still just items. Not a balanced experience at all, but I still begrudgingly beat it.

I'm gonna be blunt here: I don't think Fable is particularly good, but that doesn't mean it's worthless. Peter Molyneux has a lot of ideas, as we all know, and that sort of resulted in this development crunch where the dev team scrambled to try and implement all these different ideas and concepts into the original game according to his vision. Naturally, that means that most of the actual meat of the game is spread quite thin and exists, but not much more; the combat devolves into mashing X until they block, in which case you mash B, there's some kind of morality system but I don't think it actually matters until characters begin to take some kind of notice near the end of the game, and you can buy a house and sleep with people I guess but I never really saw any value in that unfortunately.

What Fable is good at doing is becoming this janky sandbox that's a ton of fun to break at every corner. For example, you can buy 154 apples from the first shopkeeper and then sell them back to him to profit because the price of buying/selling all depends on his current inventory (i.e. the shopkeeper has no apples after you buy them all, so they must be worth more selling to him); that's right, you can literally make untold millions just selling apples and meat from the first shopkeeper in the game with a net exchange of zero, and not only destroy the foundation of the entire market system, but also buy the most powerful armor in the game within the first hour. The magic system is also absurdly busted; spamming multihit arrow/sword spells makes your already pretty simple combat skills significantly overpowered, and the Slow Time skill just lets you hack away at enemies to your own leisure while they are forever trapped in the eternal limbo of hitstun. Oh, and there's a cave pretty early on that you can farm to raise your experience multiplier that keeps going up as long as you keep whacking enemies and don't get hit. Fun fact: since the experience multiplier also affects experience potions, you can consume an experience potion as soon as you have a multiplier of 20x and gain like 8000 XP in one go to become even more absurdly stat-buffed in the early game.

What I'm trying to say is, if Peter Molyneux's vision of Fable was to create this open universe where anything is possible, then he actually kind of succeeded, albeit in all the "wrong" ways. The story's inconsequential for the most part and I never really cared about what was going on (nor bothered to read the texts provided to me in the middle of the game that are the only source of lore/continuity actually) and the characters may as well just be generic Morrowind NPCs for all I know. And obviously the game has many issues being a product of its era, amongst other things. But Fable is not devoid of value because it is a ton of fun exploiting this game at every corner to do unintentional and dumb things and fortunately never takes itself too seriously. Maybe it's not a game I would necessarily recommend first or in earnest, but if you're looking for a few hours of sloppy yet enthralling entertainment from busting open the berth of bork 2000s games, then I think you'll find something very special here.

Narrative: 3.5 - Gameplay: 4.5 - Visuals: 4 - Soundtrack: 3 - Time: 4
Stars: 4

Played this one for two reasons: one, because it was on the "leaving soon" section of PS Plus; two, I wanted to check all the fuzz around it. For the unaware: IGN gave it a 10, and there was some backlash saying it wasn't a 5-star game at all. Agreed with the latter.

However, I was kind of surprised. It was a slow start, with loads of handholding from the very beginning... Then, nothing! Figure it out inside the Deathloop. That's when - as a matter of fact - it got me. Planning your loop, and exploring both for loot and clues was genuinely fun.

I had a lot of fun plaing it with my friend.
Fortunately my friend already played the game and new a lot of things.
To experince a lot of the stuff in this game you HAVE to read or watch guides and I just don't like such a concept.
Also it's a lot of grinde.
To say something positive I really like the Pixel-Art.