My gaming collection took a pretty big hit in late 2007 and early 2008 for reasons I’m not going to get into here. Two of those games that were lost to me were Halo 3 and The Orange Box. This left me with Call of Duty 4, a game I chose to keep not because it was better, but because it was the most fun for me at the time, and the one that this very community was leaning towards.
Well, with my last paycheck, I decided that I was going to regrow parts of my gaming collection, namely with these two games that I had lost. Woo-Boy, controversy abound! As Sarcastic Gamer’s resident grim reaper of death in Call of Duty, I was met with some strange responses when some of the many people on my friends list signed on to see me playing Halo 3.
Some of them were worried. Some angry. Some were even scared. But all of them were chocked full of questions.
Eagle-eyed community members might have noticed that like many forms of media, physical products are slowly on the way out. Websites such as Netflix and platforms like the Xbox Live Video Marketplace allow you to stream or download movies across the internet direct to you, without the need for any DVDs. In music, CD singles are slowly disappearing from shelves; the UK high-street chain Woolworths recently announced its plans to phase out singles altogether, despite selling an arguably-profitable one in three of them in the country. Other stores such as zavvi and HMV have cut down on the quantity of physical CDs they sell on the shop floor, launching their own digital download services to compete with the likes of iTunes and Napster.
What’s on the way out next then? Games? Speculation awaits through the link below…
This week we covered a ridiculous number of topics in just 30 minutes, plus exposed a treasonous scandal brewing within the cast. Find out why “Chocolate Martinis” brought the show to a screeching halt, and hear Dave ATTEMPT to make it through a minute of uninterrupted airtime. Specifically we spoke about:
Travel Plans for 2008
E3 - July 15th thru 17th (LA)
QuakeCon - July 31st thru August 3rd (Dallas)
PAX - August 29th thru 31st (Seattle)
1up awards (that were awarded)
Assassin’s Creed: Best Action Game?
Mass Effect: Best RPG!
Portal: Best Puzzle Game
Best Shooter/Best Multiplayer/Game of the Year: Halo 3?!?
If you own a PC, want to own the Orange Box and are gaming on a budget, there’s good news. The evil people at EA have decided that you’ll probably want to make several trips to the store to complete your own Orange Box.
If you’re like me, your Orange Box has been played through and it’s collecting a little dust. However, TF2 is still a great reason to spin the disk up again. A good SG Gamer Night would be awesome, but the damn lag is still a fun-killing issue.
Well, (Xbox360) TF2 fans, your salvation may soon be at hand!
Yesterday, Mr. Supa wrote about the “orange being stale”, in reference to The Orange Box getting dull and dry for him. But that statement makes absolutely no sense.
Oranges DON’T GET STALE!
They mold.
And moldy Orange Box doesn’t make sense either.
But either way, you are being way too critical. Even questioning the money you spent. Think of it my way (the only way): would you rather spend $60 on four superb games, or $60 on cherry flavored Ring Pops? You know that’s all you’d blow it on anyway.
Unfortunately, I was under the impression that lag was pretty much non-existent in today’s online gaming world. Not the case with a little game called Team Fortress 2. (You know that 1/5 of the Orange Box Lono’s mentioned once or twice?) Fortunately, Valve has already created a patch to fix it, and now we’re just waiting on Microsoft to run it through their “quick and efficient” certification process.
The thing is, lag only seems to be a problem in the 360 version. PC players are running along lag free in their 8 by 8 and even 16 by 16 matches! So what’s the deal Valve? How is it you were able to create a lag free game for computers which all have different graphics hardware, but on the 360, where the online structure and hardware is identical for everyone, we’re going slower than a Toyota Prius during a brownout?
This got me thinking, maybe Valve WANTED us to be laggy, maybe they felt lag was a feature! (more…)
Why the hell did I spend sixty bucks on Halo 3, when I could have used the money to buy the Orange Box? What the heck was Bungie doing for three years?
I’ve been playing Half-Life2: Episode 2 for three days straight. Mind you, this is only one fifth of the game, but in my humble opinion, it is my single player game of the year…so far. Yep, better than Bioshock and it makes Halo 3 look like Perfect Dark Zero. What the heck was Bungie doing for three years? (more…)
I’m a huge Half-Life fan. If you’ve listened to our podcasts, I’ve pretty much compared every shooter we’ve ever talked about to either Half-Life or Half-Life 2. I believe that Half-Life 2 is the greatest pc shooter ever. The original Half-Life was great in it’s own right. It spawned Team Fortress, Counterstrike and basically the whole mod movement. Half-Life 2 not only improved on the original in terms of gameplay with the introduction of the gravity gun, which is still copied ad nauseum, but it improved on the narrative as well. Then came Half-Life 2: Episode 1, which was also great for what it was, but now…
Enter Half-Life2: Episode 2. On the PC, er, I mean the Xbox 360.
On Saturday, I was catching up on my tivo’d Heroes episodes, when I heard the mail slot by my front door open. Like a Pavlovian Dog, as soon as I heard that mail slot sound, I shut down the tv and raced to the mailbox. I was salivating like the big bad wolf going to a pig roast! Sure enough, my white and orange mailer arrived. It wasn’t a red ryder BB gun, but it was the next best thing: The Orange Box! It’s safe to say that I spent the rest of my free time that day playing Team Fortress 2.
Team Fortress 2: What I love and hate about the game after the jump.
