Half-Life 2 - The Orange Box

This is my final of three reviews for the Orange Box. In celebration, I’ll review three games at once, kind of following the Spiderman3 model: 3rd installment means 3 times the thrills, 3 times the peril, 3 times the tangential non-sequitors. As an additional bonus, my tendency to go off subject guarantees this to be a relatively spoiler-free review... so read away!

Game: Half-Life 2 with Episode One and Episode Two – The Orange Box

Platform: XBOX 360
Played For: about 36 hours


Half-Life 2 is a rather magnificent sci-fi/horror drama. It is also the thinking man’s first person shooter. I mean, in what other game series do you get to be a rogue theoretical physicist nerd whose knowledge of leverage no doubt explains his fascination with crowbars. The entire Half-Life saga is written by and for intelligent gamers... you know you are among friends when a simple badguy propaganda speech compares struggling humanity to undersea crustaceans refusing to evolve. This is a world of well-developed characters and constantly unfolding storyline. You’ll travel through bealeagured urban warfare, drive along long scenic coastlines, dredge your way through alien caverns and frantically defend a mountain village... all accompanied by sci-fi trappings like gravity guns, slow teleports, obsequious aliens and heroic bumbling scientists.

There is a lot to be happy about in this resplendent feast of a game... incredible attention to detail in the environments, lots of unexpected humor, a superb physics engine... but what really made the game for me were the scripted character interactions. Dr. Kleiner and Barney return from Half-Life, joined now by the romantic lead Alyx Vance, her father Eli and her very talented... dog. In addition to top-notch voice acting, each character talks and interacts with you, going about their business and playing out little tableaus that include you in amusing ways.

Without giving you a single line of dialogue, the game manages to immerse you completely in these scenes... you feel like you are really there with these characters as they laugh, chat, worry and generally advance the plot. The whole thing is a little strange. You are spoken to all the time, but your character never says a word of dialogue in response. As a player one assumes Gordon is adding his part to the conversation... yes’s and no’s, perhaps a joke or two... but the conversation has just as much impact without your contributions than with them.

This reminds me of a time when I used to own a green Seattle Supersonics cap. I don’t know anything about the Supersonics, or basketball in general, so my friends prepped me with two useful phrases should I encounter a fan of the sport... “Sean Kemp is the best finisher in the NBA” and “they may suck now, but just wait five years.” I have to tell you, I had a very fulfilling hour-long discussion with a random guy on a train once by simply repeating different permutations of these two key phrases at opportune moments. It begs the question, just how essential are both speakers in a typical daily conversation? We spend a lot of time conveying encouragement without tranferring much actual information... heck, politicians even make of this a profession!

Main characters and red-shirt combat squads follow you through various dangerous situations throughout the game, filling in the story and adding a human dimension to the usually impersonal first-person shooter genre. Some of the levels in which your friendly computer-controlled companions follow you are quite dangerous. Fortunately, the one you care about the most, Alyx, is quite indestructible. I can attest to this fact, having at one point lost track of her position only to watch in horror as she got caught between two zombies and a head crab, had a grenade and a few explosive barrels detonate next to her, even as big parts of the ceiling fell on her head. She rejoined me momentarily without a scratch.

In fact, Alyx’s invulnerability was so impressive, I was sometimes resentful of the way the game always presented a convenient excuse for her to not join Gordon whenever particularly ugly circumstances arose. Sure, she’s right with you when you have to take down a few soldiers. But you can bet that the moment you have to crawl through an old booby-trapped ventilation shaft to fight suicidal mutant zombies in a pool of toxic waste, or get two hornet-like attack choppers bearing down on you while snipers take aim at your head, indestructo-girl will be busy elsewhere fiddling with a door lock or tying her shoes or something. And what the heck am I doing crawling through air ducts in a hazard suit anyway? Isn’t that suit like, power armor or something?

The Orange Box as a whole and the Half-Life 2 chapters in particular fit well into the Xbox 360 achievement system. The developers had a lot of fun coming up with things to do, everything from slaying an enemy with a toilet to launching a garden gnome into outer space. If they could just build in an achievement for knowing what a half-life is, I would be a happy math teacher indeed.

A half-life, by the way, is the amount of time it takes for half of a substance to disappear. Represented by the greek character lambda (which you see plenty of in this game), half-life is often used to describe the rate of deterioration of a radioactive element. Since Black Mesa, City 17 and, indeed, the entire game world is in a constant state of decay and collapse, the nomiker Half-Life has a certain poetic appropriateness. Well done all around, Valve!