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I’ll admit it: I own four copies of Half Life 2 and bought my original copy many years ago, but it wasn’t until now that I really played it. With the Orange Box and it’s terrific value, I don’t feel I payed too much for the experience.

The first copy I bought on a whim when the game originally came out, having loved the original Half Life to death. My PC wasn’t really up to the task at that point, and neither was I with all the work and family matters I need to attend to, so it sat in my office collecting dust. When I did find the time to start gaming again, I bought an my Xbox 360 and decided that I should really get the Half Life 2 XBox version and finally give it a go, but soon heard rumblings that Valve was going to create a new version so I decided to wait for a native 360 version. That version, the Orange Box, finally came out, and while it took years to start playing, I was hooked and couldn’t stop playing it once the wrapper came off the box.

Let me get my only gripe with the series out of the way right now because it’s just a minor thing but permeates all the products included in the bundle: the loading screens. The loading screens smacks of old technology with the way they freeze the game up for 5-10 seconds at a time with no warning. Even in Episode 2, you’ll be walking through a tunnel and the game will freeze for a moment until the a loading screen pops up for 5-10 seconds to load the next level. It’s a forgivable sin, but I hope they fix it for Episode 3 and beyond.

By not playing Half Life 2 until now, I got a truly great gaming experience from start to finish. Half Life 2, which starts out slow with it’s long water level, is an awesome game and holds up well despite the fact that it’s a couple of years old. Episode 1 extends that goodness and gives you more of the same. Episode 2 seems to have taken all the good bits from the original and Episode 1, and combined them to make a roller coaster ride of goodness. Portal I blogged about before, which is also stellar. At the end of the day, it was a marathon gaming experience but well worth the time it took and I never got tired of the experience.

At this point, I can’t wait for Episode 3 and I hope Valve does a similar experience next time bundling potentially Episode 3, Portal 2 (the two stories could potentially connect at some point), and a remake of Half Life 1 to make the graphics HD quality. That would be a truly awesome deal.

If you’re keeping track at home, that’s three copies. The fourth was another Orange Box for the PC which I’m going to use the Team Fortress 2 code and give the rest to my brother in law. 4 copies seems like a lot, but it seems like a great deal to me.

Tags: Shooters, Xbox 360, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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Next Generation has a great article documenting the PSP’s reversal of fortune and how it’s now doing well on the strength of it’s hardware updates and the new exclusive titles that are coming out.

I bought my PSP on launch day and have always been a big fan of it.  I think it’s got some good games that I’ve enjoyed a lot, and given it’s screen size and quality, it does a great job as a video player.  My only gripe is the lack of a second analog stick which would have opened the door for some quality PS2 ports, and at this point, I’ve given up trying to play first person shooters on the platform.   Many people don’t like the idea of playing FPS’s on a handheld, but I’d play them all the time on a handheld if the controls were there.

It’s an under-rated handheld if you ask me, and while I prefer my DS for some things like puzzle style games, I prefer the PSP for it’s more powerful graphics and it’s ability to do other things besides gaming.

Tags: PSP by wagnoid
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I picked up Picross this weekend, and given the number of hours I’ve played it since then, I’m fairly concerned that I’ve got a serious addiction problem on my hands and I believe Picross should be sold behind the counter by prescription only. If you enjoy Sudoku, which I consider the gateway drug of puzzle games, you’ll love Picross.

The idea is pretty simple. Each puzzle is a simple grid where each square can be turned on or off that you decipher based on a simple rule set. At the end of the puzzle, if you look hard enough, it forms a picture. There is a time limit to each game of 60 minutes but if you guess wrong, you’ll get penalyzed minutes which can be annoying if, like me, you don’t have full control of your stylus and accidently hit a square you weren’t intending.

The rules are simply a set of numbers for each row and column representing runs of dots. For instance, the grid size starts out 10 x10 and one row might have 7,2 next to it which means there will be 7 squares in a row on and 2 squares in a row on. With that knowledge, you would draw the first seven squares on, the next off, and then the last two on (i.e. 10 total squares). Just like Sudoku, you’ll need to be cognizant of the vertical and horizontal axis of each square to fully determine which run of dots goes where.

The game takes 5 minutes to learn with a decent tutorial to start you off (albeit I couldn’t figure out how to skip it and at points, it becomes a bit pendantic) and then you are off and running. The puzzles get harder and harder over time, as you’d expect, with the clues more difficult to figure out and the grid sizes getting bigger.

If you have plenty of time to waste, I can’t recommend this game enough.

Tags: DS, Games I'm Playing by wagnoid
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