This past week The Orange Box was released on Steam, containing every single-player Half-Life 2 game released to date as well as Team Fortress 2 and Portal. Always excited to play some more HL2, I had the fortunate coincidence that this week is fall break and I managed to find the time to play all three showcase titles.

I don’t wish to be particularly wordy here, so I am going to make my comments short. But I must say that Episode 2 is just about the finest execution of a first person shooter in history. Just about everything was perfect, and even the inclusion of Xbox 360-style achievements was nice, at least to give players a reason to play the game again.

TF2 I have already talked about, and it is awesome. Also, it’s glad to see the bugs and exploits being fixed quickly.

That just leaves Portal, which is simply remarkable. Secretly this is the title I was most anticipating out of all three, and it exceeded my expectations. How they managed to pull it off so flawlessly is something I would like to know. The only complaint I have is that it really is too short, but community-made maps and additional content in the future (multiplayer, anyone?) will make up for that in time. Also I’d like to concur that this is bar none the best ending credits sequence in a video game ever.

Considering all the other games that come bundled in the Orange Box, this is a crazy deal for $50 (on the PC—console players get shafted the extra $10 for console tax).