I had no problem with Valve bundling Half Life 2 and Episode one in, mainly because I never bought the original Half Life 2. At the time I didn’t quite like HL2’s dependence on Steam, but now I’ve come to grudgingly accept it. Thus the Orange Box was difficult for me to resist because it’s great value for money. And to be brutally honest, my main motivations behind getting the Orange Box were Team Fortress 2 and Portal.

Despite Steam’s early problems, I have come to like it quite a bit.  I have given my account info to some of my friends and they have used it to download Half-Life 2 and Portal to take them for a ‘test drive’ before buying it themselves. 

Even though I have the Orange Box for the PC, I made the switch over to Mac and bought the PS3 version of the Orange Box so I wouldn’t go through withdrawal.  It is hands-down my favorite PS3 game as it has the complete HL2 series, Portal (which is just awesome) and Team Fortress 2 (which interests me, but I have yet to play it online). 

Les, have you picked up the PS3 version yet?  If not, I recommend renting it over a weekend just to experience Portal.  I especially like playing it through a 2nd time and listening to the game developer’s in-game commentary.  The level design and the game’s evolution (both Portal and Half-Life 2’s Episodes) is quite interesting and hearing GLaDOS and Alex Vance’s voice actors describing their characters is fun to hear.

I wish Valve and Bioshock were as Mac-friendly as Blizzard is, but having a PS3 has cured most of my gaming cravings since I’ve switched to Mac.  Of course, Apple’s insistence on using 2 year old video card technology wouldn’t help any even if the latest games were available on the Mac.