Portal, the Orange Box, and VALVe.

[Derric]

A few days ago I downloaded Portal: the first slice, and I thought it was really fun, In fact it was fun enough to consider buying. I looked on Amazon, and saw that the full game comes in the Orange Box, along with Half life 2. The pack is a great price for several games. However since I've never played Half Life before; I decided to download the demo to see if I liked it, but more importantly, if it would run on my computer ( When I say run I mean: will it be playable not skip frames etc. ). When I tried to start the demo a message popped up telling me that: if I clicked yes, I would need to be connected to the internet from then on to play any VALVe games.

So what I want to know is:
a. Is the full version of portal as good as the demo.
b. Is the orange box worth it.
c. If; for whatever reason, the internet is not available at my house will I be able to still access my VALVe games.

[De Taxi]

Yes portal is pretty good...but short. However the ending gives you all your affort in full. Half-life 2 is fun and you also get episode 1 and 2 and TF2.
Now to the orange box...if you will buy the verison I bought you will have to download your games from steam. So you will need an internet at least for the duration of the instalation and updates. After that you can play the games on steam in offline regime. But remember that you will need the connection for few hours so you download all the data.

[Derric]

Thanks, that answered my questions. Now I only need to find out whether or not Half Life works well on my machine.

[Zamamee]

Half Life 2 (and pretty much any game on the Source engine) works very well on a huge range of PC setups. It's very efficient, so many older systems perform surprisingly well on HL2.

[iDeekz]

Don't forget to try Source SDK.

[goody10]

Portal is great if not a little short. There is a mod out called Portal Prelude (i think thats its name) which is supposed to be bigger than the original game.

Here is the mods official site
Portal: Prelude

[Zedo Mann]

Originally Posted by Derric

a. Is the full version of portal as good as the demo.

I've never played the demo, but the full version is good. Kind of short though. I played through it 5 times and am working on a 6th...

Originally Posted by Derric

b. Is the orange box worth it.

Definitely. You get 5 games total: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, and Team-Fortress 2. Six if you count Half-Life 2: Lost Coast...

Package: The Orange Box
The Orange Box - 5 Games. One Box.

Originally Posted by Derric

c. If; for whatever reason, the internet is not available at my house will I be able to still access my VALVe games.

You will need to have an internet connection while your games download to the latest version, as De Taxi said. You will need to have run your games recently in order to play them from Steam offline mode.

If you get the Orange Box, you may consider the $10.00 sandbox mod/game Garry's Mod on Steam

Hope that helps you out...

Originally Posted by goody10

Portal is great if not a little short. There is a mod out called Portal Prelude (i think thats its name) which is supposed to be bigger than the original game.

Here is the mods official site
Portal: Prelude

Project Beta is better and will be out Q4 of this year.
Portal: Project-Beta mod for Portal - Mod DB