Currently Playing: The Orange Box

I picked this up in Game the other day (Got £25 trade in for MoH:A which I was quite pleased with). I've been waiting for a while. I played through a lot of Half Life 2 on the original X-Box (released I believe at the end 0f 2005) but I got the feeling it wasn't really doing it justice. Then upgraded to a spanking new 360 and decided to wait for the 360 version to replay and finish the story. Now the Orange Box is with us and what a generous package it is.

I decided to get stuck into Half Life 2 itself. What surprised me was how much of the general stuff I remembered whilst actually remebering very little of the specifics. This wasn't a problem to begin with as the first part of the game is quite straight forward and scripted however once into the game proper a large of amount of exploration is sometimes required to advance.

Technically it's much better looking on 360 (as you'd probably imagine) with the water effects most noticeably improved along with certain sections being noticeably more packed with stuff..The section just before you get the hover craft has way more junk and stuff in it.

What hasn't improved is the loading. It's frequent. Rather long and causes teh entire game to pause. Which does rather spoil the immersion a little bit. The levels are huge and apparently the PC version was teh same but having played bioshock and Halo 3 recently I think more could of been done to harness the power of the 360. Either loading on the fly a la Halo 3 or less of it. Bioshocks levels are, if not quite as huge as HL2's pretty damn big.

Anyway so far so enjoyable but I seem to remember it get's better as it goes along.