Firstly, have any of you guys been unable to connect to GS the last 8-9 hours?

Okay here are my first impression:

Orange Box:

As a whole, my initial experience with the Orange Box has been bitter. After 3 failed installations of OB and a steam crash, and of course after several hours of download I've finally managed to install all the OB games excluding HL2:E2. I mean, c'mon they retail a game, so why don't they pack all the necessary stuff in the CD/DVDs. It's good that I at least had an internet connection(inspite of it being slow and quite unreliable). What abt those who don't have an internet connection? Does Valve want its non-interenet enabled customers to turn to the grey market?

Now for individual assessments(install experience excluded)

Portal: This was the first OB game I played. And what do I think of it? Simply awesome. Even though the game lasted for only 5-6 hours, which is very short(especially given the fact that I play out my games slow and steady), the experience was richly rewarding. There's no shooting, hardly any gore, no BAGs(Big A** Guns) and not even a substantial story. It's got a whole new concept that keeps you entertained from start to the corny little song at the end.

Half Life 2: A sequel to the highly popular Half Life, this game plays out along the same lines as its predecessor. However I felt that you get launched into action much sooner than in the original HL. Better graphics and some tweaks in the environment interaction surely is promising.

Team Fortress 2: I don't know abt TF1 but this game's gone the cartoon way. For a multiplayer of its type this is a welcome change from the serious overtones of Counterstrike and CoD4. With different ****s, that are unique and some special abilities of certain ****s(like engineers building defences),which I haven't hitherto been exposed to, the gameplay's got the stuff to keep me entertained. Another good thing was that the latency times were as low as 70 in some servers, unlike CoD4, where the lowest latency time I've played was 200+. However, most servers were empty and any active servers were full. Even if I find a low latency server that was active and not full, the map doesn't load, saying that I don't have the map. Oh well, after abt 30 min of searching, I finally got a server that I could play in.

Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within:

I had really high expectations on this one, maybe too much. So mcuh that my first impression on it has been that of disappointment. Unlike PoP: SoT, the action bludgeons you too soon in WW and you miss the gentle learning curve of SoT. Moreover the game delves into the darker shades of the PoP plot, which wasn't the way I expected it to go. The character modelling of the Prince and in fact all other characters was also not in the way I expected it to be. My first thought after I played a little of it was that it was a B-grade game that has poorly tried to copy a more popular game. I might be completely wrong. I hope I am completely wrong in my first thoughts. And yeah another bugging issue was the big 'GAME OVER' screen that appears when you die. I HATED that. Why couldn't they have used a more subtle way of ending things... like in PoP: SoT.

--PENDING: First Impressions for Brother in Arms: Earned in Blood--