Welcome to City 17
IMO you get 3 games for the price of 1, which is still a great deal. I consider HL2 with the expansion packs Episode 1 & 2 to be ONE game. Portal and TF2 finish off the pack of 3.
Any way, what you get with HL2 and expansions is ONE HECK OF A GREAT GAME! Yes, it is a few years old now, but if you never played it on the PC before then this is a nice treat following Halo 3. The graphics are top notch and rival the way the game looked on a high end PC. I know I am about to open myself up to abuse, but I feel the lighting effects, textures and the killer physics make this truley one of the best games of all time. And that does not even bring into play one of the best story lines ever found in a game. To me, every other FPS out there is just a poor attempt to catch up to the HL series..... yes, even HALO! The controls are solid, the audio is KICK A$$, add all of the above together and you just get sucked into the HL World. The only negative thing I can find, and it does not even hurt the game are the many load times you run into. They are not very long, just lots of them.
Portal : Not sure what to say about this, it's a complete MIND F! Now maybe I might be a little slow when it comes to this great little puzzle game, but man, it freaks me out! A great addition to the disc and it has NOTHING to do with HL2 so no spoilers.
TF2: Talk about a revamp of a classic game! The new cell shading graphics are killer, and the revamp of classic maps and classes make this a great flash from the past. When I first started playing, it took me all of about 2 minutes to flash back to about 1998 when I first started playing it. It's brings tears to my eyes to see body parts flying all over the map again!
Over all I give everything in the Orange Box two thumbs up! with a -.5 for the load times.