I love the Orange Box, it's worth every penny. The Black Box retail would have been more ideal, though. Contradiction?!?
Inside the Orange Box you will find the game Half-life 2, which is an absolutely jawsome game. So jawsome it earns the right to be associated with Street Sharks lingo. In addition to Half-life 2 you get both of the episodic expansions, Episode One and Two. But that's not all, oh no! You also get Portal, and Team Fortress 2!!!
-----------------------
Portal is a completely stand-alone piece of sex that has nothing to do with Half-life 2 at all. I still call it a mod, however, because I'm a jerk. A jerk with no friends and poor hygiene.
In Portal you play as a test subject, named... I forgot, and who cares anyway. How you became a test subject is unknown, I like to assume you were lured in by the offer of cake. Your goal is to solve puzzles to move on to the next puzzle [OMG spoiler] and then, later, to escape the facility for cake, freedom, or whatever, same thing. [/OMG spoiler]
Portal is great fun and has an awesome sense of humour, if not way too easy. If you don't laugh or at least smile during your play-through you're probably dead inside, or maybe a Martian. I'm not saying you're bad entity, but I hear Martians hate chocolate and eat kittens and vote Green Party.
-----------------------
Team Fortress 2 is also stand-alone, also very sexual, and I'm still a jerk for calling it a mod. There's a pattern emerging about my jerk-ness, and my sexual attraction to games... it's a good pattern, indeed!
Team Fortress is a team-based First Person Shooter which involves a class-system, with different classes to preform different roles. There are different modes of play, mostly standard with all online FPS, as far as I know.
Er, um... well, to be honest, I suck at Team Fortress 2. I die more often than I have sexual thoughts about games, which is a lot of dying, apparently. Yet I still enjoy this game immensely, I'm sure those I've "teamed" with disagree.
Team Fortress, like Portal, has a sense of humour, and I like that in a game. The game felt balanced to me, which is important for a class-based game. Unfortunately, for most of the time I played, I felt as though it was very much solo-effort rather than a team game. I'm sure It'll be grand for playing with friends, clans, and such though.
I should point out I'm not much of an online-gamer, hence the sucking part. Actually I suck offline, too. But that's private sucking, and none of your business, pervert.
-----------------------
Episode Two is a fine piece of a... Episode Two is a rather enjoyable episodic-expansion to Half-Life 2, following the story on from Episode One. I don't really want to mention what's going on, as it could spoil Episode One for those who have yet to play it. Which isn't many, I assume.
In Episode Two you'll find yourself back in the role of the quiet, handsome, and generally awesome Gordon Freeman. By "handsome" I meant something totally different that doesn't make me look gay Y'know, like "rugged hero, with dreamy eyes..." or something.
But anyway, yes, Episode Two is good fun, the puzzles are no more of a challenge than the ones in Half-Life 2, and often are repeat puzzles. It's definitely more about killing and story progression than working your brain out.
I really love the way you only get to see the story from Gordon's perspective through-out the series. It really let's you understand how he must feel about his situation. It also leaves so much open for speculation, and general madness. I really love it. I'm about to cry happy-tears.
-----------------------
Trying to review so much [new] content, and keep it informative (JOKE), interesting, and short enough for the tl;dr it crowd is hard work, and I failed. As such here's a summary:
I love the Orange Box, every bit of it. Though I already own Half-Life 2 and Episode One I think it's still very much worth every penny, but would have preferred the Black Box Retail. Seeing as I like to own a disk, buying the individual games via Steam isn't something that appeals to me. But may do so for you... if you're crazy and burn money for fun since it's more expensive than the Orange Box, you crazy money burning fools!