You probably should have bought the Valve Complete Pack, then, basically everything for $100.

Though you could get the HL1 anthology for $15.

Complete pack would have been good but there is a diffence form asking my dad to spend £25 and £50...

£25 sounds good £50 does not..

Very true, and you already have a couple of games there. Could have gone with the "but you save $200!" approach, lol.

Nah I didn't particulary want most of the games that were there. Other than HL1 and CS and HL:source maybe..

So in general I would have wasted my time with downloading all the others to probably not play them.

I see your point. HLS sucks, though, no real change from HL1 (not even new textures), I want the BMS mod to come out (it's HLS done properly, and free).

I am not insanely into story lined shooting games. HL2 is pretty but once you complete them you kinda run out of things to do...

I think the PC fails in this sence because of the lack of different modes to the games like easy, medium, hard ect. Then at least when you go through them again you can challenge yourself a bit.

I suppose the acheivement things are about all they have which isn't bad because it gives you tasks to do as your going along...

So far on HL2 all I have found is the harder it gets the more health you find.. The only time I have died is when I got poisoned or whatever, then blew something up that was a little too close to me..

Still not bad but console games can be compared to them still and thats just lame xP

There are difficulty settings, goto options. I think you can change them on the fly in HL2, meaning that you can do a bit in easy and a bit in hard. I know it's an odd place, but they are there.

With the new achievements there is a lot more to do, I'm replaying Ep2 just because there's a fun achievement I want. You can also play it again, try and do things differently or just change the difficulty.

After that, you've always got the multiplayer games. It's weird with HL, because deathmatch isn't always included, so you don't always get the true MP mode of HL2, but a different game completely (which I actually think is better).

I have had DM since I bought CSS. Never really bothered playing on it though..

Yeah, my DM came with HL2 original box, which also had CSS. I think the different games like CSS and TF2 are actually much better than a multiplayer version of the singleplayer, in HL's case.

Indeed. It would be near impossible to setup a good singleplayer mode on CSS and stuff lol. I think the idea was that they were the multiplayer versions of HL2 ect. They all use the same engine and graphics really.

Well the original (goldsourse, aka HL1 engine) versions were just very popular mods. Certainly in CS, maybe TF, but I'm not sure. I think it's nice, anyway.

Thats the good thing about the source games. Their all basically mods of each other.. And almost anyone can create and modify mods for their own liking..

Source is a very powerful engine with a very simple and well established SDK. They have even made the engine itself very adaptable, they keep updating it with new stuff (HDR, particle effects, cinematic physics etc).

Yeah its good and it does the job. Usually pretty stable. Crashes every now and then but no major problems with it ever really.

It has a notorious looping sound crash, but that's about it.

Surely that can happen in most games cos its the DirectX sound bug?

Though I guess with Valve they split up their sound files into smaller pieces, making it more noticeable (but cooler when it works)

Oh, I didn't know that, I just get it a lot with source games, where it locks up and the sound gets stuck.

Yeah that happens on ALOT of games not just source games...

And I have had a few times where I just get an error and it closes down.. Might be more down to windows though..

Ah, OK, haven't really experienced it any others, though I play source games a hell of a lot more than most games.

Yeah I suppose. You play alot of C&C too which don't tend to have many errors..

Except the dreaded desync.

Thinking about it, I only really play Source games regularly, and other games for so long after I get them.

Source games seem more on-going and generally good. As for C&C its gone down hill in my opinion since the original red alert..

CnC has lost a bit of it's edge, however they're still pretty good games.

Online play on generals is cool. Its definately the best since red alert excluding tiberium wars. I havent played that one yet so I can't really say though it looked half decent anyway.

Tiberium wars is good fun. I don't actually consider Generals a true CnC game, as it uses builder units rather than the build queue, though it is still a great game.

Anyway, back to Orange box.

I actually thought there were a few things missing in Ep2, most noticeably was Barney wasn't there (even though I didn't notice while playing, probs cos I hadn't played the others for a while). It also lacked a gunship fight (always good fun, may have been interesting if in the final battle, and destroyable by busters). Metrocops were also missing, but they suck, so it doesn't matter.