Orange Box In Stores Wednesday

Ars Technica is reporting on an announcement from Valve: the Orange Box will be in stores on Wednesday. For those folks who purchased the pack through Steam, all five games will be 'unlocked' just after midnight that day. If you're like me and already owned HL2 and HL2:Episode One, the 'giveaway keys' should be available at that time as well. "In our last bit of Orange Box news, Valve has been running a television commercial for the Orange Box. It had to have been hard to make all those different games look like one cohesive package, but the company did a great job. The Orange Box can't come soon enough."

Giveaway Keys are Live

[Bieeanda]

A new column in the 'My Games' tab titled 'Gifts' appeared earlier today, with listings beside my installs of HL2 and EP1. According to the official forums, that system is live.

Re:Random Opportunistic Mod Plugging of the Day!

[Rowan_u]

Just wanted to add here, that despite the self depreciation. . . I loved Minerva! Maybe even more than the main game (with the exception of the antlion bits). Writing was superb, and the way you left me staring down turrets with no grav-gun really opened me up to what's possible in the source engine. Running mad dash style while holding a barrel in front of your face for cover, then attempting to pick up one turret and throw it into another is simply something that never occurred to me while in possession of the mighty grav-gun. All around great mod. Still waiting for the conclusion btw.

         

Re:Get with the times.

[Tackhead]

> I have to wonder if there's any intersection between the people who complain about digital distribution of software (a la Steam) and people who shriek and throw feces at the entertainment industry for not changing their business model to center around digital distribution.

I don't see anyone clamoring for the music industry to deliver "you download the song, then your MP3 player contacts the mothership to confirm that it's authorized to decrypt the song on your player, and if you leave your MP3 player unplugged from your computer for more than 30 days, you have to phone home the next time you plug it in. We also have the right to automatically "update" the Original Explicit Mix with the Radio Edit Mix if Wal-Mart decides it won't sell our records if the singer uses the word "fuck".)

Actually, I see plenty of RIAA and MPAA executives clamoring shrieking and throwing feces in favor of that model of digital distribution. But I don't think you were talking about those particular monkeys :)

Me? I wonder about the intersection between the people who think Steam's a wonderful content delivery system, but who shriek and throw feces at Microsoft for XP, Vista, and WGA. They're the really weird ones.

Re:I like steam but...

[lucas teh geek]

if all you want is episode 2, then buy just episode 2 by itself for $29.95. nobody is forcing you to buy the orange box

Re:Can we finally buy Half Life 2, for real?

[rufo]

Sure can. [ebgames.com]

Re:not really outraged..?

[Fweeky]

I'm not denying that Steam doesn't have some good aspects, but the app itself is a pile of junk. It's slow, buggy ("Delete your ClientRegistry.blob. Again."), awkward to use, and lacks a lot of basic functionality I'd hope a download service like it would have by now.

Stardock's content delivery system, Stardock Central, is much closer to what I want out of such a service; if Stardock are down or my Internet connection is funky, it doesn't freeze for 120 seconds waiting for the connection to time out; if a patch is available, it can tell me about the exact version I'm about to get, let me checkpoint my current install, and if the patch goes horribly wrong I can rollback; it doesn't lock up and busyloop for no apparant reason; it looks and acts like an actual native application.

Oh, and it doesn't have any DRM.

Re:Get with the times.

[toolie]

Valve is doing us a favor? They're forcing us to buy software that we already own in order to get access to Episode 2, and then they're doing us a favor by letting us give one copy of the software we've paid for twice to someone else? How bloody friggin' generous of them.

Instead of being a douche and jumping on the 'ZOMG!!! They suck making us buy all this stuff!' bandwagon you do some checking for yourself. Here, I'll even help you out [steampowered.com].