Half-Life 2: The Orange Box is possibly 2007's best game, a collection of five superb shooters value priced at $59.99. Valve expertly blends its older games with newer content, delivering an essential bundle only a fool would ignore.

It starts with Half-Life 2, or rather, an excellent port of Half-Life 2, a game from 2004 that outshines every first person shooter on Xbox 360. Despite its age, the game looks stunning, showcasing magnificent environments, rippling water, tons of action and the best physics of any console game. You don't just play it to find out what happens to its protagonist, Gordon Freeman or to kill things for the sake of slaughtering them. Most of the fun comes from experimentation, setting off chain reactions with exploding barrels, splintering wood, chopping zombies in half, skimming across the water in a hovercraft, squaring off against an attack chopper and chucking around large objects with the gravity gun. If you already played this on PC then great. There's nothing new to explore. But if you somehow missed this monumental achievement in gaming, you just won the lottery.

Half-Life 2's follow up, Episode One continues where the prequel left off. Once again, you step into Freeman's hazard suit and battle against the alien nemesis, the Combine. It's a short, 5-7 hour adventure, and you won't mind its abrupt conclusion, since you'll immediately segue into HL2's latest addition, Episode Two. During the course of this 10-12 hour adventure, you'll face countless enemies across a dangerous forest, fighting aliens topside and in the bowels of a dusty mine. Familiar weapons such as the shotgun, pistol, magnum and gravity gun return, along with a new vehicle and adversaries. Much like Episode One, it provides more Half-Life 2, which is in no way a bad thing, other than the fact that it doesn't finish the story, and Episode Three is probably a year from release.

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