Meh. Portal deserves all the praise it gets and more, but it's only a few hours of awesome before you put it away forever, and a few hours isn't enough to make me like a company. I like TF2, pretty cool game, but it's not exactly anything revolutionary. It's just a fairly good FPS. I get just as much fun out of Halo. Excuse me, I think I see an angry mob outside, I'll be back in a few moments.
Well, anyway, I've played the start of Half-Life 2, and it's a total meh. After the first session, I had to force myself to keep on going, and after doing so a couple of times I realised that if you have to do that then there's no reason to play the game. It seems to be an average FPS with a nasty case of Zelda, a disease that causes recurring cases of nonsensical and pointless puzzles, at least one of which is, according to Yahtzee at least, repeated ad nauseam throughout the series. I don't see anything particularly interesting about it.
As for other games, well, I've only bought The Orange Box, so I can't say. However, I must say that Steam is pretty cool, mainly because it lets us Australians dodge the having the nicest beaches tax and get games for reasonable prices. Still, I can't really say that that's because of Valve, it's just because our government/games industry/whatever it is that makes the games expensive if bloody stupid and Valve are lucky enough to have a shop that avoids said stupidity.
