Alt-Controls.com

The Orange Box (360 & PS3)

Alternate control schemes supported:
-Southpaw
-Button mapping

If you haven’t picked up the greatest deal in modern gaming then you are missing out or you may just be a Legacy style player and wise to the lack the Alt Controls support. The Orange Box includes five action packed titles, Half Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and the “mind fuck” known as Portal. The first three titles follow the continuing adventures of Gordon Freeman, while Team Fortress 2 gives us some multiplayer goodness with a class based first person shooter.

Having never played through Half Life 2, until its release on consoles, I must say that this 3 year old title still holds up as a worthy game amongst the new releases of 2007. The physics, enemy AI, graphics, and storytelling gave a glimpse into what next gen gaming was going to offer. Also, you’ll find the facial animations of the non playable characters are still some of the best in gaming today. Half-Life 2, Episode 1, and Episode 2 alone are worth the ticket price. But wait! There’s more!

Portal is a FPS/puzzle game and although it’s a bit on the short side, in terms of overall game time, the experience is awesome and a more than worthy addition to The Orange Box. Also, you can’t mention Portal without proclaiming “The cake is a lie.” So there, I did it.

Last but certainly not least is Team Fortress 2 and after playing this multiplayer game for only a few minutes I can see what all the hype was about. The graphics are cell shaded and they really give a unique look to the game. Use of 9 different character classes help separate TF2’s gameplay style from the other big shooters that have been released recently. (CoD 4, Halo 3) So if you are looking for a different style of multiplayer action you can find it here.

For Alt-Controls this game does have southpaw and you can map action/function to any button or analog click along and, as always, standard sensitivity settings and look inversion are options as well. Which is almost perfect but no……there had to be the following issues.

The bad news: Legacy and SP Legacy options are, sadly, absent. If you are one of the fortunate ones that have a legacy controller mod, don’t celebrate just yet, you’ll find that the driving and boating aspects in Half Life 2 are going to be problematic has the steering and gas/brake functions are normally mapped to the a single analog. Also, keep in mind that the driving/boating sequences are a bit long and you’ll find that these parts of the game make up about 2 hours of total gameplay. In my opinion this setup is really stupid and is the only fault in this amazing gaming package. For default and southpaw players alike this becomes a problem because using gas or brake and making hard turns simultaneously is an issue as there is a point in the analog stick’s radius where both functions cease to work together and you’ll find yourself slowing and only making a turn and sometimes getting a bit stuck when in a cramped spot. Add on top of all of this, there is a gun mounted to vehicles which is operated with the other analog stick. The gun does have little bit of auto aiming but you’ll probably want to fight against it’s operation. So this brings all you Legacy players to the realization that, in conjunction with a modded controller, the driving and shooting functions are BOTH going to be split between two analogs and at these points in the game you are going to be either, swapping between modded and standard controllers, or pulling out your already scarce hair. If you go with swapping controllers plan on doing it every 10 minutes because you’ll be driving from one scene to the next getting out of the vehicle, [SWAP] killing combine personal and the likes, getting back in your vehicle [SWAP again]. But again these parts of the game represent only 1-3 hours of the total gameplay so I leave that to you guys.

Being that I am a southpaw player the title earns a “Thumbs up!” but, for Legacy players it earns a “Rent It!”

Happy gaming guys!

Control option screens:

Half Life, Ep1, Ep2

Portal

Team Fortress 2

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Multi-platform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.