I tell ya, I’m still waiting on Falcon 4.0!
OK, I guess that joke stopped being funny when they actually released Falcon 4.0 
The old TF? Are you referring to TFC (TF1.5) or the original Quake mod?
If you mean TFC, I couldn’t disagree more. Virtually everything in the game has changed, apart from the classes.
Team Fortress 2 has been my first mutli-player online gaming experience. And ummmm, I sort of spent the majority of my weekend playing it. It’s pretty freaking exciting.
But I’ve been assured that 8 out of 10 Aperture Science engineers believe that the Weighted Companion Cube is most likely incapable of feeling much pain!
Yeah, I only played the original Quake mod, to which it’s identical from what I remember.
The maps are very similar (2fort was my favourite back in the day, and I still like it. It’s almost identical, and all the old strategies still work)
There are some class differences. I preferred the rockets the pyro used to have, as opposed to the flamethrower (I play primarily as a spy… Pyros are the bane of my existance)
But the way I play, it feels like the same game - exactly as it should.
I can’t run Portal. 
I just recently got a new system (replacing one that was 7 years old) and the first thing I got for it was the Orange Box.
Helf-Life 2 works great. I didn’t pick it up when it first came out (since my old machine couldn’t run it) so the Orange Box was a good deal for me. It runs smoothly at full resolution. I haven’t finished it yet (fighting my way through Ravenholm at the moment) but I’ played the first few minutes of both Episode 1 and Episode 2 to check them out and both run just as well.
Not so with Portal. It starts up and I get a second or two of the blurry “Loading” screen then the screen flashes a few times and I crash back out to the desktop. Windows gives me a helpful “hl2.exe has stopped running” error and that’s it.
Steam support is being less than helpful; the only thing I’ve gotten from them is a canned response telling me to disable and completely uninstall my anti-virus program. (Something to do with an out-of-memory condition; guys, I have 3 gig here.) It didn’t help anyway.
Given that the various Half-Lifes work fine but Portal won’t work at all I’m suspecting something wrong with the game file. I ran the file check through Steam and it doesn’t find any problems but I’m not sure what exactly it checked.
Has anyone heard of anyone else having similar problems? Is there an official forum somewhere that I might be able to get any better suggestions? Should I just go buy a 360 so I can play Portal?
It must just be you. I went to a LAN party a few days after it was released and man that was a blast. The LAN actually said their changing their premier tournament from CSS to TF2. I also disagree about it being a spam-fest. TFC was a spam-fest. I love it, but it got old sometimes. I only play Solider or Sniper with Solider taking up 95% of my play time. I must admit I feel a little underpowered as the Solly without grenades. It’s nearly impossible to destroy a engie/sentry/dispensor combo with my 4 rockets. Especially when the engine is on top of the dispensor and the dispensor is right next to the sentry. The best I can hope for is to kill the engie with splash damage and then take out the gun.
I’ve been playing the hell out of the game though, at least 1 hour a day it seems. Love it!
Easiest solution if there are corrupted game files is to delete the local content of Portal using Steam and just re-download it. Assuming you have a broadband connection it shouldn’t take that long.
Just as a followup, I finally managed to get Portal to run. After digging through Steam’s somewhat labyrinthian support docs I finally got it to work by modifying the startup parameters to force it to start in windowed mode. Once it starts I can then switch it back to full resolution full screen through the options menu.
The best anyone came up with as to why this works is that for some reason the game is trying to start up in a resolution not supported by the video card.
A minor hassle, but it works now. Now, if you will excuse me, my weighted companion cube is telling me that I won’t get any cake if I don’t finish this level…
I dunno, tanstaafl. I have it on good authority that in the event the weighted companion cube does speak, you should not listen to its advice.
I really can’t get that um, thing that happens during the credits out of my head. It’s amazing.
Replaying the game and its end sequence made me have a brainstorm about one of the AI’s components…
[spoiler]The “curiosity” module. Earlier in the thread I compared GLaDOS and the turrets to products from the Sirius Cybernetics Corp. But the curiosity module, its adorable and naive interest in the world around it, and the bittersweet inevitability of its demise, suddenly reminded me of another famous Adams creation: the whale. Once I made that connection between these two literary cousins, I found it even harder to plop the poor little thing into the incinerator.
But, of course, I did.[/spoiler]
Truly a brilliant and replayable game. I was pathetically pleased to reach many of the achievements, but I doubt I’ll ever get past “cupcake” on the advanced/challenge levels. Argh!
Ah, well I’ve only ever played TFC (which I used to play regularly).
Yeah, I miss the pyro’s rocket, too. I also miss the grenades. Conc-jumping was a part of the game that’s completely missing now. Same with demoman and the detpack.