Erica gave me The Orange Box as an early Christmas present and I spent the weekend playing the heck out of Portal.

The game has an interesting history -- a prototype was developed by a group of students using the Half Life 2 engine that so impressed Valve (the makers of Half Life) that they hired the whole team and polished the game into its present form.

The game itself is awesome. The gameplay is remarkably different from usual first person shooter games -- the only weapon the main character has is a "portal gun" that allows you to create two "portals" nearly anywhere in your environment that you can step, or jump, or fall through. It makes for very interesting puzzle solving. And the story presented in the game is , by turns, funny, touching, and disturbing. It's certainly not an epic -- I've read it described as a 'short story' of a video game. But it's definitely a complete piece. FuzzyCo grade: A+.