Yup. Not truly surprised on this end nonwithstanding, as it's not something I'd come to blows with. Am a bit dejected, but.... it's okay. Yahoo! BIZ has the scoop:

"REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS - News), the world's leading interactive entertainment company, and Valve®, the award-winning studio behind the blockbuster franchises Half-Life® and Counter-Strike®, today announced the naming and product configurations The Black Box and The Orange Box, two of the most anticipated action game offerings shipping worldwide in Fall 2007.

The Black Box will ship for the PC, and includes Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2. The Orange Box will ship for the PC, PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system, and Xbox 360(TM) videogame and entertainment system, and includes all the content of The Black Box, plus the original Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One.

Innovative games included in The Black Box and The Orange Box include:

* Half-Life 2: Episode Two -- the second installment in Valve's episodic trilogy advances the award-winning story, leading the player to new locations outside of City 17.
* Portal -- a pioneering type of single player action game that rewrites the rules for how players approach and manipulate their environment - much like how Half-Life 2's Gravity Gun reinvented the way gamers interact with objects in the game.
* Team Fortress 2 -- an all-new version of the legendary title that spawned team based multiplayer action games. The game's daring new art style features the most advanced graphics of any Source-based game released to date.

"In less than 18 months, we've shipped 10 new products to retail outlets with EA Partners," said Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve. "The Black Box and The Orange Box represent a new approach to publishing multiple products, on multiple platforms and we know through our experience that no organization in the industry is better equipped to successfully launch new product types on multiple platforms than EA Partners."

"Valve is one of the world's premiere independent developers and EA Partners is thrilled to help them bring the groundbreaking action games in The Orange Box and The Black Box to market as their publishing partner," said David DeMartini, vice president and general manager of EA Partners.

The Black Box and The Orange Box are targeted for release in Fall 2007. For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com."

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CVG:

"How did the G-Man come about, then?

Marc Laidlaw: I remember Ken Birdwell came into my office and he'd been thinking about all the The guy who puts story in front of the crowbar different functionaries you'd have in an institution like Black Mesa. You have your scientists and their administrators - the tax guys, the government guys who are checking over the books and representing some other interest - and you're not quite sure who they are.

The original concept was born from that and we developed from there. 'What does he do?' 'Well, he's not actually a combat character.' 'So what happens when you shoot him?' 'Well, it turns out you actually can't kill the guy.' 'So what does that mean about him'?"

New Firing Squad Episode Two Interview|FiringSquad:

FiringSquad: The newly revealed Team Fortress 2 is a lot different than the game that was first shown at E3 in 1999. What caused the change in art style to a cartoony 1960's spy look?

Doug Lombardi: Starting with the characters in TF2 we had a set of goals that we wanted to accomplish, ranging from making sure that you could identify a class and its abilities from just it silhouette, to allowing gamers to form an emotional attachment to the class they most liked to play. Once we felt like we had a set of characters that were meeting those goals, along with all of the goals in between, we started building a world for them to play in that was complimentary.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 delayed in any sense of the form|As CVG confirmed, in said conversation with Doug Lombardi both Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2, and Portal won't be a long stride away from us during the Summer, so anyplace near around that timeframe of sorts. Yet another delay. A bit dejected to no end, one could say... as my lips curl and my eyes lock and meet with the such.|As CVG confirmed, in said conversation with Doug Lombardi both Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2, and Portal won't be a long stride away from us during the Summer, so anyplace near around that timeframe of sorts. Yet another delay. A bit dejected to no end, one could say... as my lips curl and my eyes lock and meet with the such.

CS: Source, Source Engine, SourceTV and VGUI updates|

Counter-Strike: Source

* Added beta for Counter-Strike: Source Dynamic Weapon Pricing

Source Engine

* Exclude .lua files from being downloaded by clients
* Exclude the addons/, gamemods/ and lua/ from having files inside of them downloaded to clients (Garry's MOD support)
* Optimization for dedicated server and SourceTV relays


SourceTV

* Enabled tv_deltacache by default and made size adjustable
* Removed original game server IP address from spectator "status" command output


VGUI

* Correctly render underlined fonts

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CVG Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 previews|Episode Two:

"The most intriguing prospect of Ep Two though is the setting - since forests, farmland and countryside generally aren't quite as constricting as the linear paths through barricaded streets and murky industrial complexes in which Freeman has made his name. Clearly, there'll still be a lot of this, chiefly an underground journey through mines and Antlion burrows, but much of this new instalment will take place in a far broader arena. You'll be really encouraged to get to know the lay of the land that you're covering, journeying back and forth between action hotspots as opposed to relentlessly pushing forward as you did in the Coast and Water Hazard sections of HL2; making decisions about which skirmishes to take on first and which places to make your stand."

Portal:

"Portal takes Prey's scripted portal dynamic and shoves it so far, far up its arse. I mean, in Prey could you magic up two portals on the floor then push a box into one and watch gravity bob it up and down in each of them? Has any game given such backhanded witty praise as an unseen AI chirruping "Unbelievable! You must be the pride of !" as you solve a puzzle?"

ww.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=147024">Team Fortress 2:

"At this point in my presentation the screen in Valve's boardroom flickers into life, and the new rendition of iconic TF map 2Fort appears before me. "We chose to do a kind of '60s sci-fi theme, and the reason for that was the exaggerated environments, the unrealistic weaponry and the notion of having one team just across the bridge from the other team." I nod. There are, after all, few international conflicts that revolve around two hangers that sit 100m away from each other. "Another reason we chose it was that thing of James Bond and the volcano with the secret lair underneath," continues Brown as we share a knowing You Only Live Twice 'Little Nellie' moment. "So it's seemingly simple, unassuming and non-threatening, but underneath it's hiding its intent, and so that again fits into this role of why team A is right across from team B."

It need delve deeper than that!? The resulting video resides IGN, so plug at the such if you find said post intensely interesting.|||13||

Source Multiplayer Games

Ammo pickup enhancements - when a player drops ammo they now drop a single ammo belt or ammo pouch instead of multiple ammo clips or bullets. This makes the process of taking ammo from a dead enemy much simpler, or picking up your ammo when your weapon is shot out of your hand much easier

Player ragdolls are now effected by explosions from grenades, artillery, and HE rounds

Option for original role names - the player can now choose to view the original untranslated role names in game
Russian language localized version

Many bug fixes
Note A small update to the dedicated linux server which fixes an issue with two missing texture files was released after this update

I suppose the previous videos weren't room enough to quench gamers amongst gamers who wouldn't come to grips otherwise... or that it was just a subject of circumstance? In regards to the actual news post, two new 720p Half-Life 2: Episode Two gameplay videos, which shows even today that the Source Engine can work wonders with a new render-to-texture super-sampled soft shadow w/self-shadowing system, 64-bit non-linear gamma-correct FP16 precision SM2.x/3.x HDR filtering/blending and then dynamic tone mapping... not to mention an excess of post-processing pixel shader light bloom effects otherwise, and then the new DirectX 9.x SM2.x/3.x particles system to accompany such.

The videos reveal the differing locations, weapons, vehicles, and the aforementioned Source Engine improvements. Weighing 157.1MB / 91.3MB respectively, be sure to make off to Worthplaying for these rather prodigious downloads (hinting at those [i]still[/i] on 56.6k dial-up modems :wink.

(EDIT: and now 3rd one has taken a stride and is revealed, weighing around 125MB and can be seen at Filefront.
And now the 4th one.... reveals itself as the masses find it better.... on FileFront, weighing 145.27MB..... and now the finality of the 5th one, as such can seen on Steampowered)

CVG:

"The demo didn't go into much detail about new weapons, although it did suggest weapons may often be in short supply, as considerable use was made of the Gravity Gun. However, we did see one new weapon, the Strider Buster: a sort of magnetic mine which you can attach to Striders' backs, and then explode by shooting it."

Again:

"And puzzles get a lot trickier as the game progresses. Unlike the dark, fleshy corridors in Prey, Portal's clean, white environments have been presented with a simple, easy-on-the-eyes attitude, providing Valve with a little more freedom to concoct wild and head-spinning tasks. Once I'd got my hands on the all-important portal gun, extra set-pieces and apparatus were added to the mix, such as moving platforms, bouncing energy balls and rotating sentry guns. But what impressed me the most was the subtle efforts Valve has made to keep everything obvious - visual cues like shadows and lights on the ceiling, so you know exactly where to place your space-bending hole."

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