Metacritic, the world's most popular collaboration of entertainment critique which summarises vast numbers of reviews to produce an average score (Metascore), has seen Valve's Orange Box leap-frog a huge number of history's most highly praised titles to take first place on both the Xbox 360 and PC games indexes.
A single review score of 97 is impressive enough, but to see a product's average review strike 97 is even more so. The most intriguing thing about the scenario is that it's truly the whole package that was won the hearts of nerds around the globe - not just any one particular part of it.
Team Fortress 2 has already become a dominant force in the online first person shooter space, while fans of the Half-Life series have flocked to Episode Two to continue Gordon Freeman's adventure. The more surprising success however was that of Portal, which has brought the awe-inspiring fun of yesteryears puzzle games into contemporary technology.
The success of The Orange Box is truly admirable, but to be honest I'm still coming to grips with the fact it is actually being reviewed as an entire package in the first place...
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