Yeah, Orange Box is out.  Yeah, it's another excellent game experience like Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and Half-Life 2: Episode 1.  This has been announced, it has been reviewed, and easter eggs have been discovered.   This we know.  What I don't think is getting enough love is the fact that if you buy Orange Box and already own HL2, Valve will let you give HL2 and HL2: Episode 1 to a friend.

Orange Box gifts are allocated to users who own either 'Half-Life 2' and 'Half-Life 2: Episode One' and then go on to purchase The Orange Box, which includes these two games. An Orange Box gift allows users to give either or both 'Half-Life 2' and 'Half-Life 2: Episode One' to a friend who does not already own the game. An Orange Box gift is an easy way to let your friends enjoy 'Half-Life 2' and 'Half-Life 2: Episode One' for free.

You can't sell these as per the rules, but I've seen several forum threads where others are giving away HL2 to some other lucky members.  Know someone that bought Orange Box?  Ask them for your free copy of HL2 now.  Don't know anyone?  Check out your favorite gaming forum and try to catch a copy being given away.  The single-player experience is worth buying, but for free?  Valve makes it tough to say anything bad about them. 

It seems as if social networks are the answer to life these days.  If your not a part of at least 10, your way behind.  What does a social network have to offer the average MMO player though?  Isn't a MMORPG basically a huge social network anyway?  At least 6 sites think they do have something to offer you.  If nothing else, the fact that you can connect players and characters across multiple games.  This may be the most appealing thing about them.  I had lots of friends on Solclaim as AutomatiK in Asheron's Call, and wish I knew what they were playing now.  Let's take a look at the ones that I could find and see what they offer.  Since I'm sure not many will offer up membership numbers, I put in some basic popularity/traffic rankings as another way to compare them.  Also, these are loosely ordered in sequence according to how I thought they ranked against the other social networks.

Inclusive MMO Social Networks (many games)

Curse

Curse was a suprise to me, I never realized that they had a MMORPG social network until doing this research.  I knew they had a great World of Warcraft addon section, but that's all I ever used the site for.  That being said, they had the most impressive design to me.  It had a lot of MMORPG's to choose from, and was the first I saw that included free MMORPG's on it's list.  It also includes a nice account setup wizard that walks you through setting up your account.  Of course, it had things common to social networks, like blogs, being able to upload videos/pictures, and being able to search for other players that play a particular game.

Guild Cafe

Guild Cafe wants you to join up with other gamers.  They have several prominent features that help you find other players or a guild.  Probably the most prominent one is LFG (Looking for Group) posts.   They also offer profile surveys so that others that have the same interests as you can find and network with you.  It has a nice selection of free and paid MMORPG's, although I wasn't impressed with the profile design.  They rely on you to post your accomplishments in your favorite MMO.  Posting these and other things though, will get you experience points.  One of the other main features of the Guild Cafe is as the name suggests, they are also a home for your guild.  Offering a place to talk, put together events, and challenge other guilds in PvP.  Not to mention getting some nice tools to help in guild recruitment. 

Character Planet

Character Planet tries to accomplish everything.  It gives you the online gaming social community, it gives you free guild/clan hosting, and it also adds gaming news that you can vote up or down (think digg).   As far as the social network profile aspect, I found that it looked more like MySpace than any of the others.  Their was a nice selection of MMORPG's offered, but for the most part, it was pay-to-play games.  I will say that it did have a lot of options available.  One of two that I quickly noticed is that it offered members a ventrilo server.  The other was something called prize points.  Probably a lot like the Guild Cafe system, doing things on the site will get you more points.  Monthly prize point leaders get to redeem their points from a list of prizes, but I could not find this list.  Overall, I like where they are going, but it needs refinement.  

MMOFaces

MMOFaces has a tight integration with it's forums, but from what I saw, not a good integration with actual MMO's.  Despite being the only one with MMO in the actual title/branding of the site, I couldn't find any options to add players or games to my profile.   This project must be in it's early stages or just an addition to the forums on the site. 

KoinUp

KoinUp's best feature seems to be pictures.  It is almost a gaming version of Flickr, and one of the features of it is that you can post to KoinUp and Flickr at the same time through their interface.   Basically, if you love taking screenshots or videos in WoW and want to share them on a picture network, then KoinUp may be for you.   Right now, it has specialized tags for Second Life, The Sims, World of Warcraft, IMVU, and There. 

Specialized MMO Social Networks (one game)

Rupture

Rupture made my job easy.  Their about us page, summed their features and where they came from up nicely.  Here are the cliff notes:

• Started by Shawn Fanning, same guy that started Napster.
• Tracks a lot of stats in-game so you can keep up with what your friends are doing
• It tracks stats through in-game addons
• Has IM/Chat capabilities

Rupture has a tight integration with World of Warcraft right now.  When you put in your character and server name, it will automatically pull your information from the WoW Armory and insert it into your profile.  They plan to expand their network to other games in the future. 

SLProfiles

SLProfiles is targeted towards the Second Life community as a web addition to the game.  They have lots of features along with their social network profiles including pictures, creating events, joining groups, and even creating in-game items.  If you play Second Life, I highly recommend checking it out.  I think they do a good job of complementing the game.

Of course, you can always create your own groups and networks on one of the popular social networks like Facebook or MySpace, but I generally like where most of these are going, and think it's worth while to try to set up your gaming profiles on a gaming network such as one of these.   There's also Duels, which is sort of a social network, but it's a game too.  It'd also be classified as specialized since you can't add characters from other games.

If you know of others, just list them in the comments and I'll try to add them to the review.

Microsoft has announced that they will be patching Games for Windows to version 1.2 soon, which will include some basic UI improvements, ability to join your friends in game, and offline achievements.  While it's good news that Microsoft is putting some money into the PC gaming market, I'm still not sure this Games for Windows initiative is a good one.  It basically gives Microsoft more control over the way you play games on your computer.  While I'm totally on board with going up against friends playing XBox 360 while I'm on my PC, I just don't know if it's worth it.  Can't Microsoft tie these together without all the other fluff?  Games for Windows is good in some sense, because the PC gaming market has been totally divided in the past.  That is changing though, and without Games for Windows. I mean, what about Steam and the more and more games that are joining that platform everyday?  It seems to be providing everything I need at this point, so why would I switch to Vista which has lower gaming performance, just for DX10 and Games for Windows?

Just a note to let you know that Phoenix Online and Project Torque have been released into open beta.   Phoenix Dynasty is a top-down 2.5D MMORPG , which means background and scenery are in 2D, and characters and monsters are in 3D.  Project Torque is a massive multiplayer racing game (yes, you race for experience) that we reported about a week or so ago.   

Project Torque is kicking things off with a Amatuer vs. Live event between 4 and 6pm PST today.

There some very recently released PC games on sale over at GoGamer.com. They have Bioshock and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars as a part of their 48-hour madness sale. Right now, you can get both games pretty cheap. They also have Doom 3 for only $9.90.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars -- $32.90

Bioshock -- $34.90

Doom 3 -- $9.90

Wanna try them out? ETQW demo, Bioshock demo, and Doom 3 demo.