The Orange Box was one of the greatest deals in gaming on its release in 2007. Cramming five Valve-developed classics onto one disc – Half Life 2, Half Life 2 Episode 1, Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and introducing the original Portal – the quality bar was supremely high. Originally shipping on the 360 at native 720p resolution, Xbox One X enhancements delivered a 9x resolution increase, offering up a native 4K presentation that naturally transitioned over to Series X and thanks to some config file tweakery, it’s now possible to remove the 30fps cap, to play Valve’s finest at 60fps on Xbox Series X and Series S hardware.
However, to revisit these games today on console is fraught with issues if you’re on Xbox. Firstly, the Orange Box has been removed entirely from the Xbox marketplace as of 23rd February 2023. It simply cannot be bought digitally any more. However, if you bought it before its removal it’s still of course possible to play it today from your library. And, if you own the physical disc you’re still good to go, of course. But that’s really no good at all for Series S users, without a disc drive. In that case you had to buy the digital version while it was still available.
As you’ll see in the video, we use a user-mod of sorts to remove the frame-rate cap on each title in The Orange Box which stacks on top of Microsoft’s X enhancement, which scale up the original’s 720p to ultra HD on Series X and a still impressive 1440p on Series S. And removing that cap doesn’t just improve performance – but consistency too. The originals on Xbox 360 always ran with inconsistent frame-pacing, introducing visible judder. An official solution to this via Microsoft’s FPS Boost would have been welcome, but for whatever reason, it never happened. 60fps is definitely possible and I’d say that Microsoft and Valve could still make it happen and I hope they do – because as cool as the mod is, it comes with a number of limitations that do cause issues.
