It's bad enough that Valve's The Orange Box is suffering from a joke of a delay on the PlayStation 3, but if 1Up is to be believed, the wait isn't even going to be worth it. Once again, the prospect of severe framerate issues rears its ugly head, which is said render the game "unplayable" at times. Just what is the EA port team playing at?

After spending a significant amount of time with a near final version of the PS3 game, it's apparent that this version suffers from a number of technical flaws, which at best merely hinder game play and at worst make the experience downright unplayable. Framerate is a consistent issue throughout the Half-Life series of games included in The Orange Box. One moment you'll be cruising through the game at 30 frames per second and the next you'll be enjoying a slideshow of series protagonist Gordon Freeman cruising down the river. However, Portal suffers from no such technical hiccups and is on its way to being a pitch-perfect port of the spatial reasoning exercise. Due to a server connection issue, we were unable to get any time with Team Fortress 2.

At least Portal's okay, that's the main thing. One can only hope that "near final" isn't completely "final," but I don't know how much more work they're hoping to do with it to fix such glaring issues. Between the ridiculous delay and the shoddy porting effort, by all accounts it seems that Valve's offer of the year has totally shafted the PS3. No surprise, since Valve head Gabe Newell thinks Sony's console is a complete waste of time.

If there were any PlayStation 3 owners waiting for this one, I hope they have a good PC, just in case.