n our recent trip to Valve, Doug Lombardi helped clarify a number of things about their upcoming Orange and Black Box releases. For console users, you’ll only be able to purchase the Orange Box, which will include Half-Life 2, Episodes One and Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. PC owners can purchase either the Orange Box, or for previous owners of Half-Life 2 and Episode One, they can get the Black Box, which will only have Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2. The Orange and Black Box editions will be available at either retail stores or via Steam (for PC owners only). When launched, however, you won’t be able to just purchase Episode 2, Portal or Team Fortress seperately—you’ll have to buy a package.

Even though Episode Two was to be released last holiday season, many believed that the episodic content was delayed to include the other two games. However, according to Lombardi, this wasn’t the case. “Nothing is done yet. Portal is the closest, but it’s not done today.”

For those who recently upgraded their PC video cards to support DX10, you’ll be happy to know that both Episode Two and Team Fortress 2 will support the advanced technology of these cards, even if the PC is running Windows XP. On the low-end front, Valve still plans on supporting PCs that can only run DX8 applications. Valve’s attempting to also support DX7, but couldn’t confirm if it’d go back that far with technology.

Even though Lombardi wouldn’t confirm a release date, the current schedule is to release all three versions of the packages in the Fall. Lombardi admitted it was a big undertaking to go multiplatform with this package, but the goal is to ship all three versions concurrently.

So what about a Wii release? While everyone we spoke to at Valve is quite enamored with Nintendo’s new console, Valve currently doesn’t have anything in development for the Wii. Regardless of Gabe Newell sending his children’s Mii’s to people on staff, the company hasn’t started development on any Wii projects. However, Lombardi made it clear that the company was quite surprised by the interface and wouldn’t rule out anything just yet.