1. I don't know about gifted products, but if you bought Half-Life 2 and/or Episode One before the Orange Box, you'll be able to give them away as gifts. But that you've got Episode One as a gift... Don't ask.

2. Steam-only games will always require online activation. After that you can play in offline-mode, though.

3. Sorry, no idea. I don't own The Orange Box.

4. See above.

5. To me the first Half-Life felt like a pretty long game and compared to that, Half-Life 2 felt like a very short one. I'd say it's going to take about ten hours to complete Half-Life 2. The Episodes are shorter, though: I completed Episode Two in one night (yep, I played in from the beginning to the end without any major breaks). Oh, and Source engine loading times are horrible compared to those of the original Half-Life.

6. The last time I played it, it was essentially the same as the original Half-Life with the exception of added bugs. Yep, it was even worse than the original game. If you want a proper remake, you will have to wait until Black Mesa (a mod for the Source engine) gets released next year. And no, the expansions of Half-Life (Opposing Force, Blue Shift) are not included with Half-Life: Source.

2 - okay, that's actually about what I was expecting. If I ever end up offline, hopefully I'll be able to call a number to activate over the phone or something, and if they drop support for it, they'll have whatever patch or instructions are needed.

5 - Okay, hopefully I'l get at least as much gameplay out of the the 3 parts of half life 2 as what I got from half life 1

6 - I know Blue Shift and Opposing Force aren't included in Half Life: Source, but do you know if Black Mesa is planning on touching on those at all, or are they also only just doing half life and leaving it at that?

NEW QUESTION!

7.) What type of attitude should I expect from the Team Fortress 2 community? I was really kinda hoping to avoid the Halo retard/troll type crowd. I know I'm going to run into some of that no matter where I go, but I was hoping to see as little of that as possible.

TF2 community was surprisingly mild/friendly from what little I experienced, but one of the PC gurus would be better able to answer that. I think the art style scared off most of the teenage wannabes.

I haven't played a lot of online games, but most people on there seem to be incredibly nice guys, oddly enough. There are some idiots there, but they seem to hang together on certain servers, and if you're not an idiot yourself, you don't visit that server. At least 8/10 servers have nice people in charge, and they generally kick annoying idiots if an admin is on (which one generally is).

The only real problem is some people who mic abuse, but you can personal mute, and then it isn't really a problem.

The Team Fortress 2 community is from my experience a bunch of swell guys.

4.) How bad am I going to get murdered on Team Fortress 2? I know you can turn down the visuals for lower specced PCs, but I'm sure everyone else is doing that with much more powerful PCs than mine. and can anyone recommend the best class for newbies to start out with?

Team Fortress 2 is a very nice game towards new people. Crappy at aiming (like me), go Engineer and build sentries, Medic and heal people, Pyro and flank enemies or Heavy and shoot randomly around you.

Teamwork is essential in TF2. If you go with some teammates, you can easily get around doing decently.

As for what I recommend starting with, you should go by Valve's maps, not the user maps, as they have abuses and such (which is nice, but takes a long time to realise how to counter, so it is bad for beginners).

For the classes, I would say

Offensive:

Scout - No, demands good running, great aim and a good overview.

Soldier - Needs to reload a lot and is slow. Also needs some tactics to avoid getting owned by both Demoman and Pyro. Not recommened, but possible.

Pyro - Yes. You have a flamethrower, and if you're not stupid, you should come by killing a decent amount of people (at least 0.75 pr life). Not a lot to learn, and no reload.

Defensive:

Demoman - not really. You could place stickies and such, but you need to know what to do.

Heavy - not really. No reload, but is slow as hell, and good snipers/spies will kill you like hell.

Engineer - Yes. You can build a sentry, and then wander off a bit dragging enemies to it (or let them run to it themselves of course). Easy to learn, and gives you a lot of perspective.

Assisance:

Medic - Yes. You can heal everyone (overheal to 125% too), and this is where you should be most helpful. Don't run around with your gun a lot though.

Sniper - Unless you're great at aiming with a scope, no - not at all.

Spy - Under no condition should you spy before you're good.

So overall, I recommened changing classes.

You can always be Medic/Engineer/Pyro, and if you're on defense also Heavy/Demo or on offense soldier too (there are maps that aren't only offense/defense, but rather a mix, but you probably won't play them a lot early on).

I tried to keep it a bit basic, as you will understand the rest after having played a while.

Also, if the entire enemy team is engineers with sentries up, you don't go pyro. Each class has a relative weakness to another or some situations (demoman kills sentries), but generally the rest of your team will fix that. If you lack a medic, however, and the enemy has one, you're probably going to lose though (if the teams are about as good as each other)

Still teamwork and tactics is the most important in TF2. You can easily be very important to the team while killing very few people.

My biggest problem in TF2 is I'm color-blind and have a hard time telling apart the red and blue units. :p

Thanks for all the useful advice, Oyvoyvoyv, that should be a big help getting started. I'll probably start out with the scout/engineer(I seriously love his movie)/medic, but I'd love to work my way up to spy and sniper, all the characters are great, but Heavy/Demoman/Soldier/Pyro just don't really fit my personality at all, which is a big factor in how I play.

Is there anyway to get practice in with each of the classes outside of actual multiplayer battles? Like do aoffline run where you can just check out the equipment and aiming, etc? maybe go up against some AI?

@DKII - I know what you mean about the artstyle, but I personally LOVE it. I haven't been able to get enough ever since the first time I saw "meet the heavy"

And are you serious about the colorblind issue, cause that would seriously suck.

There are servers that have AI units on them, and perhaps you can make one yourself with it. You can, however, not play offline, or not enable other people to join, so no to that (as least as far as I know).

You could of course find a server with bots on it, but no players, and join it. The bots are retarded though.

Also, I think you should stick to what you feel is how you play. I used a long time to find that out (haven't really played any online shooters), before I ended up with demoman/engie/medic.

wait, so I understood the part about not being able to play offline, but then the next part confused me.
So if I create a server with just bots, I CAN or I CAN'T stop other player from joining?

It's relatively easy to mod the game with skins if you wanted.  Here's a yellow team if that helps hehe: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/49183

Green vs. Orange: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/52167

Orange vs. Navy Blue: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/51170

Green vs. Red: http://www.fpsbanana.com/skins/49191

Most people are green-red color blind though right?  So I dunno if these would help too much hehe.

Bots are really not an option in TF2.  It can be done, and you can find servers with bots, but it's a hassle and the bots are dumb.

Best way to practice is to either play a game by yourself to practice the moves, like rocketjumping or whatever, and then joining a server labeled for noobs. 

Then again...joining a noob server might mean

A) Random jerk experts join and completely dominate, or
B) Everyone really is a noob, and it is god awful.

So I take that back...just join a "vanilla" server (no customizations) with a full 24 people and have at it.  That's the best way to get better, in my opinion.

I play on random servers, 208.43.68.36:27015 is one I play on more often though...the community is good there...it's a little slower since Left 4 Dead came out though...I haven't actually played TF2 since then...I will get back into though.