In 2007, Valve released The Orange Box collection for both the PC and Xbox 360. Xbox 360 owners, however, actually got a version of the original Half-Life 2 in their port of The Orange Box that is graphically better than the current PC version. That's because Valve decided to give the Xbox 360 port all of the updates they had made to the Source Engine since Half-Life 2 was released for the PC back in 2004, including support for HDR lighting and improved character models.

While Valve doesn't seem in a hurry to give PC owners those kind of updates, a group of modders have taken it on themselves to bring the original Half-Life 2 up to speed with the graphical updates that were put into Half-Life 2 Episode 2 (released in The Orange Box). They even hacked in some new Steam achievements. You can see the differences in the YouTube video above. It's currently unknown how Valve feels about this kind of modification but if you want to try it out this Steam message board thread has some download links for the mod.

[Via Rock Paper Shotgun]