As far as buying the Black Box, you should only need to pay $40. HL Ep1 did not require HalfLife 2 to play, and I can only assume Ep2 will follow suit.
Also, you can purchase individual games online though Source (Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat), so I wouldn't see why it would be any different for Team Fortress 2.
I have your same problem, I live in Rural North Florida, far away from any/real/ broadband. I've tried Satellite Internet, and I have to say that while it is effective for browsing the Internet, it makes games pretty much unplayable.
With Satellite, anything you do it going to have about a 2 second response time. You press fire, you fire two seconds later. You cast a heal, the heal happens two seconds later. Not fun times.
On dial up, MMORPGs normally do okay, but downloading patches can be a pain- also very large raids can cause you to go link dead regularly.
Though, to be fair, FEAR and Quake IV will be unplayable no matter what, so you'd better get used to having LAN parties, because that's the only FPS fix you're going to get.
The best I can tell you is try to get ISDN.
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As far as buying the Black Box, you should only need to pay $40. HL Ep1 did not require HalfLife 2 to play, and I can only assume Ep2 will follow suit. Also, you can purchase individual games online though Source (Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat), so I wouldn't see why it would be any different for Team Fortress 2.
I have your same problem, I live in Rural North Florida, far away from any /real/ broadband. I've tried Satellite Internet, and I have to say that while it is effective for browsing the Internet, it makes games pretty much unplayable.
With Satellite, anything you do it going to have about a 2 second response time. You press fire, you fire two seconds later. You cast a heal, the heal happens two seconds later. Not fun times.
On dial up, MMORPGs normally do okay, but downloading patches can be a pain- also very large raids can cause you to go link dead regularly.
Though, to be fair, FEAR and Quake IV will be unplayable no matter what, so you'd better get used to having LAN parties, because that's the only FPS fix you're going to get.
The best I can tell you is try to get ISDN.