For my non-gamer friends (This includes you, WoW players.), Portal was a student project at a game design school. Valve was so impressed they scooped up the team and had them revamp the game for The Orange Box. The setting is a test lab. You are a lab rat. Use the portal gun to solve puzzles. Sometimes you use portals to move around the level. Sometimes you use them to redirect projectiles to hit certain targets. Sometimes you use them to drop a crate through the floor and on top of a sentry gun. It's fun. It makes me feel clever (except for the two or three times the game managed to stop me for five minutes or so to figure out a puzzle). I finished the story in three and a half hours, but there are bonus challenges and commentary I'll most likely go back for. Also, just screwing around with portals is fun. To try and get a picture of the protagonist, I shot two portals on a wall and stood halfway in between.
I'm going to assume the second head is bug. :P
A lot of people have praised Portal for its comedy. Maybe I watch too much really good comedy, or maybe I was just too concerned with staying alive to care, but I never laughed out loud. There really only seemed to be one joke, anyway.
Regardless, Portal was a fun three and a half hours. It managed to make portals engaging and fun, something which the decade in development Prey didn't. Hopefully the bonus content will increase the enjoyment. And if the portal gun is well integrated into Episode 2 (or any other FPS), that could be a welcome breath of fresh awesome.
1 comment:
Tonight I played the advanced levels and the campaign again (with commentary). It would have been nice if they'd reduced the volume on the rest of the game when the commentary was running. Listen to the commentary, it's become apparent that I solved more than a couple puzzles in ways I wasn't supposed to and completely missed the cue of the checkerboard floor tiles.
I enjoyed most of the advanced levels, but the challenge levels were a little more than I was interested in. They basically treat you like a failure (no cake) unless you solve the puzzles in the absolute best possible way. But waiting for my brain to figure this stuff out and having to quick load every time I barely miss a jump or can't hurl a box just right isn't my idea of fun.
I liked Portal. Portal was innovative. Next time bring guns, please. I'm really hoping Gordon gets his hands on this device in Episode 3. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.
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