Gushing about Portal

[erilar]

Since Cory was offline last night when I finished my chores, I fired up Portal instead to give it a try. I was pretty tired, and a slower-paced game was perfect.

Everything you've been hearing about the game (if you keep up with the video game press) is true. It's a completely new kind of game, and very refreshing in its innovation. If you don't know much about it, imagine a physics-based puzzle game played like a first person shooter. It uses Valve's Source engine (the magic behind Half-Life 2), and the game takes place in side a massive research facility called Aperture Labs.

After solving a few easy spacial puzzles, you end up toting a "portal gun", which allows you to fire a ray at a surface, opening up a blue extra-dimensional portal. At the onset of the game, a closed orange portal typically exists in each "test", or level. The blue portal you create leads directly to the orange portal (and vice versa), time and space be damned.

Example: You enter a room, and the only exit is on a high ledge out of your reach. There is a "blank" orange portal accessible to you at ground level. You shoot a blue portal at the wall up on the ledge, walk through the orange portal, and exit the blue portal on the ledge.

The game gets mind-bending pretty quickly. For instance, when you look in one portal, you see out the other. This produces weird visuals like seeing yourself from a different angle through the portal. Even more vertigo-inducing scenes, such as infinite recursive images of yourself looking into a portal follow.

Fairly quickly, you end up gaining the ability to shoot both the blue and orange portals. That's when the real fun begins. Imagine shooting one in the ceiling and one in the floor, dropping through, and falling forever, eventually reaching terminal velocity. So cool. You can control yourself slightly in mid-air, so you never get "stuck" in such a falling loop unless you want to.

Here's another cool example: You are in a big 30-ft-high-ceilinged room separated in the middle by a 10 ft force-field wall too high to jump over. The exit door is on the other side of the force field. You can also follow a corridor to the left, which leads to a dead end and a 25-ft deep pit. So, you shoot an orange portal high on the wall opposite the force field, and shoot the blue one at the bottom of the pit. Then you jump off the ledge, aiming for the blue portal. You pick up lots of speed as you fall, catapult out of the orange portal horizontally, and fly over the force field wall to reach the exit. Too. Fucking. Cool.

Anyway - you can get Portal a couple different ways on both PC and Xbox 360. It's one of the games in the Orange Box, which is $50 for PC and $60 for 360. Portal is also available separately (for PC) via Steam for $20 if you aren't interested in the rest of Orange Box.

The only downside is that the game is short - the main game is only about 3 hrs long. Therefore, especially if you haven't yet played Half-Life 2 and all the sequels (like me), Orange Box is a much better deal. (Then there's also Team Fortress 2, which everyone is going nuts about - haven't played it yet though.) There also some "advanced levels" that extend the Portal gameplay, but I think they are tougher twists of the existing levels.

Finally, I haven't yet beaten the game, but I hear that the ending credits are accompanied by a song written by none other than Jonathan Coulton.

[erilar]

Finished this incredible game last night. You guys know I get zealous about the stuff I'm currently doing and gush about it, but this is a whole new level. Sweet, sweet flying silicon monkey Jesus - go buy this game

I think this was the most continuously-satisfying video game I've ever played, ever. It's that good. From the minute you press play until the credits stop rolling, it's like electric nirvana. Drop everything you're playing and start playing this. Now. It's that good.

(BTW, it's a bit longer than I'd let on before - I figure I took 7-8 hrs to beat the campaign, and then there's some "advanced" levels and such that I haven't even tried yet.)