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I realise I’m a little late to the party with Portal, but I just don’t play games as much as I used to. My free time has collapsed of late and, as a veteran from the ZX Spectrum days, I’m sick of the industry treading the same paths over and over again.
So nowadays I have one or two favourites that I put decent effort into (Forza Motorsport 2 is my current long-term squeeze), and then have quick flirtations with the few quirky games that interest me and break the mould a bit. Quirky games like Shadow Of The Colossus, Vib Ribbon, Animal Crossing, Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney. Climbing up gigantic monsters, picking flowers, dancing over loop-the-loops, defending clients against miscarriages of anime justice.
And now I can add Portal to that list. Shooting holes in the space-time continuum and jumping through them.
Portal is a little sidegame bundled with Valve’s The Orange Box (Half-Life 2, plus two bonus episodes). HL2, while absolutely marvellous, is pretty standard first-person shooter fayre: pick up guns, shoot people, save the day. Portal takes the same mechanics, removes the weaponry and bad guys, and gives you a device that fires portals. Shoot two and they become linked, so that you walk into one and emerge from the other. Your goal: get to the end of each increasingly tricky level.
This changes everything. Suddenly you can access any point you can see. Up becomes down becomes left becomes right. A shoot-em-up becomes a multi-dimensional puzzler.
Clearly this could be completely unplayable without a well-designed learning curve, but luckily one of the things Valve Software do brilliantly is to progressively reveal complexity. Advanced concepts (shooting portals underneath gun turrets so that they fall onto another turret) are introduced steadily, the levels are designed beautifully to give that perfect mix of experimentation - affordances galore - and guidance.
And it’s funny. Genuinely funny. I’ve never found a game funny before. Admittedly I’m a sucker for passive-aggressive malfunctioning robots, but even the gun turrets say “No hard feelings” in a Bambi-ish voices when you destroy them. Swoon. And an inanimate metal cube with hearts on it has developed more of a cult following than any humanoid ass-kicking hero.
Anyway, writing about games, to paraphrase someone or other, is like dancing about architecture. If you get a chance, play it. It warmed the cockles of even a jaded gamer like myself. If you need any more convincing, watch the end credits (spoiler-free):
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very cool. ah i remember the days of hl2 multiplayer in my days of a clan member {shudder}
so glad i moved on and away.