Erica gave me The Orange Box as an early Christmas present and I spent the weekend playing the heck out of Portal.
The game has an interesting history -- a prototype was developed by a group of students using the Half Life 2 engine that so impressed Valve (the makers of Half Life) that they hired the whole team and polished the game into its present form.
The game itself is awesome. The gameplay is remarkably different from usual first person shooter games -- the only weapon the main character has is a "portal gun" that allows you to create two "portals" nearly anywhere in your environment that you can step, or jump, or fall through. It makes for very interesting puzzle solving. And the story presented in the game is , by turns, funny, touching, and disturbing. It's certainly not an epic -- I've read it described as a 'short story' of a video game. But it's definitely a complete piece. FuzzyCo grade: A+.
Comments
Did oyu play on PC or Xbox?
Posted by: dfdg | December 17, 2007 3:03 AM
I find Portal to be kind of like Katamari. It's so insanely fun that I can't help but play through it again (and again, and again) because I find myself missing it.
Posted by: Fish
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December 17, 2007 11:53 AM
@dfdg - I played on PC. On a MacBook using BootCamp to boot into Windows, actually.
@Fish - In the developer's commentary there was one note where they said, "we didn't want to tell the whole story in *this* installment..." and that made me really happy that there might be a sequel.
Posted by: Fuzzy Gerdes
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December 17, 2007 4:04 PM