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The Importance of Portal
Team Fortress 2 and Episode Two may have been more anticipated elements of Valve's Orange Box offering, but it's the charmingly small Portal that's been getting a lot of attention in the last few days. MTV's Multiplayer blog thinks the game has the move of the year, and the Gamers with Jobs site offers up a convincing argument why Portal represents a significant step forward for storytelling in games: "Portal is an object lesson in interactive storytelling. We in the media are so fond of shaking our heads, scratching our beards and looking for the "art" in videogames. Well it's time for us all to shut the hell up. This is it. It's in this finely crafted, lovingly rendered piece of short-story literature. Honestly, I'd be surprised if the authors themselves see it as the accomplishment it is. It's a simple set of mechanics, a few pages of sound-booth dialog, a handful of textures and repetitive level designs. But then, a novel is only made up of 26 letters, black ink and white paper. And most artists of lasting brilliance don't recognize the importance of their own work. And how many now-revered musicians and painters died unknown and broke?" If you still haven't heard it, Jonathan Coulton's 'Still Alive' (the ending theme to Portal) has been in my head for over a week now. Just try to get it out of yours.
For those interested a 2D version of this game portal can be played here
Warning: A few spoilers included.
:)
I agree with a lot of the commentary on portal, and at the end of the game I was wondering "did anyone actually stop when they got burned to death?".
But this author is too impressed with himself. Portal shows what kind of game can be produced when the production team isn't trying to make an "epic" game... have you ever compared the list of credits for half-life and hl:ep2? See how many more people are involved? Is the game that much better because of it? Valve is producing episodes instead of new games because people want more of the story, and it's not a bad thing, but the company seems to be adding more and more people to produce what is effectively a shorter version of HL2 each time... and they don't need to develop the engine or tools!
The new weapon added is nice, but it's not revolutionary. Other than the weapon, this game was just more of the same... story telling, driving a vehicle, shutting off force fields, crawling in tunnels. Can't valve do that more, and more quickly, than two years per episode?
However, portal made the orange box worth it.
One other thing about valve not making a lot of progress... Counter-Strike: Source has been unaltered for a long time. Not to say it's not still fun, but why haven't there been at least some new things added to keep it fresh? Maybe change out some weapons, or add a few new ones? Remove or balance the overpowered weapons?
Last time I checked CS:S had over 20,000 active game servers on the net. That's got to be close to or THE most popular team based shooter around.
What are all those people doing?
As to the end of portal, I think it fits in the half-life continuity before the events at Black Mesa in HL1, and probably prior to the incident with Borealis. I base this on the outdoor view of the building at the end of the game. I would actually have been pleased to end up on board a ship instead of outside a building
GlaDOS is the best computer villain since Shodan.
I think if Valve is smart they'll release a Portal 2, as well as increase the crossover between Portal and Half-life. Maybe Gordon will discover a portal gun onboard the Borealis, or maybe he'll meet the female heroine of Portal. Wondering where Portal and Half-life 2 meet will add a lot of freshness to the HL2 story and game.
I can't wait to see what games people develop with the portal generation code in the half-life SDK.
Erik
I'm not really sure you can call Portal an FPS because of the "shooter" part...after all, in the game you never hold a weapon expressly intended to destroy anything or hurt anyone. Not even a generic wrecking tool like a crowbar. The portal generator is a gun only in the sense that it projects energy to a distant surface...it's not a weapon. Not even as much of a weapon as the Gravity Gun in HL2, which got a lot of attention at the time as a puzzle solving device rather than a traditional weapon. The joy of Portal was the way in which it guided you to do the "wrong" thing...gradually distrust the computer, start to notice the signs of something amiss, and improvise to use this mostly innocuous device to destroy obstacles. It was possible to continue believing the announcer...on the first reports of the gameplay on forums, you could find players saying that they "beat" Portal and the ending was pointless: they had trustingly ridden the platform into the incinerator. The game rewarded suspicion and curiosity, yet allowed the player to be an obedient lab rat if that was their predilection.
I don't really have a good term for the game, though on the basis of similar discussions we might call it a "first-person-puzzle-suspense-tragicomedy."
No, this is not a troll. I really want to know because the game looks great. Will it run under WINE or Cedega? Is there a native Linux version?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.