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Croal vs. Totilo - The Portal Letters
Today Newsweek's N'Gai Croal and MTV's Stephen Totilo conclude another of their fascinating email correspondences, this time surrounding Valve's recently released Portal . In part one, the two journalists explored the power of minimalism in gaming, and why that 'less is more' attitude worked so well. Part two saw the pair wrestling with some fundamental disagreements about the nature of character in the game. In today's finale, the twosome addresses the game's brief length, and how that made the game all the better. "What's great about Portal's approach is that suggestive spareness of the plot and the absence of characterization leaves us plenty of room to fill in the blanks with our imagination, which, when supported by a framework as precisely and elegantly thought out as it is here, delivers a more powerful final product than many other games that give us plenty of characterization and story but precious little genuine mystery ... Portal goes one step further and questions the very nature of the person thing giving us those orders; like you said, Valve's puppeteering of its players."
The shortness of portal is ok, the lack of storyline should be fleshed out in Ep3.
It whet my appetite and now I have been homing my skills on the challenges and custom maps.
It has greater replay-ability than HL itself and now play it like playing patience or minesweeper or tetris, not for the storyline but for a mental workout.
The advert was right - you really do begin to think with portals.
I look around real life for ways to shave off seconds whilst I walk to my car or around the shops. Getting a drink would be simple with a portal in the kitchen.
I have to mentally stop myself from diving headfirst from platforms and it took real effort not to jump into a big pink Barbie mirror at the local wal-mart.
liqbase
Valve Manager: Hey we're going to release this thing called Orange Box with HL2 and TF2 and we'd really like to pack something else in it to help fill out the press releases, any ideas?
Valve Coder: Well the programmers and I have been playing around with this little game called Portal. It's sort of based on the old game called Narbacular Drop, see you have this gun that creates portals and....
Valve Mangager: That sounds great. Polish up what you have and submit it to the testers.
Valve Coder: Well it's not really done you understand, there isn't a story or anything, and several of the designers have had to take leaves of absence after trying to figure out how levels might work.
Valve Manager: Look it doesn't matter, it's just a throw in. Nobody will be buying this for Portal, or HL2 for that matter, we just have to throw the community a bone for making them wait 10 years for TF2. Finish what you have and let's get it in there.
(9 months later...)
Game Pundits: A stunning example of minimalistic game design! A triumph of elegant simplicity and quasi-storytelling!
Portal is one of the best games ever.
Only bit of the plot that is confusing is that it twice references you as an android (remember, android hell is a real place), but in an interview the authors said that the character is human, with just reinforced ankle supports. I played it through a second time, and I can see how a person (just from the game) could make a case the main character is a person, but it just feels like a contradiction in the plot to me.
Someone else on /. in an earlier thread about Portal pointed out that 500 levels wouldn't have been enough. But that many would have drowned out the story. I've played through Portal about 8 times now and find something new each time. That kind of craftsmanship isn't an accident.
Hopefully Valve starts releasing bonus maps or *gasp!* episodic content. [Insert Flame Here] So far the Portal community maps aren't very impressive. But the full SDK should fix that.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
The shortness makes the game *better? Hell no. The game is very remarkable, one of my favorites this year. It has very strong focus, but its shortness is a detriment, not an asset. While it may not have been possible to make the game longer without ruining its stellar quality, or adding useless fluff, the game should have been rewritten in that case to make it work. Portal, at $20, is the first game to make me feel ripped-off for its length, compared to cost. My God, even Heavenly Sword is longer than Portal.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
The designers behind "Portal" were brilliant. This game actually made me feel closer to an inanimate cube that never moves or makes a sound than any character in a game that I can remember.
***** SPOILER ALERT!!! *****
Part of it was the isolation of Portal. You don't know where you are or why you're there. A computer lies to you and threatens you with "android hell". You have to incinerate a "faithful companion cube" with hearts on it that just helped you get through a level which you couldn't have gotten through without it. The computer then congratulates you on euthenizing your "faithful companion cube" faster than any test subject on record. At the end the computer AI says you incinerated your companion cube, the only friend you've ever had.
Some folks want to compare games to movies. Well, don't compare them just to features; compare them to movies in the 1940s, back when there were short features, travelogues, newsreels, and cartoons. Not everything is a long-feature, nor does it have to be.
If you are going to compare games to features movies, why is it that "leaving them crying for more" is a good thing for movies (and books, and plays, and concerts, and so on), but not for games? Why does it have to be: "leaving them exhausted, emaciated and with Post-Traumatic Repetitive Stress Disorder (aka "The thousand-yard controller thumb")?
Portal is genius. It's a game where many of the key developers (writers and the ND folks) are new arrivals to some large company that specializes in developing products through an extensive testing cycle, and it's about being a new arrival in a large company that's developing a product, and you're part of the testing cycle.
There are two cliches that HL and just about every video game in the 90s had, that really didn't work (most of the time): ubiquitous, absurd, crates (uh, nobody uses those any more. Why are they here?), and a sidekick you're supposed to love, but who's two wooden and one-dimensional for it to work. They manage to make a sidekick-crate lovable. I haven't seen a triumph like that since Vladimir Nabokov made a sympathetic character out of a pedarast with delusions of being a king in exile.
Anyway, look at me still talking...
It's VERY refreshing to be able to play a game from beginning to end in one sitting. If a game takes longer than 15-20 hours to finish, I usually take extended breaks away and forget what the heck I was doing a week later when I pick it up again. I don't know who made the "40 hour" game something to strive for - I sure can't believe it was the working adult.
His name is "companion cube", you insensitive clod :(
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
a fairly recent Canadian movies called Cube (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_Movie). Granted, there is more than one prisoner....but check it out...
Actually there is a tool to make maps for portal and the SDK even includes a copy of one of the levels - the one where GlaDOS says the test is impossible - so you can see what it takes to construct a level. And to put it bluntly, it's a lot of [expletive deleted] work!
Long before I bought The Orange Box - in fact, about four months before I'd ever even heard of Portal (I only got it about a week ago) - I wrote in my blog, back in June, an article about the tools which are available for designing maps for these games. And the Hammer map editor for Half-Life 2 / Portal is either as complicated as the one for Half-Life I / Quake III or even more so. These tools are very difficult to work with and hard to use. Notwithstanding that the maps involved are extremely intricate to do all the things necessary to implement the game. Somehow I wonder why the full "3D immersion" feature so skillfully implemented in the editor for Duke Nukem 3 was never tried for any of the other games. And we've got more capability now; Duke Nukem did a 3-D immersion in a DOS-based application; we now have all of the graphics capability and mouse capacity and all the other features of graphical user interfaces, and yet, sometimes they don't take advantage of all the power that is available.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Are you actually claiming you think the game ends at Chell's "victory candescence?" In case you're actually thinking the game ends there - which I doubt is likely - if you get killed there it starts you over again a little earlier in the level, I think just before you enter the fire, and it will keep doing this forever, or until you figure out how to escape being "baked". In case you did believe that was then end, here's a hint.
When you are about to get to the fire, and you can see the cement wall in front of you above the railing, point your portal gun at the wall above the walkway in front of you, and fire a portal. Turn to your left, and fire a portal low on the wall below you, then jump into that portal. You want it to be low enough that you fall into it; if you miss, you end up in the slag and have to try again. When you do make the jump, it lands you on the (concrete) platform above the fire, where the real challenge in level 19 actually begins.
What I've found really helpful are the video walkthroughs on You Tube showing how to complete the levels. There were times when I had to "go to the videotape" to figure out how to solve some of the problems. Sometimes it can be amazing to watch. One guy figured a way to get the companion cube back before the end scene in the game, by committing suicide in the fire 3 times before incinerating the cube, then firing the blue portal at the entrance door (which causes it to disappear, the door is not a valid target), then firing the yellow portal at the center of the far edge of the ceiling in the workstation area in the room where GlaDOS is located, the companion cube then falls out of the ceiling!
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.