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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!
How is this hard to understand? No offense, but it's spelled out right at the beginning of that particular level why you're being referred to as an android. The room with all the turrets is a room designed for testing androids, but because of a problem with the human testing counterpart to that room, you're forced to complete the android version instead. Of course, there is the deeper question of whether the room actually was designed for android testing or if GLADOS is simply messing with you, but on the superficial surface, the whole android thing is pretty clear.
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.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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
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...
My cube spoke to me a couple times on that level. Perhaps you didn't hear it?
****
The Enrichment Center reminds you that the weighted companion cube cannot speak. In the event that the weighted companion cube does speak, the Enrichment Center urges you to disregard its advice.
****
Also keep in mind that in the earlier levels GLADOS is speaking to your character mostly through pre-recorded audio. It's only later in the game that GLADOS starts speaking to you directly. As such, the "android hell" bit was most likely just the pre-recorded exit audio for that test rather than an attempt by GLADOS to make you question your own humanity.