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Valve Announces Portal 2
eldavojohn writes "Enough rumors, Portal 2 is due out for 2010. Valve also let users know through an announcement on Steam. Game Informer seems to be the de facto provider of Portal 2 information so far. Prepare yourselves for more aperture science! Notice anything funny about the underlined letters in Steam's announcement?"
I am so wanting there to be more sections for "androids". I always thought the idea of "android hell is a real place" was such a mind screw and gave you so much understanding of how messed up this company was, that it needed a whole game through the eyes of the androids.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
At this point, I'm far more interested in Vavle's Mac development that they seem to be doing. I'd love to know if I can finally ditch my Windows partition. I'd love to see Steam and the Source Engine on OS X.
Given their solid Direct3D stance, I'm a little worried... but a gamer can dream, right?
Still, Portal 2. Going to have to play that.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I'm sure I'll probably get modded troll, but I really never got this game. I thought it was fun to port around the first couple of times but I honestly found it to get repetitive and boring to keep doing the same thing over and over. I breezed through the game fairly quickly and never felt like there was anything particularly innovative or amazing about the game--I spent my youth playing many hours of Nintendo games that had the same thing, except only in two dimensions. It felt more like a polished half-life 2 mod rather than an actual game.
The sad thing is that portal 2 will be a disappointment.
It may in fact be a fantastic game but it will be judged next to portal which is pretty much a perfect game.
Its worth remembering that this is valve, which consistently defies expectations. Team fortress classic was a fun little game: valve then took almost everything about that game and threw it out for team fortress 2. Usually that is a recipe for disappointment, but I think almost everyone who played both would agree that TF2 was much better. Half life 1 was also really great, but valve managed to improve on it for HL2. A lot of people were disappointed that they put out left 4 dead 2 so quickly, but I think it was an improvement.
And there are clear ways in which they could improve Portal. Here's one: LONGER. Another way to improve it? Bundle it with HL2 episode 3. I am having a hard time thinking of other ways they could make it better, but there are many reasons why I don't work at Valve.
I'm a little worried about multiplayer though.
If you listen to the developer comment on Portal you will find out why Portal is more important to Valve than Half Like is at this point. Portal is probably the most popular "FPS" genre game for Women ever released. IIRC the lead developer at Valve was even a woman. Gabe makes the comment in the developer commentary with Portal that it opened their eyes to the potential to selling games to that other 50% of the population. Portal was a huge hit with the girls and from a business perspective Portal then became more important than Half Life.
As you noticed, the portal gun really can't work in HL2, the areas are just too open and people would end up outside of the map in no time (or it would have to only work in a handful of specific areas).
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It seems more likely to me that Gordan will rescue Chell and she'll make prescripted portals for him while he escorts her past the combine and does all of the gravity gun stuff.
The dialog should be really interesting:
Gordan:
Chell:
Gordan:
Chell:
Although to be fair, Chell never talks in Portal because there is nobody to talk to.
I read the internet for the articles.
and less companies like EA, Activision, Microsoft, Ubisoft, etc.