So... Portal 2

[Malchik]

Unless it's explained in the manual, I didn't know what the fuck was going on with the protagonist or why she was there to begin with. I was actually surprised to find the players model was a generic looking female with springs on her heels. Portal is obviously set in a wacky world. I would have liked it if they made her some sort of manufactured test subject, but I digress, I don't know what the back story of the character is, and I beat the game.

Hell, they should have just made a whole new character. She escaped didn't she? Does her character have some sort of cult status? I don't know how, she was as interesting of a character as her simple model portrayed.

[Crisis]

Well no, Chell didn't escape, although the ending was ambiguous until Valve updated it. Her character is quite popular and it does make a lot of sense to reuse her, mainly because it means they don't have to go through the entire story arc of the original Portal with a new protagonist - in Portal 2, both Chell and GLaDOS already know the score.

But a lot of people wanted to see more of Chell, as the first Portal offered little hints about her background (orphaned, humble origins, part-time Aperture employee) that were enough to get people intrigued. Plus, and I don't think this is just me, there's a certain amount of attachment I got to what was the only human creature in this vast, scary, mechanical labyrinth.

[Farmer]

Hell, they should have just made a whole new character.

Her character is quite popular and it does make a lot of sense to reuse her, mainly because it means they don't have to go through the entire story arc of the original Portal with a new protagonist

By the looks of it, they've attempted the best of both worlds by keeping Chell and introducing the two co-op robots.

[Segaholic2]

Everything in Portal is linked to Half-Life.

[Crisis]

So has anyone else finished yet? I'm not sure how I feel about the ending. I guess it was satisfying enough even though the moon thing was a bit out of left field. I guess there had been hints with ratman drawing pictures of the moon all over his dens and conversion gel being made of moondust, but you know. I thought the game was a little on the easy side, I think I only died 3 times or so, even the final boss doesn't send you back more than 4 minutes and he's not even that difficult.

I've been playing through co-op today and it's a lot harder than single player, but less funny and less plot-driven (at least, so far). I kind of wish I could take the best bits of both and merge them together.

[Senbei]

Just blasted through single-player and quite enjoyed it, as you might expect. If a puzzle game could be a blockbuster action movie, this is what it'd look like.

[Crisis]

The co-op mode was so good that I was shocked it was over in a single afternoon. I mean, it's about twice as long as the original Portal, but it was so much fun I never wanted it to end. I'll take a whole game of that, please.

Actually, presumably co-op will be the focus of the DLC and modding community, so I might end up with my wish granted after all.

Valve also just sent me £150 of their games for participating in the ARG (and getting all 36 potatoes), so that was nice of them.

[Green Gibbon!]

On the way from Amazon, assuming they've started shipping to Tohoku again.

Which version did you guys get? I heard the PS3 version is better looking than the 360 version, so that's the one I ordered. Is such a thing possible?

[Crisis]

PS3 is supposedly the best. The 360 suffers the worst loading times, apparently, and can't co-op over Steam (the PS3 can, and you get a free PC/Mac copy too if you register it on Steam). I'm not sure about the graphics, they aren't particularly great in any version and I'd be very surprised if either the 360 or PS3 struggled with them.

I'm using the Mac version. There was one time when the game crashed (in co-op mode when I drop repulsion gel onto certain turrets), presumably because there's a lot going on there (4 portals in co-op mode puts a heavy strain on the system, and gel interacts with dynamic objects in complicated ways), and other people have reported crashing at the exact same place. But other than that, I've had no complaints.

Although being told not to "turn off the console" while saving was a little strange.

[Esrever]

I'm about 2 chapters into the co-op (playing in splitscreen with Shannon on the PS3), and 3 into the single player. (Playing on the PC. Great idea, Valve!)

I watched my lady play the first chunk of single player on the PS3 though, and I have to admit... aside from the resolution and a bit of extra aliasing, it looks pretty similar to how it looks on the PC with max settings. The load times are pretty similar, as well.

My game crashed once, near the beginning, right when someone was uttering the phrase "still alive". It just looped them saying it over and over and over. For a second, I thought it was maybe on purpose!

[Farmer]

Pre-ordered, collected, and completed it. And it's oh so very very good. Exactly the high quality I expected from Portal's sequel.
That said, a lot of things from the trailers - most notably the pneumatic diversity vent and, for the most part, the crusher - seem to be AWOL. I trust Valve cut them for the best, but the gameplay does feel a microscopic bit incomplete compared to what I thought was going to be included.

Also, an otherwise satisfying co-op session was disrupted by an annoying bug where a door wouldn't open despite the only switch being activated. Fly/ointment and all that.

[Crisis]

Re: unimplemented content (mild single player ending spoilers):

The developer commentary says that basically crushers were cut out until the last chapter because of negative player feedback to the trailers, presumably the propulsion gel one where Chell is expected to time a jump in order to evade a massive chain of crushers despite a lack of obvious visual cues. I suspect that Pneumatic Diversity Vents were removed for similar reasons; they're exclusively a weapon against turrets, and the early introduction of turrets lead me to believe that they were originally intended to play a big role in this game, but they were completely absent from the second act and barely had a presence in the third. My gut feeling is that Valve thought the product was too hard and cut a lot of stuff at the last minute, which is why the difficulty curve is skewed a little bit too far away from challenging. The removal of pellets and the trivial damage dealt by the lasers sort of supports that theory (which kind of sucks because it takes away the gag from the "Thermal Discouragement Beam", if it's not actually a euphemism for "deadly laser"). Looking back, I think the companion cube chamber was actually more deadly than any of the Portal 2 single-player test chambers.

The good news is that it's all been coded into the game and that they're obvious candidates for DLC/modding tools.

[Farmer]

And not a moment too soon, here come the memes.

[Esrever]

Just finished the single player mode. The gameplay was a lot of fun and nicely evolved from the original, the dialogue was hilarious, and the tour through Aperture history was neat and well done. I personally loved the thing with the Moon... after being prepped by the earlier dialogue about Moon dust being a good portal conductor, revealing the Moon during the final boss just triggers such a hilarious dawning realization. "Nooo... can I really? YES I CAN!" It's a wonderfully mental punchline.

That said, what made the first Portal brilliant was it's deconstructionism... the way it played against your expectations by first aping and then completely inverting the structure of video games themselves. You are in a game, with numbered levels and goals. But then the levels start to come apart, until you're eventually travelling around or behind the levels, or even better, back through them in incorrect ways. Suddenly, everything feels weird and uncertain... you have no idea where you are or how close you are to the end of the game, when moments earlier you thought it was almost over. It evoked the same sensation that I remember feeling after discovering the Sonic debug mode... like you're breaking the game, even though you're not actually breaking anything. It was genius!

Portal 2 doesn't really try to pull off anything equally ambitious thematically. It's content to tell a funny, smart, but much more traditional surface-level narrative. As a result, it's just as great as Portal, but not nearly as special.

[Senbei]

Valve knows the sequel couldn't live up to the original, though. They didn't sabotage themselves by trying to make an ambitious, genre-changing cultural phenomenon again. They just made a damn good follow-up for the fans and the money! If you're going to put a "2" in front of a masterpiece, it's a wise way of doing it.

[Zeta]

My one disappointment is not enough Cave Johnson. If they ever make a third it better have more of him in it.

[MiraiTails]

PS3 is supposedly the best. The 360 suffers the worst loading times, apparently...

I wonder if this is alleviated somewhat by installing the game to HDD.

[Green Gibbon!]

Just now finished it, only two and a half months late! It was completely brilliant, of course, the most clever game I've played probably ever (both the mechanics and the the writing). Buggy, though, even the console version. When I started the final battle, I died like 6 times from the fumes while trying to figure out what to do. After about 40 minutes, I broke my code of ethics and loaded GameFAQs to discover that Wheatley is supposed to throw bombs, which, due to a bug, he was failing to do. And the most recent auto save was already past the point where the bug occured, so I actually had to load from the save before that. It wasn't that far so no big deal, but if I could have my choice of wasting 40 minutes of my Sunday evening on a bug that was not immediately obviously a bug or doing something constructive like masturbating - well, at least I saved some tissue.

[Xyton]

Yeah, I heard about that one a couple times. Apparently you can get around it by starting a new game from that chapter -- hardly desirable, but better than needing to restart completely. A friend and I tried to nail down what caused it, but didn't have any luck; where were the two auto-saves, if you don't mind me asking?

[Popcorn]

Is Portal your first Valve game, or something, Gibbon?

[Green Gibbon!]

Yip, so far just Portal and the sequel. I've been meaning to finally try Half-Life and I see there's a cheap deluxe package with the entire series on Steam, but I'm not sure I can download it from this country and even if I do I can't imagine when I'll have time to sit down and play all that. It took me this long just to finish Portal 2. And I didn't even touch the multiplayer.

What else has Valve done besides Half-Life and Portal?

[P.P.A.]

Team Fortress 2 and the two Left 4 Dead games.

Don't bother with Half-Life 2, though. It's dull and boring, not knowing whether it should depress with vast, empty stretches of generic, gritty environment or rather try anf fail to build up excitement with shootouts and enemies when it autosaves every few metres and failure merely results in you respawning around the last corne— Wait, I like Sonic 06, my opinion is invalid.

[Crisis]

Other than Half-Life and Portal, Valve has pretty much just done multiplayer FPSers. Counterstrike, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead are the big ones. Team Fortress 2 just went free to play so there's literally no excuse not to try it any more, but Left 4 Dead is far and away my personal favourite. I have gift copies of Half-Life 1 and 2 on Steam, from the Portal 2 launch event, you can have em if you can get Steam working over there. Although if so then you're probably better off getting the Valve Complete Pack for its ridiculous sale price. £24.99 for every game they've ever published, when Portal 2 alone cost £29.99 a week ago!

For what it's worth, I enjoyed HL1 more than its sequel. I think it just aged better. HL2 was pretty experimental for its time, but by today's standards the pace seems a little slow and there's a lot of not-very-interesting slogging to do in between the good bits. It's basically the Ocarina of Time of FPSers.

Moving back to Portal 2, there was a community mapping contest recently. I've been trying them out and they've all been pretty good so far! A bit on the short side, but then the game's only been out a few months.

[Popcorn]

It's important you ignore everything the previous two dumbasses just said.

I've been going on about how Half-Life 2 (and its episodic sequels) is clearly one of the best games of all time since it came out, but this historically being a more console-centric forum, I've never had a huge amount of backing here. (Not that I play anything on PC outside of Valve games anyway.) I seem to recall you hating first-person games, though, but your liking for Portal suggests you should at least give Half-Life 2 a try. They both employ similar level design and narrative tricks and an emphasis on setting and strong art direction; there's a sense of shared authorship. They're built using the same engine so they feel very similar, too - I consider Portal and HL sister franchises. I assume you already know their stories are set in the same universe, and that both games reference each other?

Don't bother with HL1 unless you end up loving HL2 to death and want to know how the series started. It's an important game but it's very dated now, and people who say it's better than HL2 only mean that in complicated emotional ways someone new to the franchise wouldn't understand. You don't need to have played HL1 to make sense of HL2, anyway.

Other than that and Portal, Valve is most notable for the multiplayer FPSs Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2. I find the first two franchises dull as fuck - my dislike for Left 4 Dead is particularly controversial of me - but TF2 is cracking stuff. TF2 is free now, at least on PC, so you could give that a shot. And it's beautiful to boot.

[Senbei]

Popcorn is right.