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1259 words, 29 paragraphs, about 4 minutes to read (300 wpm).
First published on 2021-03-17.
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I like the Portal games.
Recently I replayed both mainline games, as well as playing the fan mods Portal Stories: Mel and Aperture Tag. I have thoughts.
All of those games are brilliant, apart from Aperture Tag is unfortunately a really disappointing game. But that's a story for another day.
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Plot spoilers for Portal 1 and Portal 2 will follow. You've been warned!
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Portal 2 is a brilliant game. The main thing I notice about Portal 2 is they went all-out on the lore. Valve's wonderful writing, and lots of it? I can't refuse an offer like that.
We had the wake-up call. We had Wheatley. We had the core transfer. We had the whole of Old Aperture, with Cave Johnson, Caroline, the gels, the space rocks. The Wheatley test chambers. The corrupt cores. They crafted an awesome story onto a world which previously had little lore. If you only look at the lore from the original Portal game, the world had none of those things I just listed. And these days, people writing stories within the world take those things for granted, and couldn't imagine Aperture Science without them.
Yes, Portal 1 had little lore. The only meaningful knowledge we got came from the few hidden drawings and Her manic ending speech. Everything else that was thrown in felt like a joke. Which is perfectly fine! Valve writing humor is Valve at their best. When I say joke lore, I'm thinking of the companion cube.
To me, it feels like what happened is that they wanted a test chamber where the player keeps the same cube throughout to perform various tasks. Then someone made a joke where they drew a heart on the cube, and that spun off into a whole inside joke. Consider:
"The symptoms most commonly produced by Enrichment Center testing are superstition, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, and hallucinations."
"The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak."
"You did it! The Weighted Companion Cube certainly brought you good luck. However, it cannot accompany you for the rest of the test and, unfortunately, must be euthanized."
"You euthanized your faithful Companion Cube more quickly than any test subject on record. Congratulations."
And that's the end of the companion cube. I don't think it adds to the lore. It's a joke that they threw in. And I appreciate it for that. That's what I think about the Portal 1 lore.
"Haha, funny cube, which goes away at the end of the test. Well we can't just leave it behind. We have to have a proper... ceremony."
The concept of emotional attachment to the cube was born, and it was blessed into those writings.
Other Portal 1 things. After replaying it today, I noticed that the puzzles were extremely easy. (It was so long since I last played, so it's not like I remember the solutions.) I guess it makes sense for the main game puzzles to be easy, since this is the audience's first exposure to portals, and because the "advanced" maps are also included as optional content for those who want them.
I also noticed that the game had a lot more surfaces on which portals can be placed compared to Portal 2. In most test chambers, almost all of the walls were white tiles for placing portals on. Dark tiles were rare. I think giving people the freedom to move around however they like adds a lot to the game, and makes the puzzle solving less direct and more creative.
In Portal 2, there are a lot of linear outdoor areas which are almost entirely made of rough surfaces, except for the occasional moment where the game wants you to place a portal to continue. I didn't find the gameplay as interesting in these sections, since hunting for a single portal surface is less thrilling than trying to solve a tough and creative puzzle, but I still appreciate the value of those sections for being able to advance the story. As I said, the story is a huge part of what Portal 2 is all about.
Portal 2, while a step up from Portal 1 in both length and difficulty, was still not _particularly_ difficult, with only a few chambers that left me temporarily stumped. That's fine, it didn't need to be overly difficult for me to enjoy the story. The game also came with the map marketplace, where evil creators were able to make standalone evil test chambers, so it still does provide challenges, just not as part of the built-in maps.
Along with the portal-placing liberation that Portal 1 provided, it also had a couple of very... interesting... mechanics. The most noticeable, compared to Portal 2, is that portals take time to travel through the air from the gun before they hit the wall and come into existence. This leads to a lot of interesting tricks where you can be half-in a portal set, shoot a portal, then step back to the other side before it impacts, allowing you to reach places that you might not otherwise have been able to. In short, with that trick, you can get from point A to point C, where there is line of sight between points A-B and B-C, but without needing point B to be a safe place to stand on. In Portal 2, where the portals are created instantly, you must be able to stand safely at point B to make the transfer. This trick isn't really useful in terms of solving puzzles in alternate ways, since the main ways to solve them are relatively easy to find, but I bet speedrunners absolutely love it. Or they would if they didn't instantly clip out of bounds and ignore all intended geometry of the maps.
In the end, Portal Stories: Mel was the one that ended up quenching my thirst for difficult puzzles. Some test chambers in that game I spent multiple hours on, and finally managed to solve. I only had to look up the solution to one of them - you know, _that one_ in advanced mode with the orange gel and the horizontal funnel and button.
I like the Portal games a lot.
There's a lot more I could say about the games, but the difficulty, freedom, and story are the main things that I had thoughts about. And now my thoughts are out in the world, and inside your mind too. Thanks for reading.
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I just wanted to recommend asciiportal which boils the game down to its puzzly essence and has some really creative levels (in the user-submitted map sets, not so much in the default map set; the "evil" and "mechanist" packs are mine.)
https://github.com/cymonsgames/ASCIIpOrtal
We found that it didn't quite build as-is. To build it, you'll need to apply Martin's patch with `patch < asciiportal-control.diff`, then finally build the code using `make nosdl.`
Looks like a matter of extreme optimisation breaking some functions which didn't always return.
Try "make nosdl", that shouldn't need any dependencies other than ncurses and yaml-cpp.
This is somehow even cooler than it sounds. It's the same principle as Portal, in two dimensions, rendered as ASCII text, running in the terminal, and somehow managing to correctly render the view through the portals.
I highlessly suggest you play it if you want more Portal.
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