Portal

Portal

Nothing I can say about Portal hasn’t already been said before. Just stop reading now if you’ve read anything at all. However, if you’ve not heard of Portal, then read on…

I played Portal last night. It’s a little game included in Valve’s new Orange Box ($50, includes 5 games). It’s one of the best games I have ever played in my entire life ever.

I set out at 10pm to play the first few levels. I stopped at 1:30am having beaten the game.

I laughed (a lot) and I cried (not really, but there was a really sad moment when I had to burn a cube with hearts on it that they referred to as my “companion cube”, and the game was so good that I actually felt sad like I was loosing a friend).

The whole time you are basically like a lab rat. There is this computer voice that talks to you. You learn to trust it at first, as it helps guide you through your tasks. But then you learn not to trust it because it is a liar.

After a while you get the feeling that you are no longer playing the game, but that the game is playing you. It tries to psyche you out and get you to fail not only by making the tasks hard, but by telling you that you are no good, and that you are not smart enough, and that the task is impossible.

It is amazing.

Oh, the object of the game is that you have a gun that makes two portals. You can shoot most surfaces and then walk in one portal and thus out the other. So if you are on one side of a room that has a fire in the middle, and you want to get to the other side of the room, you would shoot the wall next to you and the wall across from you (on the other side of the fire) and walk through the portal on your side and thus out the portal on the other side.

Buy the game, you won’t be disappointed. It’s absolutely amazing. Actually, it’s not. Don’t buy it. It sucks. (there, now your expectations will be low and it will be even better).

About the Author

Christopher McCulloh

E-Commerce developer at Finish Line Co-Author of HTML, XHTML and CSS All-in-one Desk Reference for Dummies Graduated from IU with a Bachelors of Media Arts and Science and a Certificate in Applied Computer Science. Tech Editor for Building Facebook Applications for Dummies and Building Websites All-in-one for Dummies 2nd Edition. Creator and maintainer of the Status-bar Calculator Firefox Extension Three years professional experience in Java E-Commerce Development and four years professional experience with PHP for a combined total of seven years professional JavaScript/HTML/CSS experience

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