Portal: I’m making a note here… Huge Success

Posted by Morgan on Jan 4, 2009 in Features, Games, PlayStation, X Box | View Comments

From the Joys of the festivities I now have the use of an Xbox 360 (is it an or a, an sounds better, it stays, take that grammar rules) Portal is a game that intrigued me since I discovered a brief summary on the web. I kept holding off finding out more as I knew one day I would play the damn thing (same applies to Bioshock)

So the day came and after deciding we didn’t want any other games on the wonderful ‘Orange Box’ we decided to put some Xbox point to use and download ‘Portal: Still Alive’

Now if you haven’t heard of Portal then it is a 1st person puzzler! Seriously, such things exist, well one, this one, where you get hold of a portal gun which creates portals -- you place and entrance portal and an exit portal and you enter one and come out of the other. Now if you’re ever going to play this game (and you should) stop reading now, spoilers are plentiful and gleeful.

Seriously, spoilers.

I warned you.

So, I came into the game a noob and I had only seen some fan fun with the ‘weighted companion cube‘. From the moment GLaDOS wakes you up I fell in love with the game. You are a test subject for Aperture Science and what follows is essentially a game of how to use the game up until the later levels.

You can tell when games have been tested to the limit and made with time and love, Portal is one of them. Yes it is short, but it is one of the most enjoyable games I have ever played -- and I am not a first person shooter player one bit!

The puzzles are clever and thanks to the voice of GLaDOS, funny and although you are on your own the obvious depth of story that the developers had makes the world seem real, meeting the turrets with creepy cute voices and the rat-man dens add to the atmosphere that lead you to the end of the game.

It’s difficult to review this game without just saying, omg you have to play it! But it is true, it is the essence of computer games -- it is fun to play, hard enough and requires the mastering of a skill (when you start flinging yourself about you’ll soon realise!).

The satisfaction of getting to the end of the game and realising that it isn’t done just yet is like no other I have played!

So in short I LOVE this game -- buy it -- play it -- go out dressed as a cake it is so brilliantly put together it is an absolute joy to play.

And the song at the end is fantastic….