Monday, June 2, 2008

Portal

This weekend instead of preparing a seminar I have to present next friday, among other things I played a game called Portal. Portal is a game that came inside a bundle of games called The Orange Box. It is a first-person puzzle game, and it is an amazing game. One of the best, and terrifically funny games I ever played.

In this game you play a female character, who is a test subject inside a science facility runned by a AI called GlaDOS. During the game, the character learns how to use portals to cross various test chambers, and while this happens, GlaDOS makes various comments trying to "help" you with each chamber. The first test chambers are very straightforward, and exist only to teach you the basics of using portals. But they get trickier and trickier until the end of the game. To generate portals you have a Aperture Science Hand-held Portal Device, that can create blue portals or orange portals. Blue and orange portals represent each side of a portal, so if you enter the blue side, you will leave in the orange side, and by placing both portals throughout the chamber you can solve the puzzles. You also have to use some basic laws of physics like momentum conservation to solve some of the puzzles. It took me around 5 or 6 hours to finish the game. It was a very fast game, but an excellent one, and hilarious to say the least.

Here is the game trailer to give you an idea about the game.


The Aperture Science Computer, also known as GlaDOS, is one of the best and funniest characters in any game in my humble opinion, and the Weighted Companion Cube will never be forgotten! If you plan to play this game in the near future and do not like spoilers, DO NOT watch the next video. It is the ending song and might spoil your game play. If you do not care, just watch it, and have fun listening to that. It is fun, but will be funnier if you have already played the game. The song is called Still Alive.

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