Friday - October 19, 2007

The cake is a lie 

Last night I had the pleasure - nay, the privilege - of playing Valve Software's new game, Portal. I have to say it was one of the greatest and most satisfying gaming experiences of my life.

There are more reasons to like this game than I think I can possibly write about without both spoiling the game for others and boring the reader to death, so I'll attempt to sum up as best I can without rambling too badly.

First, a bit about the game :

The game is built on the Half Life 2 engine by Valve. Half Life 2 was regarded as one of the best games of all time, the sequel to - can you guess? - Half Life, also regarded as one of the best games of all time. Half Life 2 was a long time in the making, and the delay had a lot of people very upset. Valve, however, did not crack under the pressure, and took their time getting the game engine just right. Consequently, it is beautiful, interactive, and capable of many great things.

Portal is a bit of a departure from the standard FPS (First Person Shooter) genre. Whereas it is technically an FPS, there are no weapons in the game - at least, not that you get to handle. The only thing you get to use is the Aperture Science Hand Held Portal Device, a highly advanced piece of experimental technology that allows you to create portals on flat surfaces. The gun shoots two types of portals - Yellow and Blue. What goes in a blue comes out the yellow, and what goes in the yellow comes out the blue. Simple.

Or not. See, what makes Portal both a unique and supremely fun game is that this has never been done before. Portal forces you to use your spacial relations, and knowledge of geometry and physics, in ways you never have before. For instance, if you put a portal under an object, and place the other portal on the wall, it causes the object to fall through the portal... and sideways out of the wall. Velocity is transfered directly through the portal, so an object that goes in traveling quickly will come out traveling quickly, no matter what direction that might be in.

These unique ways of using physics create some interesting situations and solutions to puzzles. For instance, if you need to jump a long chasm, but are able to place a portal on the floor of the chasm, one might place one portal on the wall behind you, facing your destination. Then, leap off the platform you are on, and place the entrance as you fall on the floor. Your vertical velocity builds as you fall, and transfers into horizontal velocity as you exit... pointed straight at the other side of the chasm like being shot out of a cannon.

And that's just one example. The possibilities are infinite. This makes it one of the greatest puzzle games of all time.

It's not all wine and roses, though. One might think that the bouncing and bounding and portal-ing around sounds like great fun... and it is! But the motif for the game is much much darker than the gameplay makes it sound. You are little more than a science experiment led by the nose by an artificial intelligence named GLaDOS. GLaDOS is ... a little off, to say the least, as she seems to be helpful in many cases, but makes odd comments, usually with regards to your grizzly demise as an unfortunate side effect of testing. The commentary - and with it, the game - only gets more disturbing as you get little glimpses of things scrawled on the walls by, presumably, other 'test subjects'. GLaDOS entices you with a tasty cake if you complete the tests, but you're met constantly with the words, "the cake is a lie" scrawled on the walls over and over and over again.

I adored this aspect of the game. Clean, sanitary evil combined with well-played insanity combined with a sense of utter helplessness for the main character against these odds makes for intense game play for me.  Josh and I both compared it to "Silent Hill FPS with a technology twist."

Just when you think the game is going to end at the completion of the 19th and final test, the game truly begins in earnest. The 'tests' only groom you for the real challenges ahead. The learning curve is a nice even slope - a little too slow for me, but only a little. I'm sure others would find it just right, but I cheated a bit by having really damned good spacial relations, quite a bit of time playing Aliens Vs. Predator and getting used to FPS vertigo, as well as playing the Flash version of Portal up to about level 37. By the time I got to play the actual game, I was well groomed to deal with its many challenging innovations.

Each task either increases the difficulty of previous tasks, introduces a new element, or does both. I never once found myself asking, "What do I do here?" But I often found myself saying, "I understand what I need to do. I can't believe they're going to make me try to do that! Here's hoping my aim and my timing is spot on!"

Which brings me to the controls - Spot on. The advantage that Portal has is that it's not truly a full fledged FPS, with all the bells and whistles. There are really only 3 things you can do in the game : move, shoot portals, and pick things up / press buttons. The movement keys are your standard FPS WADS configuration, space is jump, and command (we were playing this on a dual-booted iMac) was crouch. Picking things up and pressing buttons are the same key for use, which is the E key. That leaves shooting portals - Two portals, two mouse buttons. Coincidence? The controls were responsive, the accuracy of the portal gun was dead on and quick, and I never once felt like I was out of control of my movement due to strange drifting or jumping or hit-detection. Over all, I'd give the controls an A+.

Anyone who knows me, knows I take my gaming seriously. Heck, look at this blog - I have a whole section of it dedicated to games, and it has more posts (at the time this entry was posted) than my personal life section does. So, I want it fully understood that it means something when I say, it has been a while since a game has made me sit back and cheer at how awesome something was - truly put down the controls and cheer. I don't believe, until Portal, a game has ever made me do it more than 4 times in an hour. This was truly one of the greatest games ever created.

Learn more about this game at it's official site, http://orange.half-life2.com/portal.html