socks with crocs 2

Portal came out yesterday. My initial reaction: Sweet moogly it’s a portal; I’m making portals! My opinion now that I’ve beaten the main level set: Portals should be real life and I want heel springs so I don’t take fall damage.

But really, here’s how it breaks down: You’re a test subject at the Aperture science enrichment testing center. You get to walk through room after room of increasingly dangerous obstacle courses that would normally be impossible. The catch: you have hacks. Hacks in the form of a portal gun, that is. You make use of our favorite physics engine and some clever portal shooting to outmaneuver the polite automated turrets and to manipulate floating radioactive balls of doom. Sounds simple. Actually it pretty much is. The main story mode missions aren’t very hard at all, and they aren’t very long either. I finished the whole main story mode in about two hours, and that’s average among anyone I know so far. One thing I must say is that they did an excellent job with the personalities they gave the little turrets and the AI running the complex. They are very memorable and quite hilarious, and despite the part about being life-threatening, I look forward to each encounter.

Luckily that’s not all there is to the game. There’s a set of extra challenging levels, and another set of levels with special objectives. One thing I was particularly impressed with was that there is a developer commentary mode. You can go back and play through the main level set with set points along the way where you can stop to listen to a bit of commentary from the makers of the game about that specific area. It’s something that I’ve never seen in a game and should definitely be in more games. That alone adds a lot of replay value for true fans of a game.

The real hope for replay value here, actually lies in the fact that there is an included level builder which I haven’t tried yet, but will definitely be the cause of much fun and puzzlement in the future. In a month or two we’ll see portal map sites springing up to challenge our natural senses of direction in new ways.

You can keep up with my game play stats here. After all that I’ll leave you with three reminders:

• You should try your hand at Portal now
• The cake is a lie
• The cake is a lie