Happy New Years!

With this late post, the blog goes off hiatus. Today was not a high point for me productivity-wise, but I finally got to spend some time truly getting acquainted with my X-box 360.

Anyhow, I beat Valve’s Portal. It’s a short game included with Orange Box (which also includes Half Life 2, two episodes of HL2, and Team Fortress 2). So here’s my write-up of 2007’s game of the year:

Portal is widely praised and rightly so. The core concept is interesting, a tool that can shoot a blue and an orange portal. Going in to either one causes you to leave via the other. Critically, momentum is conserved, so if you go into one traveling at a high speed (for example because it is at the bottom of a pit) you leave the other at the same speed. I love physics based puzzles at they inherently allow for a lot of experimentation and sometimes alternate solution.

In addition to a fun core mechanic, the setting is often hilarious. Your character is presented with a series of puzzles described over a PA system and via cute infographics. Your proctor is an excellent character in her own right that benefits from being introduced early and being a fairly constant presence.

I’d recommend playing it. You’ll feel smart beating it and you’ll probably have a pretty good time. There’s some twitch elements, a few timed puzzles that require shooting while moving, but most of the game should be accessible to anyone who likes puzzles. The twitch bits are the only flaw I can think of in the game, not because they aren’t fun, they are, but because they’re the only thing keeping it from being nigh universally accessible. I don’t think they’d need to be removed, but it would be nice if those parts had an alternate solution.

Anyhow, one other interesting bit. The voices in the game are all female as is your character. At the same time, it isn’t sexualized at all nor do they make a big deal of it. It just happens to be a world where all the (fairly few) main characters are female. The dialogue reflects this in subtle ways, such as a reference to take your daughter to work day. It makes for an interesting response on all the games that are nigh exclusively male.