Portal 2

[legios]

I, specifically, am playing this on the 360, but I am putting it out on its own because really Portal is fairly platform-independent.

I bought this second-hand a couple of weeks ago, and once again I am astounded by how engrossing a simple idea can be. In a day and age where so many games are about brown soldiers shooting at brown enemies with "realistic" weapons in a grey-brown environment there is something refreshing about Portal 2.

I mean, it is basically just a series of physics puzzles - given a gun that makes wormholes and simple principles of conservation of momentum, get yourself from A to B. It is an incredibly simple idea, but it is so addictive. I don't think I have ever got as much pleasure from the most action-packed shoot out as I have done from standing in a corner of a testing chamber for five minutes and then suddenly realising "ah HAH! I see how that works now".

There is something endearing about GladOS as well - one of the great bonkers AI's in gaming managing to be a bit scary even when all she is doing is making digs about the player avatars weight.

There is a place for videogames about shooting people with guns (or missiles) or karate-ing people into unconciousness. But it is nice that we live in a world where it is also possible to make a highly successful video-game that is just about applying physics to problem solving and makes that process fun.

(The promise of split-screen co-op with Portal guns sounds amusing too. I must see if I can dragoon someone into helping me experience that).

Karl

[Stomski]

Have you played Super Meat Boy??

[legios]

Mar 7, 2012 9:17:19 GMT Stomski said:

Have you played Super Meat Boy??

Not only have I not played it, I don't think that I've even heard of it. Can you elucidate?

(Also - Portal 2 is one of the few times the existence of Achievements has not irritated me. Just purely for the fact that there is an achievement whose description reads, in total "This is where he does that". )


Karl

[Stomski]

Super Meat Boy is an indie game built around a simple platforming concept that takes it to the extreme. The levels are normally simple, but in order to complete them you need to incorporate a rhythm into your platforming skills and make a finely tuned sequence of jumps around all manner of sick obstacles.

It's basically Mario on acid. You know that wall jump they introduced in Mario64? Well, you'll need it more than anything else.

Both it and Portal excel in their respective design decisions and are hugely rewarding when you get something just right.

[kayevcee]

N+ is the stick figure equivalent of Super Meat Boy. N+ is a flash game about a little wall-jumping ninja trying to reach a certain point on a screen filled with obstacles, turrets and booby-traps. The original N+ had over 100 levels and beyond about level 60 they became farcically difficult. I think I gave up around level 71 and deleted it before the inevitable aneurism.

-Nick

[Cullen]

I played Portal 2 on Steam and while I thought it was a good game, I don't get the hype. The puzzles in P2 are very easy, and the exploration sections boiled down to hunt the tiny panel of portal-capable wall. The original Portal was a better puzzle game and I've played better exploration games with puzzles in them (particularly the Metroid series). Darksiders, a good Zelda clone, had a dungeon where the Portal gun was the main item and it did puzzles better than Portal 2.

I do recommend the co-op though as that's where Valve hid the real puzzles. Me and a friend got stuck for 20 mins on a level he had already completed once!

[Stomski]

Not sure I agree with you there re. Darksiders. The portal gun implementation was fairly limited in that game and the physics of momentum preservation didn't really play too much of a part.

I think the genius behind the original Portal was the way it introduced a way of thinking on how to tackle the puzzles within a controlled environment and then you were thrown into a open world having to use what you'd learnt previously out of context.

Because this was already done, Portal 2 didn't quite get the balance right. I'm not sure how it felt for people who hadn't played the original though.