1 Week To Portal 2

The original Portal, which arrived via the incredibly economical Orange Box package, was worth the price of admission alone, despite being bundled with 3 other great Valve games (Half-Life 2, HL2: Episode 1 and HL2: Episode 2). I had no expectations for it at all, and yet it ended up being one of the most fun games Vicki and I have ever played together. As such, my hopes are probably too high for its sequel, which is due out next Tuesday.

To understand where I'm coming from, though, you have to appreciate just how great a game Portal really was! For anyone who has never tried it, the concept behind its gameplay is simple enough: you're given a gun that shoots two portals - one orange, and one blue - and forced to find your way out of increasingly difficult predicaments. Each portal is essentially a large, circular opening that will adhere to most surfaces in the game. Together, they form an entry/exit pair: whatever goes into the blue hole will come out of the orange one, and vice versa. To understand the utility of this, imagine you're at one end of a room that has a door out of it at the other end and a chasm filled with burning acid running all the way across the middle of it. You shoot one of the portals into the wall beside you and the other one into the wall at the other end of the room, near the exit. You then step into the (blue or orange) hole near you and immediately come out of the (orange or blue) hole across the room! Problem solved by the application of a tiny bit of spatial physics!

Lest you think the game is just a long series of similarly-trivial challenges, you're soon having to perform maneuvers like jumping off a ledge, shooting a portal below you as well as one in the ceiling above you, so that when you emerge from the upper hole (after falling through the lower one) you've got enough momentum to put to use after forming a portal in a side wall where you'll come out after plummeting through the floor-hole a second time and shooting across the room where you... well, it just goes on from there, in some of the harder puzzles. Vicki and I had a complete hoot trying to figure out how to get through the game, and spent weeks at it.

I don't know whether Portal 2 will live up to its predecessor, but I do know I can't wait to find out! I plan to pick my copy up next Tuesday morning rather than pre-ordering it for home delivery because I figure it'd just end up coming a couple days late, if I did. This one I want to be sure to get on its release day!