Portal 2 Co-op Fun

Tammy and her boyfriend Ryan visited us for an overnighter this Easter weekend, affording me the opportunity to try out the co-op campaign of Portal 2 with someone who's at least as good at the game as me (probably better, actually). I had thought that this role might end up falling to Tammy, but instead it was Ryan who really rocked at the puzzle solving!

Some of the dilemmas in the game are unbelievably difficult to figure out, thanks to the fact that there's often very little in the way of clues to help you along. I loved starting each new level, talking it over between us as to what we're supposed to do, and then often resorting to just trying random things to see what inspiration might come to us. Ryan's very logical mind got us through some of the toughest spots, along with my occasional burst of insight based on seeing patterns in the game play. I still don't think there's much replayability to this co-op campaign, though. A couple times we ended up having to replay a level, and in each case we found that we could race through it in a fraction of the time since we knew all of its tricks. But the original passage through each head-scratching map is well worth the cost of the game!

By the way, I do recognize that this post is an unfortunate example of "burying the lead." While our time spent together playing Portal 2 was ridiculously enjoyable and worthy of a blog post, it was much more important in the grand scheme of things that I finally got to meet Tammy's wonderful boyfriend. My apologies to him - and her! - for making that aspect of the tale an incidental detail rather than the main story! He's welcome back here anytime... the PS/3 controllers will be charged up and ready!