In my English composition class, we were required to write a review of a movie or anything else that one can have a critical opinion of.
So I chose Portal. Here it is below (paranthetical citations and works noted page removed):
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I think that I'm one of the most finicky game players out there. There is a wide array of genres that I simply don't enjoy playing: sports, first-person shooters, and real time strategy games are automatic passes in my book. These genres account for most of the games out there today, leaving very little that I actually do enjoy. These genres include platformers like Super Mario Bros., puzzle games like Tetris, and role playing games like the Final Fantasy series. The gems in my little world are games that combine genres that I enjoy. The Legend of Zelda series are such games that combine role playing elements, where you start out with nothing more than a loin cloth and a glorified stick ending up with a near god-like inventory, and puzzles that require you to slow down the action and think about which button needs to be pressed in which order to advance.
Just being a game in a specific genre doesn't exclude it from getting added to my "Trade-In to GameStop" pile. If the game has a high learning curve up front or the difficulty increases faster than the natural progression of the characters I lose interest quickly. An example of this is Final Fantasy III, which has a very difficult sequence early on in the game with no way to save the game in the middle. You can play for nearly ninety minutes and die on the last fight before you can save again, forcing you have to play those ninety minutes over again. Another case of this is in Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors. In the bonus content opened up after you finish the main storyline, there is a post-game boss that can be defeated with your characters at about level thirty-five. The next boss you go up against requires you to be closer to level seventy. I expect to have my characters progress while I play the game. I don't think it's fun to be required to play the game in order to progress.
So when I heard about the packaged bundle by Valve known as The Orange Box, released in October of 2007, my initial instinct was to leave it on the shelf. The package includes the previously released Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One in addition to the new games Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. The Half-Life series got its start in 1998 and Team Fortress was released in 1996. These titles and sequels that are a part of The Orange Box were known first-person shooters, leaving only Portal, being advertised as a first-person puzzle game, to be the only portion of the package that interested me. A price tag of fifty dollars only to play twenty percent of a game seemed unappealing to me. So I left it on the shelf, listening to my instincts.
After the "awards season" celebrating the 2007 releases in the gaming industry, Portal has been mentioned a number of times. When I say "a number of times", I mean A LOT. Portal has received at least six "Game of the Year" awards, three "Innovative Design" awards, three "Best Puzzle Game" awards, four for "Best New Character" awards, three for "Best Song" for their ending credit sequence, and oddly enough, one for "Best Sidekick" for an inanimate object. Praise of that magnitude caught my attention forcing me to rethink my previous decisions. Finding out that I could download the game using Valve's "Steam" application for twenty dollars instead of getting all of the other unwanted games for the higher price, I gave Portal a try.
I was pleasantly surprised that all of the honors that I've heard about were well deserved. It is comparable to a book that you cannot put down at two in the morning because the story is so twisted that you have to finish it in fear of having nightmares. I simply did not want to stop playing the game once I started. Even after finishing the game, all I wanted to do was to select the "New Game" option at the main menu and start again.
Imagine yourself a scientist watching a mouse in a maze. You're likely quietly observing the rodent attempt to get the baited cheese at its destination. This game is pretty much that except that you are the mouse, it is suggested that there is cake at the end instead of cheese, and a chatty, sarcastic, and self-proclaimed liar GLaDOS, an artificial intelligence (short for Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) is running the show instead of the silent person you were thinking of. Anyone who has seen a Terminator movie can tell you that bad things happen when you give a computer the ability to think for itself. So you can imagine that unpleasant things are in order by the end of this game.
The learning curve of this game is very short. Most people will be able to sit down at this and get a feel for it right away. The game starts you out with the concept of what a portal is in the very first room. GLaDOS will open up a pair of portals, one in the glass-walled room you're confined in, the other outside such that both are in view. When you look through either, you're able to see yourself, a female character named Chell with ankle springs attached to your legs to prevent damage from falls. This effect of seeing yourself shows the player that portals keeps the character and other objects in the same space of the game rather than whisk you into some alternate dimension. The game's puzzles progressively teaches you through all nineteen "test chambers" the different aspects of the game: which surfaces portals can and cannot be created on, how the physics in the game works, and what is considered to be deadly or not.
The portion of the game that is the most innovative of all of the new aspects to the players is the concept termed by Value as "flinging". They use the premise that momentum is preserved through the portals. So if you jump off of a ledge ten feet into a portal on the floor and you come out another portal that is on a slanted tilt aimed upwards, it acts similarly to you being shot out of a cannon at the same speed that you've entered the portal. As GLaDOS states in the game, "Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out". This allows for unique level design. One level requires you to climb a high but narrow room to a small exit in the upper corner where the only surfaces you're able to create portals on are small perpendicular-to-the-floor platforms. Some of the more advanced puzzles like this one will take most people a bit of time of trial and error to figure it out, but not too easy to make the game not enjoyable.
The game ends with the most hilarious boss battle that I have ever played. I purposefully let the time expire two or three times just so I could hear everything that was being said during the fight. Afterwards you hear GLaDOS' final report on her "study", in song. The song on its own is cute and funny when left as a stand-alone song. When put in the context of the game, the song has much more meaning, and thus makes it even funnier. That's the song that has won the previously mentioned awards, including my own unofficial award of "Best Song in a Video Game Ever". The previous owner of that award was Final Fantasy VI's opera house scene. It took thirteen years for me to crown a new leader. Makes me wonder how long this one will last.
The main problem that people may have with Portal is how short it is. Playing through the game the first time takes six to ten hours, depending on how fast you are at solving the puzzles, and taking about two hours to play through when you know what you're doing. But to be honest, I don't see this as a bad thing. Makes me think back to the old Nintendo Entertainment System days when there were no save feature on games and you had to play them in a single two or three hour sitting. Games today will try to add "replay" value to the game by making hidden side missions or extra quests that are not required to finish the game. The replay value in Portal is that it is just simply a fun game to play that you'll want to play over and over again. It took me over one hundred hours to finish Final Fantasy XII when it was released in 2006. Did I have fun playing it? Yes. Would I want to go through that again? No. Will I want to play Portal again? I've done so about five times in two weeks already.
Portal is humorous, innovative, and most importantly, fun. The game forces players to think differently than they would when solving real world puzzles. The end game song is memorable to the point you'll find it's stuck in your head, but pleasant enough that you won't care and will simply enjoy the experience. For only twenty dollars, I suggest that anyone who likes puzzle games to give this a try. For those who are reluctant to buy and download anything on the internet, Portal is now available as a standalone perchance from any game retailer for the same price. Once you've played this, you too may find yourself "thinking with portals".
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There it is - I set up a poll to ask what you think of it. Feel free to reply with additional comments.
Any critisism to make this better is welcome. It's due Tuesday, and I'm open to suggestions.
Thanks!
So I chose Portal. Here it is below (paranthetical citations and works noted page removed):
------------------------------------------------------------------
I think that I'm one of the most finicky game players out there. There is a wide array of genres that I simply don't enjoy playing: sports, first-person shooters, and real time strategy games are automatic passes in my book. These genres account for most of the games out there today, leaving very little that I actually do enjoy. These genres include platformers like Super Mario Bros., puzzle games like Tetris, and role playing games like the Final Fantasy series. The gems in my little world are games that combine genres that I enjoy. The Legend of Zelda series are such games that combine role playing elements, where you start out with nothing more than a loin cloth and a glorified stick ending up with a near god-like inventory, and puzzles that require you to slow down the action and think about which button needs to be pressed in which order to advance.
Just being a game in a specific genre doesn't exclude it from getting added to my "Trade-In to GameStop" pile. If the game has a high learning curve up front or the difficulty increases faster than the natural progression of the characters I lose interest quickly. An example of this is Final Fantasy III, which has a very difficult sequence early on in the game with no way to save the game in the middle. You can play for nearly ninety minutes and die on the last fight before you can save again, forcing you have to play those ninety minutes over again. Another case of this is in Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors. In the bonus content opened up after you finish the main storyline, there is a post-game boss that can be defeated with your characters at about level thirty-five. The next boss you go up against requires you to be closer to level seventy. I expect to have my characters progress while I play the game. I don't think it's fun to be required to play the game in order to progress.
So when I heard about the packaged bundle by Valve known as The Orange Box, released in October of 2007, my initial instinct was to leave it on the shelf. The package includes the previously released Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One in addition to the new games Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. The Half-Life series got its start in 1998 and Team Fortress was released in 1996. These titles and sequels that are a part of The Orange Box were known first-person shooters, leaving only Portal, being advertised as a first-person puzzle game, to be the only portion of the package that interested me. A price tag of fifty dollars only to play twenty percent of a game seemed unappealing to me. So I left it on the shelf, listening to my instincts.
After the "awards season" celebrating the 2007 releases in the gaming industry, Portal has been mentioned a number of times. When I say "a number of times", I mean A LOT. Portal has received at least six "Game of the Year" awards, three "Innovative Design" awards, three "Best Puzzle Game" awards, four for "Best New Character" awards, three for "Best Song" for their ending credit sequence, and oddly enough, one for "Best Sidekick" for an inanimate object. Praise of that magnitude caught my attention forcing me to rethink my previous decisions. Finding out that I could download the game using Valve's "Steam" application for twenty dollars instead of getting all of the other unwanted games for the higher price, I gave Portal a try.
I was pleasantly surprised that all of the honors that I've heard about were well deserved. It is comparable to a book that you cannot put down at two in the morning because the story is so twisted that you have to finish it in fear of having nightmares. I simply did not want to stop playing the game once I started. Even after finishing the game, all I wanted to do was to select the "New Game" option at the main menu and start again.
Imagine yourself a scientist watching a mouse in a maze. You're likely quietly observing the rodent attempt to get the baited cheese at its destination. This game is pretty much that except that you are the mouse, it is suggested that there is cake at the end instead of cheese, and a chatty, sarcastic, and self-proclaimed liar GLaDOS, an artificial intelligence (short for Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) is running the show instead of the silent person you were thinking of. Anyone who has seen a Terminator movie can tell you that bad things happen when you give a computer the ability to think for itself. So you can imagine that unpleasant things are in order by the end of this game.
The learning curve of this game is very short. Most people will be able to sit down at this and get a feel for it right away. The game starts you out with the concept of what a portal is in the very first room. GLaDOS will open up a pair of portals, one in the glass-walled room you're confined in, the other outside such that both are in view. When you look through either, you're able to see yourself, a female character named Chell with ankle springs attached to your legs to prevent damage from falls. This effect of seeing yourself shows the player that portals keeps the character and other objects in the same space of the game rather than whisk you into some alternate dimension. The game's puzzles progressively teaches you through all nineteen "test chambers" the different aspects of the game: which surfaces portals can and cannot be created on, how the physics in the game works, and what is considered to be deadly or not.
The portion of the game that is the most innovative of all of the new aspects to the players is the concept termed by Value as "flinging". They use the premise that momentum is preserved through the portals. So if you jump off of a ledge ten feet into a portal on the floor and you come out another portal that is on a slanted tilt aimed upwards, it acts similarly to you being shot out of a cannon at the same speed that you've entered the portal. As GLaDOS states in the game, "Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out". This allows for unique level design. One level requires you to climb a high but narrow room to a small exit in the upper corner where the only surfaces you're able to create portals on are small perpendicular-to-the-floor platforms. Some of the more advanced puzzles like this one will take most people a bit of time of trial and error to figure it out, but not too easy to make the game not enjoyable.
The game ends with the most hilarious boss battle that I have ever played. I purposefully let the time expire two or three times just so I could hear everything that was being said during the fight. Afterwards you hear GLaDOS' final report on her "study", in song. The song on its own is cute and funny when left as a stand-alone song. When put in the context of the game, the song has much more meaning, and thus makes it even funnier. That's the song that has won the previously mentioned awards, including my own unofficial award of "Best Song in a Video Game Ever". The previous owner of that award was Final Fantasy VI's opera house scene. It took thirteen years for me to crown a new leader. Makes me wonder how long this one will last.
The main problem that people may have with Portal is how short it is. Playing through the game the first time takes six to ten hours, depending on how fast you are at solving the puzzles, and taking about two hours to play through when you know what you're doing. But to be honest, I don't see this as a bad thing. Makes me think back to the old Nintendo Entertainment System days when there were no save feature on games and you had to play them in a single two or three hour sitting. Games today will try to add "replay" value to the game by making hidden side missions or extra quests that are not required to finish the game. The replay value in Portal is that it is just simply a fun game to play that you'll want to play over and over again. It took me over one hundred hours to finish Final Fantasy XII when it was released in 2006. Did I have fun playing it? Yes. Would I want to go through that again? No. Will I want to play Portal again? I've done so about five times in two weeks already.
Portal is humorous, innovative, and most importantly, fun. The game forces players to think differently than they would when solving real world puzzles. The end game song is memorable to the point you'll find it's stuck in your head, but pleasant enough that you won't care and will simply enjoy the experience. For only twenty dollars, I suggest that anyone who likes puzzle games to give this a try. For those who are reluctant to buy and download anything on the internet, Portal is now available as a standalone perchance from any game retailer for the same price. Once you've played this, you too may find yourself "thinking with portals".
------------------------------------------------------------------
There it is - I set up a poll to ask what you think of it. Feel free to reply with additional comments.
Any critisism to make this better is welcome. It's due Tuesday, and I'm open to suggestions.
Thanks!
