Zero Punctuation: Portal 2

[alexxcodered]

why didnt you mention about how the loading screens are all retarded now, before it was just being in the elivator, now there are proper loading screens, which break the flow somewhat. and yes there is potential for memes there, for example:
im in space
thats definately one of my favourite ones.

i just realised that there is going to be free dlc, my day lights right up!
also where the fuck is half life episode 3?

 

[Telekinesis]

well...uh...apparently the mods didnt like that I simply said "great review"

They did not like that you posted it within the minute the post was up, I'd guess.

 

[ParkourMcGhee]

You hit the nail on the head Yahtzee.

Good show

 

[Yopaz]

I'm surprised you didn't mention the frequent and annoying loading screens.

You know if you play this game on a PC like you should that cuts loading times a lot, never had an issue with them.

Great review, I was surprised to see that he like it this much, I would even say it seemed like he loved it, just not as much as the first one.

 

[jmarquiso]

Wait! I think I have a complaint about Portal!

Regenerating health.

Regenerating health in a game about puzzle solving isn't nearly as bad as an action game with no real stakes.

 

[sergnb]

I agree that the difficulty of most puzzles wasn't based on the complexity on the puzzles themselves, but the difficulty of finding that little tiny square of white wall in the gigantic room.

My favourite part has to be the gel sections, those required you to be a little more creative (as far as the puzzle layout let you) specially the white gel one.

Also, I found myself with no friends to play portal 2 co-op with, so I just decided to go random. I found this german guy and we had a blast. I regret nothing.

(and definitely, the BEST puzzle in the game has to the last chamber in the 3rd course, the one where *spoiler spoiler* you had to collide with your friend mid-air in order to land properly */spoiler* , the moment I figured out how to do it I felt pretty smart 8)

dude learn the spoiler command

bits around what i said and the statement after the = can be anything you want hense the insulting box. have fun ^^

I'm new in the forumz herpderp

 

[Isan]

I think Yahtzee's being a little unfair in his comparison of portal 2 to the original (big surprise there).
Portal 1 aimed for 50 and delivered 60. Portal 2 aims for 100 and delivers 99.
If that analogy makes sense :S
(120% > 99%, but 60 < 99 )

I just don't think something having more flaws necessarily makes it worse, because theres also so much more good stuff as well.

I agree that one mouthful of Portal 1 is better than a mouthful of Portal 2, but the Portal 2 cake is 5x bigger, and its still very very very tasty (like 95% as tasty as the original).


15 minutes in bed with or an hour in bed with





Am I making any sense?
:S

 

[beetrain]

I suppose I was too engrossed in the setting and characters to notice the puzzles were lacking.
At any rate, if I were to go back and play Portal 1 now, I probably wouldn't be able to enjoy it as much since I'd keep thinking about what the sequel did better. I have the same problem with the No More Heroes games, except it goes both ways with them.

 

[rsvp42]

Other than the fact that we're used to the Portal concept because of the first game, Portal 2 is superior in just about every way. I would have liked a couple more flingy, physics-y puzzles, but the overall experience is superior.

Sometimes I think Yahtzee should just steer clear of games where he has to spread his criticisms so thin. It's like he felt he had to say something humorously critical, so he just used his vague feelings of it being not as indy or surprising. They could have really messed this game up, but they came out with something longer, more entertaining and more creative than even the impeccable debut.

 

[Hyakunin Isshu]

(I'm sorry for putting this here, but I didn't know where else to put it. Hopefully you'll enjoy the tech demo videos below.)

To Ben Croshaw:

You don't care what I have to say about graphics, but, damn it, I'm going to try.

There is so many problems with you, Mr. Croshaw, but I'm just going to start with this one:

"Visual effects technology in both videogames and films have advanced to the point that what is put on screen is limited only by the director's imagination"

"Oh, for the days of the last console generation, when technology sat on the very agreeable fence between high-techitude and accessibility, when developers weren't so slow to ask themselves questions like "Strictly speaking do we really need a physics engine in a Championship Manager game? Is it so important that the league tables slide realistically down the screen?""

"Now, Last Crusade achieved this effect because it was a real stunt occurring in reality between real, physical objects, which is virtually impossible to fully simulate in pixel space because of the millions of factors you can't possibly predict, like the movements of the thousands of dust and grit particles that cloud up and get in Harrison Ford's face."

It seems you are trying to tell everyone that graphics in games will never get any better, and movie CGI can almost never be as good as the real thing, so it's pointless to even try. What an awful thing to tell people! We didn't get here by throwing up our hands and saying "too hard! we give up!" Technology *NEVER* works like that! You just want to go back to the "good OLD days".

And what the Hell is it with you calling it "pixels"? You sound like an old man who reviews movies then a gamer. Why didn't you call it CGI, or graphics, or polygons , like most of us do?

Let me get to the point: You say games are now "limited only by the director's imagination". That is complete nonsense! If that was true in anyway, then please show me this game, with no canned-animation or scripted sequence:

--In this photorealistic game, the Player is on top of a mountain looking down on a huge city. In the city, the Player sees 100,000 Cyborg Demon Ninjas, rampaging through the city, killing everyone in sight. On top of that, there is Giant Robots and motherships destroying all the buildings. The city itself can be dynamically destroyed; better then anything seen in both Red Faction or Minecraft (See the movie 2012). This photorealistic game is also a Open World game with real rooms in all the buildings, meaning, if I wanted to, I can hide in a fridge from all those CDNs in a apartment....--

Do you know any 360 or PS3 games like that? No, you don't. The only thing near to that, is Red Faction: Guerrilla, and even then, you can only destroy something that has 2 floors and 5 rooms. It's not like you can destroy something the size of Black Mesa or anything. In fact, some games can't even have more then 5 bad guys on the ground, because of bad programming, and or the way the game engine works. They get around it by using tricks, but I can always tell when they are using those tricks. And here's a big secret: programing gets much easier when computers are a lot more powerful. I'm a programmer, so I know what I'm talking about.

So please stop talking as if we hit the holy motherland, because we can barely have a photorealistic human in a room, much less an army of photorealistic humans destroying a city in a non scripted way.

For anyone thinks this can't happen in the next 5 to 10 years, think again:

Physic tech demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuWuTc5agVA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bKphYfUk-M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlcc9wJAzFQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grIVUDH4FIM:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87qdmuOesRs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsMjRmaJOqo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrb8PSpkhkQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwoJ-upjeKo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JrM4ujLY_A

real-time ray tracing and path tracing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbokPe4_-mY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyoHvNpuaK4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnXW0CitlIA


real-time in-game graphics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_YNR38H-kM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YjXCae4Gu0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GckOkpeJ3BY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvI1l0nAd1c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GmrdHxpYxk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBJIpQsecB0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THaam5mwIR8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5i_mgF7Vas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWZjzSQgBrg


I'll end this by saying, I know my words will fall on deaf ears, and if Mr. Croshaw ever sees this, he is just going to make fun of my bad grammer, and all my stupid links. Well, sorry for wanting to go to the future, but I can't live forever, and I can think of a million fun things in games, that you just can't do in this seventh generation of consoles. Sure, we have Portal and Mindcraft, but do you really want to wait 20 years on the seventh generation, hoping someone is going to make a super game to come-out, while playing Gears Of War 12, or Modern Warfare 7? Because even Ubisoft said they don't want to make anything new until the next-gen comes a calling:
http://scrawlfx.com/2011/04/ubisoft-ceo-industry-needs-new-consoles


And Mr. Croshaw? If you really want to try new and weird games, why don't you try all the Wii games you never played? Or all the games that came out in the 90s? Or all the indie games? Or the great iphone games? Or all the mods? Why do you *always* have to talk about the most popular games? Why not review Star Control 2? Why not? It's sad you openly lie to try to move the gaming industry your way. You say you want weirder games, but you only seem to enjoy shooters, and sometimes RPGs.

( P.S. You, Mr. Croshaw, give gamers everywhere a bad name.)

 

[Geo Da Sponge]

They do seem to lay the humour on a bit thick in Portal 2. Yes, we get it, Aperture Science is run by mad men with no regard for safety! Now tell me how the hell they keep hiring people!

 

[sergnb]

gotta give Valve that, creating really challenging puzzles is much harder than actually solving them. And to be honest, 70% of the game was a tutorial, so you can't really make the players feel like dumbfucks when you start and then have them steamroll through the rest of the game. I think Valve accomplished a really thin balance between frustrating puzzles and easy ones. Just when you are about to say "oh fuck this I'll solve it tomorrow", you find the missing piece that was lacking.

It really makes for a really rewarding experience, every puzzle I solved I felt smart even though I knew every single player that has bought this game has solved it and probably within much less time.

And we still have the DLC's, that promised more challenging puzzles, leaderboards and whatnot. HOORAY!

 

[Jas0913]

completely disagree with yatzee's opinion. I found no faults in portal 2, the only valid complaint yahtzee gave was that some of the sequences can drag on. It's a puzzle game, would you have rather they put less puzzles into the game. The narrative in portal 2 was in my opinion much better than that of the original. The reason why valve put this out was because the original portal left gamers wanting more. The original left it's players wanting to know more about the facility of aperture and the computer running the place, and it left of starving for more puzzles that revolve around the usage of the portal gun, and we got just that!

 

[UnravThreads]

Best way to describe Portal 2, in my opinion is that Portal 2 is Valve's best game to date, but it's not as good as Portal. I know that makes no sense, but in a way it does. Portal 2 is, on paper, the best game they've done. It just isn't Portal, though.

 

[McMarbles]

I've been down on Yahtzee lately, but I have to give him props for not joining the collective circle-jerk over this game.

 

[themerrygambit]

Awww And I was hoping you'd be jamming forks into your eyes again. I anticipated you'd probably say that it was Portal 1 but with a lot of extra useless padding. There is just something divinely wondrous in a perfect simplicity.