It’s a good thing I completed BioShock when I did. I picked up The Orange Box, along with another product which I’ll blog about later, on Friday. This is basically the final nail in the coffin for Project Gotham Racing 4, not that I could afford it anymore if I wanted to. I need to play some more of the demo, just for fun, to see if I really want it or if it was just a phase thing. Regardless, I’m not even looking at it right now, this set is so good. Well, let me re-phrase that, Portal is so good, I actually haven’t even played any of the other games yet. Like most people who are getting this, I think, I have never been into Half-Life before, but that’s part of the appeal of this set. As soon as my family got a PC that was more than capable of running Half-Life, my hardware-challenged friend, Harry, started bugging me to buy it. I never did, and since I never had an original Xbox, I never paid much attention to that re-release, either. As soon as I saw Portal a number of months ago, though, this set became a must-buy. I don’t know, but the general attitude before release about Portal seemed to be skeptical. For me, I was just purely excited. Having finished it twice, beating the Advance levels and being more than half way though the Time, Step and Portal Challenges, I think it’s safe to say I’m satisfied. Well, as everybody’s been saying, except for the length.

If you’re not a completionist, you’ll probably breeze through Portal. The first sixteen levels or so only took me an hour, and then I spent another hour on the last three levels. When I played it a second time, I finished it in just over an hour, once you learn the level’s tricks it isn’t all that hard anymore. The learning curve is pretty good, but the last level is really long and has some challenges that haven’t showed up in any of the other levels. I won’t spoil anything, but there is a significant difference between the backdrop of the last level and the other levels, which is done well. The graphical shortcomings show up in this area more than the others, though. The game doesn’t look bad, really, and for a game that’s quite short it would have been a waste of time and resources when it would be better spent on Episode 2 or Team Fortress 2. It’s just that when you go to a door and it doesn’t have a handle, just a picture of one on the door itself, it kinda snaps you out of the game world.

The other media for the game, the music, the Achievements, the voice acting and writing, are perfect. PC users actually “get” the game’s soundtrack if downloaded through Steam, it’s in the game’s files, apparently. I figure I shouldn’t get shafted just because I picked a different platform, so I have the soundtrack, too, now. 4000 Degrees Kelvin is my favorite song, except for Still Alive, obviously, which is the hilarious song that plays while the credits run at the end of the game. The song is, uh, sang by the voice actress of GLaDOS, it is the computer voice that tells you where you are and, sometimes, what to do. The game has great writing, and the fairly bland voice makes the crazy comment even funnier. The Achievements are quite good, too. Seeing as there are five games that all need to have 1000 gamerscore spread across them, I’m impressed. The images themselves are nice, mirroring the “training videos” from the old trailer. The cake motif from the game also carries over, two bonus missions completed earns you a cupcake, four gets you a fruitcakes and all six gets you some vanilla crazy cake, though I’m not sure what that is. I’m working on getting the Achievements for beating the bonus challenged with silver medals, though Team Fortress is starting to tempt me and I’m not sure if I should try and get all the Portal Achievements before moving on or not. Gold medals might be too hard, anyways. I’m saving the Half-Life games for when I know I can commit some serious time, because I’d like to go from one to the next to the next without being interrupted by another big game. I should hopefully get in another blog about one of those games in the near future. It seems when I promise blogs on a specific topic, though, I’m using Valve time.

Trackback from your own blog. Add a comment.