Chell, hero of the puzzle-packed Portal series, doesn't have a whole lot to say. Like many classic video game protagonists, she's intentionally silent: a personality-free avatar designed for you to inhabit and control however you'd like.
But she can talk, says Portal 2 writer Erik Wolpaw in an excellent interview published today by the Gameological Society. She just won't.
"Having people stand around while you talk is tough in games, so if we can actually remove one whole character's dialogue, that saves us a bunch of time for all the other characters," Wolpaw said. "At no point were we ever thinking that, 'Aw, we need to make Chell talk! This game is lacking in personality!' She probably can talk, though. In our minds, she can talk. She's just pissed off the whole time and is refusing to dignify any of the things going by speaking about them."
I love that explanation. Check out Gameological for the full interview—it's a great read.
I've been writing about comics, games and other assorted nerditry for years. But, this week, I'll be attending my first-ever San Diego Comic-Con. Not only that, this Thursday is my birthday. That means I'm liable to get myself a present or two. Or five.
Many of the publishers, toy companies and other geek purveyors who'll be at Comic-Con International this week will come to the annual nerd prom bearing one-of-a-kind editions of their wares that you can only get at the show. These kinds of things tend to be pricey but here's a few I think are worth the wallet-hurt.
Daredevil Born Again Artists Edition $100 is a lot for a graphic novel. Especially one I already have a copy of. But Daredevil's one of my favorite superheroes and Born Again pretty much amounts to a sacred text for me. I can quote whole pages by heart. (So can Owen Good.) Getting a look at the artistic process employed by master artist David Mazzuchelli as he brought one of Frank Miller's best stories to life is a must-buy for me.
Parker: The Score
Darwyn Cooke's adaptations of Richard Stark's crime thrillers stand as exemplars of how creative works from one medium can actually gain energy when translated to a new medium. The plain ol' edition of this heist story is out this week but the gritty minimalism of this slipcased Con edition sums up everything I love about Cooke's work.
Scott Pilgrim Evil Edition
I think that Scott Pilgrim is damn near perfectly realized in any medium in which it exists. The downloadable video game is a great, humorous homage to side-scrolling beat-em-ups of the past and Edgar Wright's feature film brilliantly uses video game magical realism as a metaphorical layer for what happens when we fall in love and realize things about ourselves. So, I might be dropping a wad of cash in honor of Bryan Lee O'Malley's series of genius graphic novels that started it all.
The Walking Dead #100
Let's think about The Walking Dead for a second, now that Robert Kirkman's zombiepocalypse drama has hit a milestone. It's become a multimedia phenomenon with a hit TV show and two video game iterations being worked on. All of this success comes with no major marketing, driven purely by a passionate fanbase who appreciate the humanity Kirkman pumps into his work. Walking Dead embodies many multifaceted aspects of Con and nerd culture and I'll be grabbing this issue to celebrate that fact.
Adventure Time #1 SDCC 2012 exclusive
The best way to get something truly unique at Con? Get a sketch. Super-smart thinking by Boom! Comics to have a version of Adventure Time #1 ready to be graced with a awesome custom drawing.
This sweet LEGO Portal gun comes courtesy of Ted from the LEGO Store in Minneapolis. In the above video, he gives a quick rundown of his creation in said LEGO Store. Bravo!
I wouldn't have guessed it, but deviantART artist Theresa Cartwright has a whole gallery dedicated to proving the naysayers otherwise.
They don't just include video game characters, either. Everyone from The Last Airbender's Aang to Breaking Bad's Jessie appears in that gallery. Even Jessie's meth head makeup is somehow, slightly, oddly charming in the squarified imagery in there.
The amazing individual known as Kooberz, who brought us the brilliant stop-motion Lego take on Ghost Recon this past spring is—sorry, Ghost Recon—doing something cooler for his next project: stop-motion Lego Portal.
The short film will be released in two or three parts, with the first one scheduled for release later this year. For now, we have some terrific teaser posters...
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Thanks to Kooberz for giving us the heads up and for reminding us that, if you like the idea of Lego Portal, there's still a chance that this fan initiative to get real Portal Lego sets made could still happen—though there seem to have been some pushback from the Lego folks.
Warning: The video above is more than a year old. But I only saw it for the first time last week when Valve's Yasser Malaika and Leslie Reed used it in a presentation about Steam for Schools.
I don't think Kotaku has ever posted this incredible interpretative Portal dance number. What makes me grin at the work done by the Ninja of the Night cosplay troupe is the way they bring the game's mind-bending moments to life on the stage. Everyone remembers the moment when first looked at themselves through one of the game's wormhole openings. The recreation of that revelation gets a big pop from the crowd and deservedly so. Great stuff.
Gaming Heads, the creators of fine Team Fortress 2 statuary, opens the valve on its new Portal 2 line with this gorgeous 16-inch turret replica, ready to fill speaking and non-speaking roles in your home security regime, depending on how much you're willing to invest.
Can you really put a price tag on quality replica home security? Well yes, you can, and that price tag is $300. That money can secure you one of 750 Portal 2 turrets upon their Q4 2012 release, packed lovingly in foam with a certificate that ensures that this is a high quality product and not something you made in shop class.
Just look at this thing. Are you not pleased to the tune of $300?
Perhaps you need to see a more detailed view. Did I mention the motion sensor activated light?
Still not convinced? What's wrong with you? You act as if you don't have $300 to toss about frivolously on video game paraphernalia.
I can understand that, so I won't even tell you about the Gaming Heads exclusive edition, which adds voices from the game to the statue for a mere $30 extra. It's limited to 350 pieces; you probably couldn't have secured one in time anyway.
Let's just get this out of the way: Yes, Quantum Conundrum is a first-person puzzler, just like Portal. Yes, it was designed by Kim Swift, the project lead on Portal. And yes, it shares some of Portal's core traits: there's a physics-altering arm device, a goofy omniscient narrator, and an alarming number of buttons that need to be pushed.
But Quantum Conundrum crawls out from its spiritual predecessor's mighty shadow and stands, triumphant, as a game that's unique, raw, and brilliant in many ways. Finally, Portal has a worthy rival.
Here's Quantum Conundrum in a nutshell: You're a little boy, age 8 or 10 or something unimportant (since your avatar doesn't talk or do much of anything), and you're visiting your eccentric scientist uncle at his eccentric scientist mansion. Just as you get there, the power goes out. Your uncle, Professor Fitz Quadwrangle, says something about being trapped in another dimension. Asks you to rescue him.
So you pick up uncle Quadwrangle's Interdimensional Shift Device, a glove that you can use to manipulate the objects around you by shifting any given room into one of four different physical "dimensions." Your job is to use these dimensions to solve puzzles throughout the mansion and restore the power so you can figure out just where the hell Quadwrangle disappeared to.
The dimensions:
Fluffy: Makes things fluffier (read: lighter).
Heavy: Makes things heavier.
Slow Motion: Slows down motion.
Reverse Gravity: Reverses gravity.
WHY: The puzzles are satisfying, the humor is delightful, and it'll make you feel smart.
Quantum Conundrum
Developer: Airtight Games Platforms: PC (played), Xbox 360, PS3 Released: June 21 (PC), Summer (Xbox 360, PS3)
Type of game: First-person puzzler What I played: Finished the game in one 8-9 hour marathon session. Didn't want to stop.
Two Things I Loved
Every time you die, you will laugh. Hard.
There are a bunch of books sprinkled throughout the game. Their titles are science puns. Like "Great Exponentiations" and "Henry ^8."
Two Things I Hated
When I was trying to move a box and it smacked into a wall and slipped out of my hands for no reason.
The climax is too abrupt. The game just kind of ends.
Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes
"I want to visit the Quantum Conundrum mansion and just hang out for a day or two. Chill with the professor. Maybe do a little dimension shifting. Can we make this happen?" - -Jason Schreier, Kotaku.com
But there's a catch. You can't swap to a dimension until you find its corresponding battery—a color-coded cylinder of magic or science or something—and insert it into the generator that powers each level. Some of the mansion's rooms come complete with one or two batteries and force you to hunt for the rest. Some levels give you all of them. Some give you none.
Like any good puzzler, Quantum Conundrum starts off slowly, easing you into its world with a series of simple tasks like "make this safe lighter so you can pick it up and put it on a button" and "make this safe heavier so it can push down a button." As you progress, the difficulty ramps up, pitting you against tougher challenges like "propel this crate forward, jump on it, use it to fly across a chasm, and drop it on a button."
What's creative about these puzzles is not the objects you manipulate, but the combinations you can pull off with your newfound powers. Say you want to break a window. You can swap to Fluffy, pick up a nearby safe, throw it at the window, and then quickly swap to Heavy so it has enough weight to shatter the glass. Say you want to cross a large pit. You can swap to Fluffy, pick up a box, throw it over the gap, and then quickly swap to Slow Motion so you can hop on board and ride to the other side.
It's this type of reasoning that can help you get through some of Quantum Conundrum, but this is a game that requires equal parts intellect and dexterity. You won't just have to conceptualize solutions; you'll have to execute them. So you might know how to get a certain capsule inside a certain generator, but your fingers have to be nimble enough to pull off the right throw at the right time. You might realize that you have to con that automated laser beam into fashioning you a staircase, but you'll have to swap between dimensions in just the right pattern to pull it off.
This sort of puzzling can sometimes feel more difficult than it should, not because of any particular developer-instituted challenge but because the game's physics are wobbly. Safes and boxes tend to feel over-sensitive when you're lugging and chucking them around. An object can fall out of your hands if you accidentally brush it against a wall. Some boxes bounce a little bit too much.
Incidentally, I took advantage of these bouncy boxes to hack my way through two of the game's more head-scratching levels, both of which took place towards the end of the game and involved robots, lasers, and crates. I don't know how I was supposed to solve them, but I don't think it was by repeatedly reversing gravity and flinging crates across each room until they randomly landed where I needed them. When I'd finished, I felt the urge to e-mail Swift and the rest of her development team at Airtight Games to taunt them. "Just broke your game, losers!"
Then I got stuck on one of the next levels for close to an hour. This was frustrating, but necessary. I needed to be taught a lesson.
But tedious and overwhelmingly difficult stages are an anomaly here—the majority of the game is well-balanced and delightful. Quantum Conundrum is at its best during those moments of sheer puzzle pleasure when you're flipping between dimensions, watching the world change, solving dilemmas, and making yourself feel smart. I wish more of its puzzles had taken advantage of all four dimensions instead of just allowing you access to two or three at a time, because the ones that force you to think in multiple directions are the most satisfying of them all.
The little details are wonderful too. Every time you die, you'll see a snarky, hilarious death message about something you'll never get to see (since you are dead). Ex: "Thing #74 you will never get to experience: watching your favorite childhood TV shows get turned into terrible movies."
Perhaps Quantum Conundrum's greatest quality is this: While playing through the eight or nine hours it took me to finish, I was at times frustrated, annoyed, and even a little infuriated. But I never stopped smiling.
Norman Rockwell, one of America's truly great artists, didn't live to see Valve's Portal released. Dying in 1978, he didn't come close. But let's imagine, just for a moment, that he had.
He just might have come up with something like this. Jesse Rubenfeld's painting, called This Was a Triumph, is based on Rockwell's famous "Rosie the Riveter" work from the Second World War, which at the time appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
This one? It'll have to settle for the cover of Kotaku.
Today, at the Games for Change conference, Valve's Leslie Redd and Yasser Malaika announced that they'll be giving away their hit game Portal 2 for free, via the new Steam for Schools initiative. After signing up for a beta, educators will be able to get the popular sequel, the recently launched Perpetual Testing Initiative level maker and sample levels. Students making levels won't be able to share levels outside of a physical classroom, though. For more info, head over to learnwithportals.com
Chell, hero of the puzzle-packed Portal series, doesn't have a whole lot to say. Like many classic video game protagonists, she's intentionally silent: a personality-free avatar designed for you to inhabit and control however you'd like.
The Walking Dead #100
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