Apr 18, 2011

Portal

Excursion Tunnels are the best method for controlled ascent.

I may be the dumbest genius ever. At least, that’s how I feel after playing Portal 2’s fantastic single-player campaign. Many puzzles in the last third of the eight to 10 hours (perhaps less, depending on how clever you are) of its brain-bending puzzle “test chambers” had me convinced at one point or another that they were completely unsolvable, and that some bug or sadist game designer placed the exit just out of reach. I’d let out exasperated sighs as every attempt met with a dead end. I’d grimace in disapproval as I plummeted to my death for the tenth time. I’d consider surrender.

Then, through either sudden revelation, divine inspiration, or total accident, it would come to me: use the orange Propulsion Gel to reach the energy bridge, then catapult across the chasm and shift my blue portal to the inclined surface (in mid-air, mind you) to launch me up to the ledge, grab the refraction cube and redirect the laser beam to wipe out the turrets and activate the switch! It’s so simple, I can’t believe I didn’t see it until now. One half of Portal 2’s brilliance is making me kick myself for not thinking of the impossible; the other is making me feel immensely satisfied with myself when I finally do, again and again.

Note: while we've made every effort to avoid spoilers in this review, you cannot review a game without discussing what it does well and what it doesn't. Be aware that reading any review is going to take some of the surprise out of it.

Test Subject: Dan-01

That achievement is made possible by the wondrous Portal Gun, the game’s sole piece of equipment. Unchanged from the first game (except for some subtle but slick texture work and portals that can be seen through walls, Left 4 Dead-style) the easy-to-use gun reliably casts one orange portal and one blue portal against certain walls, allowing you to magically, instantaneously pass from one to the other, regardless of distance, obstacles, or line of sight, while preserving momentum. It’s the ultimate non-weapon weapon, a sort of physics-based Judo-bazooka that redirects the strengths of energy and objects in motion toward its user’s goals—including the user herself. Wielding it makes me feel more powerful—and smarter—than nearly any other gun in gaming.

The third half of Portal 2’s brilliance is its story. (Yes, third half. If Valve can disregard the laws of physics in its game, I can disregard the laws of math in my review.) Its chambers are cohabitated by hilariously well-written and acted characters that exude personality, despite none of them being technically people. All three major roles rattle off absurd dark humor and petty insults at every turn. Evil robot GLaDOS is in top politely murderous form right from the moment she appears on screen (spoiler alert: she’s still alive!), but Portal’s show-stealing monotone antagonist is challenged for the spotlight by Wheatley, the bumbling, chattering robot who helps you escape.

Fantastically voiced by British actor Stephen Merchant (basically playing the same mind-bogglingly stupid character from the Ricky Gervais comedy Extras), Wheatley’s a doofus AI who makes you turn around while he hacks doors (he can’t do it while you’re watching). Also in the mix is actor JK Simmons, who lends his fittingly cantankerous voice to the founder of Aperture, Cave Johnson, whose comically sociopathic approach to science is second only to GLaDOS’.

Sure, I saw the plot twists coming, but still looked forward to witnessing exactly how the characters would react. Through death, resurrection, revenge, and reversal of fortune, their charm makes what would otherwise be an empty and lifeless world feel boisterous and alive—and more than makes up for the player character being a faceless mute.

It does all this and more while recycling very few of Portal’s greatest comedy hits—there’s nary a nod to dishonest cake, and the beloved Weighted Companion Cube makes only a cameo appearance. And the finale? Not challenging in the least, but a spectacular and extremely clever finish to the story, with extra points for those who’ve paid close attention to Mr. Johnson.

New dimensions

Without changing the nature of the established and celebrated gameplay, Portal 2’s gentle learning curve begins by reintroducing us to its basic concepts, then keeps on introducing new inventions to use with portals until around three quarters of the way through, and chambers become complex jungles of hazardous obstacles. Lasers emitting from walls combine with moveable Refractor Cubes to create the closest thing Portal 2 has to an offensive weapon—an aimable laser—but more often your job is to focus the beam on trigger switches through portals. Infinitely useful Excursion Funnels (levitation beams) and Light Bridges are more than just here-to-there movers—they can be applied to block or push away turrets, halt a catapulting jump before it throws you into oblivion, or help you climb a sheer wall.

I’m a little less wowed by the three flavors of viscous gel, which flow with a hypnotic globular effect from spouts and coat the environment in bouncy, speedy, or portal-receptive ooze. Unlike most of Portal 2’s other devices, these have only a couple of uses at most, and can be difficult to control. It’s a hassle when you’re trying to paint an orange runway up to a blue bouncing patch that launches you through a portal cast on a white patch, only to have an errant blob of blue splash over everything. That’s not to say that it’s not great when your work of physics-defying impressionistic art comes together, of course.

Behind the science

Locations are amazingly varied, as they must be to support this extended-length puzzle-athon without becoming monotonous. Aperture Science has fallen into disrepair in the indeterminate length of time between the greatly exaggerated “death” of its caretaker overlord and now, and many of its once-spotless test chambers are now rusted, grimy, and overgrown with vegetation. Maps shatter in front of our eyes as Aperture collapses on itself, while GLaDOS’ hundreds of robot arms gradually repair and rearrange the chambers piece by piece. All of this scripted activity animates what would otherwise be still and samey-looking rooms due to Portal’s lack of foes other than stationary turrets.

The Aperture facility is far more vast than we could’ve imagined, and the quest to escape leads through its industrial bowels, a cavernous underground sewer-like area, and a long-forgotten retro 1960s version of Aperture, among others. Some areas are so dramatically different that even the basic button triggers and doors have unique looks to them, and everything is impressively modeled and textured, right down to the Easter-egg graffiti hidden throughout. Fine-brush touches extend to the sound, too, such as the wind wooshing in your ears during long drops, or tingly electric chimes that introduce themselves to the background music when you’re speeding on Propulsion Gel. Between puzzles, Portal 2 is full of thrilling showcase moments, such as a mad-dash escape from an angry intelligence that controls the very walls, followed by a surprising take on the boss battle that, without a shot fired, made me feel dangerously out-classed next to my adversary.

Size matters

Right around that time is when the test chambers become increasingly elaborate and intimidatingly huge—to a fault in some cases. These jumbo puzzles are so immense that, even using the handy camera zoom function, spotting the exit can take a few minutes of exploration. Setting out to solve a puzzle when you don’t know what objective you’re working toward is the wrong kind of challenge, and some will find it frustrating. Later levels have multiple contiguous puzzles that can seem like they might never end, and made me miss the pace of the early game where I’d get a refreshing break between challenges.

I always solved them, though. Even though a couple stumped me in a very serious way for up to a half hour, I couldn’t give up until I made it to the other side. If you like a challenge, it’s impossible to put this game aside until you’ve burned through all of it.

Portal 2’s story doesn’t end with the single-player campaign, however. Read on as my co-op buddy Evan takes you through the entirely separate and equally innovative and interesting multiplayer campaign.

Test Subject: Evan-02

Two heads > one

I played the first Portal cooperatively. I always had a backseat driver—a roommate or a girlfriend—hovering over my chair, feeding what-ifs on where to sling my colored ovals. In Portal 2, Valve has officially supported that functionality, allowing you to share the burden of crunching your spatial options with another human brain. With the right sidekick, Portal 2 co-op is some of the most social gaming you’ll have. The occasional headaches that you’d get when you’re stuck alone are alleviated by communication and dimensional horseplay.

You and your partner play as P-body and Atlas, a Pixar-esque Laurel and Hardy droid duo running the testing gauntlet at GLaDOS’s whims in a separate, sillier story. They’re not big talkers, only managing a few expressive squeaks and squeals of triumph and defeat, but their animations are lively and a joy to watch, and they’ve got some amusing celebratory co-op emotes.

Five different testing zones are accessible through a massive hub room, for a total of more than 40 chambers (many of which are multi-part puzzles). Next to the single-player tests these puzzles are doubly complex, but co-op wastes no time babying you with tutorials—it ratchets up the difficulty immediately. Just the second one had us scratching our heads for several minutes trying to wrap our brains around the idea of linking our two sets of portals to achieve even-more-impossible feats that couldn’t be navigated alone.

A handful of puzzles are wonderfully distinct from what you do in single-player: in one, I guided Dan through a contained rat maze of spiked walls that resembled GLaDOS’ grisly version of a Pachinko machine, carefully hopping on and off a pressure pad to reverse the direction of an Excursion Funnel to float him forward, juggling him back and forth to avoid death by giant stompy pile-driver while he cast new portals to change the path of the beam. Several times, Dan created a ceiling-and-floor loop that I’d fall through infinitely, until he re-cast one portal to launch me toward an objective at terminal velocity. Other rooms prompt careful timing: after many minutes pondering one, it finally dawned on Dan that we had to fling ourselves from opposite-facing portals and collide our bots in mid-air in order to safely land on a platform below. Gameplay-driven robot chest-bumps: Portal 2 has them.

On three

For the timing puzzles, there’s an awesomely simple, non-verbal tool for syncing with your partner: holding the F key initiates a three-second countdown timer visible to both players. Two other tools tremendously supplement your (totally necessary) voice communication: marking, which lets you tag any spot or gizmo in the environment with a temporary pointer that’s highlighted on your teammate’s screen, and a seamless picture-in-picture toggle that shows you exactly what your buddy sees in the corner of your screen. Both are effortless to use and completely unimposing to the UI and gameplay, and between the two of them there’s no confusion which acid pool he wants you to help him leap over.

I love the way that trust manifests as a gameplay mechanic, and the instant, painless respawning leaves room for antics: every few stages, I’d grief Dan a little bit by keeping him trapped in a levitation beam, moving a portal to remove the Light Bridge from under his feet, or overwriting his portal with mine at the last moment to steal a launch we’d set up.

These intangibles arise from the complex fun of moving and solving with another person, the most gratifying of which is having a gaming context where you can demonstrate your spark of awareness, creativity, or problem-solving knack. There’s a wonderful reflex when this is about to happen—your eyes widen, a corner of your mouth rises. You’re the only one in the class that knows the answer, and you are about to enlighten your teammate. It almost always starts with, “I have an idea.”

Eureka!

There’s also a fair amount of making fools of yourselves. In one of our prouder moments as a team, Dan and I spent 10 minutes trying to outsmart an Excursion Funnel/Faith Plate combo. We were so busy activating switches and scouting the room for new options that it was some time before I realized that we’d forgotten the most basic part of Portal science: you can walk through the portals, not just send things through them.

From beginning to end, the co-op puzzles are excellent but brief. Dan and I zipped through all 40 in around four hours, which means you’ll be able to finish both the single-player and co-op modes in a long weekend—partly because you won’t want to stop playing. It’s a minor shame that Valve didn’t use co-op as an opportunity for a handful of optional, brutal obstacle courses like Portal’s challenge chambers—some of those take a weekend to work out.

Glad we came

It makes us both a little sad that, having played through once, we can never look at these puzzles—in either single-player or co-op—with those same bewildered eyes again (barring, as Aperture would call it, “a very minor case of serious brain damage”). The included developer commentary, and of course an encore performance from the cast, would be the only things that might make us start playing again after Jonathan Coulton’s new song, “Glad You’re Gone” (which is good, but “Still Alive” is a really tough act to follow) rolls with the credits.

For that reason, our strongest words of caution are to choose your co-op partner carefully. You only really get one shot at these puzzles—don’t waste them with someone who’s already been through, as that would spoil the many surprises and the victory of discovering them for yourself.

We’ll definitely remember all of Portal 2 fondly, though, and as one of the best-written and finely polished gaming experiences in recent memory.

Apr 18, 2011

Portal 2 Is The Better Portal, But You Better Bring A Friend

Portal

You probably won't read much of this review.

If you know what Portal 2 is you probably just want to know if the new game is great like the old one (it is) and if it is long enough to pay full price (depends on how much money you earn each week).

If you don't know what Portal 2 is, you just shouldn't read further. Unlike legions of Portal 1, fans you can actually be stunned by what a Portal game really is. Saying more would ruin things.

But there will be a review below this sentence, because there are things to discuss.

Portal 2 is the sequel to the 2007 surprise critical hit Portal. Before its release, that game was always shown as a first-person puzzle game. You were this person, this lab test subject, who had this gun. It shot two portals that could adhere to most surfaces in the game's world, the labs of Aperture Science. You could walk into one portal and you would exit the other. That was it, though what you could do with it was amazing: imagine, for example, shooting one portal at a wall and another on the ceiling and then walking through the wall in order to fall down the ceiling.

People who played Portal discovered that the game wasn't just what was advertised. It had a story. It had a villain. It had a great song and memorable jokes. It was an excellently written black comedy that sometimes made the player feel guilt.

Portal 2 is the longer storyline sequel to that first game. It offers new puzzling portal challenges, some new abilities and a separate co-op campaign that in and of itself exceeds the length of the first game. It's still a black comedy.

Why You Should Care

It's the sequel to one of the most-praised games of the past decade. Of course it demands attention. This game is a test of whether Portal worked strictly as a gem or whether it can be a series.

What We Liked

The Returning Excellence You are once again a voiceless wielder of a Portal gun, a glorified lab rat who has to use her portal gun and your wits to get through test chambers in the Aperture science labs. Each chamber is a challenge of chasms that must be spanned, switches that must be hit and impossible leaps that must be made not via quick reflexes but through inspired placement of two portals.

You are once again subject to devious puzzles that are as much fun to sort out as they are to solve once you know the solution. You're once again a silent player in a black comedy, this one arguably better-written and better-acted than before. I could tell you the plot, but that would ruin things. Let's just say that if you enjoyed the passive-aggressive torment of Aperture Science super-computer GLaDOS in the previous game, the gaming world's most nefarious computerized puppet-master, then you'll like the goings-on in this one.

The New Abilities The sequel's puzzles are more complicated than the original's, thanks primarily to the addition of new contraptions in the environment, such as tractor beams and some special paint that changes the properties of the surfaces on which it splashes. (That latter idea was great enough that the people who first cooked it up in an indie game called Tag: The Power of Paint, got hired by the makers of Portal, Valve Software, to bring their idea into Portal 2.)

The Better Look Portal games are visually spartan, illustrated mostly in the blacks, whites and grays you'd expect to see in a high-tech science lab. The design of that look had already been strong, so strong that even the little gun turrets in this serious have fan followings.

The new game livens this visual scheme not by changing the palette but by animating the world. Where games such from Super Mario Bros. to Assassin's Creed presented mostly still landscape, the damaged labs of Portal 2 are full of moving pistons, shifting walls, collapsing ceiling panels and more. This sequel takes the idea of "destroyed beauty" from Gears of War — a style that invites the player to imagine the events that wrecked the terrain they're playing through — and intensifies it by animating the restoration of much of its destroyed beauty before your eyes. The result is a marvelous animation of an intriguing world that happens before your eyes. (See the video in this review for a spoiler-free example of this.)

The Excitement For all of the first game's excellence, it was mostly a restrained experience, a thinking person's game that invited a lot of pondering and poking around. The new game is often just like that but mixes in events of extraordinary scale and heart-racing intensity. These sequences that never make the game too hard but do bring it closer to an Uncharted as a game that can offer some of the same thrills as the best sumer action movies. The energetic, mostly-instrumental score helps achieve this effect.

That Whole Co-Op Thing Most of my favorite Portal 2 puzzles are in the game's co-op campaign, a separate chunk of missions that puts players in control of a pair of robots, each capable of generating their own linked pairs of portals. The storyline for this campaign is thin, but it's little bother. The main event in co-op is the series of locked-room puzzles that comprise each of the campaign's five chapters. A co-op chapter will last two new players one to two hours, unless those players are freakishly smart. Progress can be saved after completing each challenge room, but players will probably find it more rewarding to give each other the commitment of gamers embarking on a Left4Dead campaign, soldiering through an arc of co-op until its climactic chapter end.

Just be warned: when a puzzle can involve two people placing four total portals, those puzzles can be very hard. Co-op gives headaches that single-player didn't. I didn't mind. There are few games out there that allow two people to enjoy un-rushed collaborative problem-solving. Credit to Portal 2 for doing that rare sort of multiplayer, which was as fun for me and teaming up with a friend to solve a crossword puzzle.

The Elegant Assistance Portal 2 writer Erik Wolpaw told me prior to the game's release that the new game will teach players its crazy portal maneuvers gradually and would not demand of its gamers crazy ninja twitch skills. For the most part, the game doesn't and even sometimes fixes the orientation of a placed Portal to ensure that small misfires don't lead to large frustrations. You can see the Portal 2 creators' helping hand if you pay attention, but they certainly don't make things obvious, just less tedious and finicky.

The Humor The potato stuff is funny. I also liked the stuff about lemons. But you don't want me spoiling these jokes, do you?

What We Didn't Like

Rapid Exhaustion It will be hard for most Portal 2 gamers to avoid burning through the game. While the main adventure took me more than nine hours and the co-op campaign at least seven, all of it is so fun and transitions so smoothly into interesting sequence after interesting sequence that it will be tough to stop playing. This is not a flaw of the game; it's simply a trait. Portal 2 will pass in a rush. Once it is over it may be hard to go back. This isn't a Mass Effect, in which the story can change the second time through, and it's not even a modern Mario in terms of inviting replayability to unlock new areas. While there are interesting nooks and crannies to discover, some of them teased via smartly-written Achievement goals, there's little chance that playing Portal 2 a second time will feel like a fresh experience. Given that the primary challenge of Portal is solving its puzzles — and that you burn most of the game clock just trying to figure out how to get out of each of these damn rooms — replaying the game will likely being given a crossword puzzle to complete that you already solved last week.

The inclusion of multiplayer in a video game is often a value-extender based on the idea that competitive play can have everlasting appeal. But Portal 2's multiplayer is all co-op and puzzle-based. It's a great experience the first time but one that many players may not derive much pleasure from repeating. If you enjoy games that can be savored in a single weekend, then you have nothing to worry about. But if you need the constant pull of novel experiences, the appeal of Portal 2 will expire quickly.

The Bottom Line

Portal 2 has much in common with last year's BioShock 2. Both games are sequels to beloved originals that transported gamers to extraordinary, unique locales. Both games impressed their customers with unusually sharp writing and won themselves grand affection through late-game twists that confounded gamers' understanding of what they were enjoying. Portal 2 players who know Portal 1 can't be shocked by those things again. They will expect them.

Without the ability to feel like a newly-discovered species, Portal 2 has to get by simply by being the better Portal game. It's not just bigger, it is more clever. It's puzzles are more ingenious and — I must emphasize this again — it earns high marks for presenting puzzles whose solutions are enjoyable to execute even once you've identified the labor needed to complete them. The original Portal may have had a simpler, more pure narrative, but the sequel gets by with more interesting gameplay and the unmissable opportunity to bring a friend into a must-play co-op adventure. Valve hit the right notes here. This is a great game.

Portal 2 was developed and published by Valve Software for the PC, Mac, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, released on April 19. Retails for $59.99. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played through the solo campaign and the co-op campaign, the latter via a mix of online and local split-screen. Hugged my fellow co-op player — robot to robot — a few times, only one of which times was followed by intentionally sending my buddy to his virtual death.

Apr 18, 2011

Did Valve Just Take Everyone For A Ride?

Portal 2

Over the past few weeks, Portal developer Valve and its more devoted fans have been engaged in an alternate reality game, which was believed to have resulted in people getting to play Portal 2 early. Just hours from its conclusion, it hasn't really worked out that way.

Were it just a game, that would fine. Disappointing, but fine. And yet it wasn't just a game, as the lure of playing one major title early had some people spending hours playing (or idling) in games, while others were buying a ton of games they'd otherwise have had little intention to purchase.

So it wasn't really an alternate reality game at all.

For hardcore consumers, the type that will engage in this kind of business, the modern video game landscape is one they rightfully approach with jaded eyes. It's an industry that often seems built to scam and exploit customers each and every step of the way, so gamers have become increasingly wary of the PR machine and its marketing stunts, especially when it comes to big publishers like EA and Activision.

A precious few companies remain outside of this fear and loathing, able to count on large, dedicated and loyal fanbases. Blizzard is one. And Valve is another. People feel that, because of those developer's track records of great games and forthright communication with fans, they can be trusted.

I think Valve blew a little of that trust this week.

For the past week or so, the company has been all but directly announcing that, if people went and played a whole bunch of indie games, Portal 2 would be released early. It seemed a neat stunt given Valve, who also developed Half-Life and Team Fortress, is notorious for releasing titles months and even years behind schedule. And hey, who doesn't like supporting indie games?

So many people bought a bundle of games they most likely did not previously own, all just to indulge in a little Portal 2 cross-promotion, and in the belief that in doing so they'd really get to play one of the biggest games of the year a day or two early.

At time of posting, that doesn't seem to be the case. While calculations vary (and the events of this ARG ebb and flow every hour), it seems the game will be released approximately ten hours early.

After all the clue-hunting, purchasing and playing of games thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of people engaged in, that's all they're going to get. The chance to play something a few hours earlier. In the middle of the night. If like me you didn't play this "game", then it's business as usual! Hell, you'll get the game a few hours early for doing nothing. But if I'd paid money for those indie games, games I only bought as part of the Portal 2 promotion, I'd maybe have expected a little more payoff at the end.

This, I feel, creates a slight problem for Valve. As the company's Steam digital delivery service has grown to be the single-most important shopfront for the PC gaming market, it has faced increasing, if muffled, criticism from both rival stores and outspoken developers. How can it be kosher, critics say, for the PC market's biggest online store to be run by a company that itself makes and sells games?

That hasn't been much of a problem to date because, Left 4 Dead aside, most of Valve's own games have not been released during Steam's period of "dominance" over its competitors. So Valve has been able to remain mostly neutral in its use of the store and its promotional power.

This "game", though, violates that neutrality. A selection of games have sold through the roof this week (Portal 2 was #1 on Steam's charts, followed by the "The Potato Sack", the collection of indie games containing Portal 2 promotions, at #2), and sold purely because people wanted to play a Valve game early. While the indie developers involved are getting a nice bonus, proceeds from each sale are still going to, yes, Valve. To promote a game Valve developed. At the expense of other third-party games.

So people were sold games believing that purchasing them would let them get at Portal 2 early. And for all their trouble got the game...a few hours early. Making matters worse is the fact the console versions of the game, shipping on physical discs, are already finding their ways into people's homes one way or another (I've already got a copy on 360, for example, while my PC version sits at "pre-load"), and those people didn't have to spend an extra cent.

There's also the matter of a disgruntled playerbase, made up of some of Valve's biggest fans, some of whom surely feel almost exploited at having "wasted" either time or money engaged in this game, with now little to nothing to show for it.

While conspiracy theorists could easily call this a stunt aimed squarely at callously squeezing a little extra money out of Portal fanatics, there is, of course, the chance that this is all simply part of the Portal universe. An elaborate, canonical gag. GLaDOS, the malevolent computer and star/villain of the series, spent the first game promising to give you something she/it never gave you. As this ARG has been mostly "run" by Valve staffers posting as GLaDOS, that's certainly a possibility.

Yes, this is far from a heinous crime. Nobody forced people to buy those games, many probably had fun with titles they'd never played and some indie developers got paid. I'm not saying the incident has been some kind of disaster, nor that everyone involved had a wretched time, or is burning their Valve merchandise in the streets.

And hey, there's the chance that, as the night drags on, those persevering with the game will be rewarded for their efforts with something. Art, in-game items, a tease of a future project, something.

Yet I can't help but feel that, through their manipulative actions over the course of the past few weeks, Valve has lost a little of its shine as a can't-fault-them company (beyond the obvious Half-Life delay jokes), and finally given critics of its online store's growing power a tangible hook to hang their complaints on.

UPDATE - As of 12:20am EST, it appears Portal 2 has unlocked on Steam for some users, while some participants in the ARG are receiving the Valve Complete Pack for their troubles.