Portal 2 is fantastic (games)
It was a bit longer than Portal 1, way more ambitious, and while I felt like it was a bit easier (especially since there were no fiddly timing-sensitive puzzles, which made it quite enjoyable on the PS3 unlike the original) it was a much better game in general. (And the original was pretty great!)
I personally think that the new ending song is a lot better, but it's also not the sort of thing that will become memetic. Which is a good thing. I really don't want to get sick of it. I'm also glad that there aren't any eminently-quotable one-liners that people will be able to do to death; there are definitely some great moments in it but they're not quotable and sound-bites. Hopefully after people play the game they'll also forget about the deadpan "You monster" schtick, since I'd already been tired of that before the game even shipped.
On the minus side, since PSN is still down I can't activate my PC copy, so I can't extract the soundtrack (or sync my Steam achievements). And it's a great soundtrack! Lots of wonderful glitchy ambient stuff, which I am always in favor of.
Yesterday I also played a bit of split-screen two-player with Findra, and that was also a hell of a lot of fun. I can't wait to be able to actually play online. There's some amazing puzzles in it.
I'm also really glad that Valve did the PS3 port themselves this time, instead of trusting EA with it and then complaining about how bad the PS3 is when EA did a terrible job. Portal 2 is clearly using the latest and greatest version of the Source engine (with dynamic lighting and everything! holy cow are the graphics amazing) so here's hoping that they're going to port the Left4Dead series at some point as well.
I also hope that they eventually release a PS3 Move patch (as they've hinted at the possibility of in the past), and despite what they say I think it would actually work out quite well in 3D, although the game seems like it's pushing the poor little RSX to its limit as it is so that might not be in the cards.
Comments
Really, Portal 2 is all around better than the original, though I did have some minor complaints about fiddly things which were handled differently in the physics engine. Namely, held objects felt much more solid in the original, whereas now they don't really interact with anything else until you drop them. My first memory of Portal 1 was picking up the clipboard in the very first level, and pressing it to the glass so I could get a better look at it. I tried it again in Portal 2, and it just gets lowered away from the wall.
Still.
"Space, gotta see it all... hnnh, hnnh, hnnh! Space!"
Speaking of which, I am a bit disappointed that "challenge mode" didn't return. It felt like the puzzles were all optimized to have One and Only One solution, unlike the original where there was a lot of opportunity for exploration and experimentation. This was also a conscious decision made by Valve during playtesting, which is a bit unfortunate.
Right now the closest I've seen to memetic propagation is the lemon speech but it's not being quoted, just mentioned. Because that really is a hilarious moment, but it's not quotable. Like most of the game. I guess that's what happens when you flesh out your characters instead of treating them like bags of one-liners. (Except Chell, who is of course still a bag of no-liners. Only they manage to make her hilarious too, during the movement training at the very beginning. I suspect that if anything does go memetic it'll be, "Okay, that's not speaking so much as jumping." But that gets so quickly forgotten what with the rest of the game.)
The in-game explanation of the lack of portal surfaces kind of flies in the face of why Portal 1 had so much portal-ability, though, especially since in Portal 1 GLaDOS clearly wasn't reconfiguring the test chambers on-the-fly. How did she gain so many abilities while she was shut down for so long, anyway?
Oh, I do really love how the fiddly background details in the second act change significantly as you go through, showing that you're actually going through several decades' worth of evolution. Portal 2 was originally intended to be a prequel, and in a lot of ways it ended up being one.
Also, on Friday, one of my coworkers started playing Portal 1 since he hadn't played it yet and everyone else in the office was playing Portal 2. It was fascinating just how primitive Portal 1 looks now. But I guess it came out four years ago, so.
That's a good way to put it. I was a little sad that there wasn't more to the developer commentary on this one- the commentary about managing the player learning curve in the first game was really interesting.
1. It seems to be canon (to me, at least) that Caroline is/is part of GLaDOS.
2. There have been theories on the Valve Forums of Chell being Caroline and Cave's daughter, but that seems a bit too far-fetched to me.
3. I think GLaDOS was lying when she claimed to have deleted Caroline. Why else would she have arranged the turret orchestra? Though it is possible that the orchestra was arranged by another party- perhaps the Fat Turret?
4. It has been pointed out that when Chell defeated Wheatley, the hole in the ceiling showed them to be at surface level; however, Chell later rode the elevatar numerous floors to the top. A possible answer is that GLaDOS and the Co-op bots may have moved her to a different part of the complex; but why? A connected point is that the first game showed a parking lot and forest on the surface level, whereas this one had a wheat field; how did the surface change this much in 100 years?
Well, duh.
Yeah that just seems ridiculous.
I think that's just more a result of how the turrets have some level of self-awareness on their own. And clearly most of them are smarter than Wheatley, what with succumbing to the paradox when he didn't.
It's hard to say what's canon and what's just a result of the fact that the original Portal was an experiment in gameplay and storytelling. And why wouldn't GLaDOS move her to a different chamber for recovery? Clearly she feels SOME sort of debt to Chell, and wanted to nurse her back to health properly. Obviously a lot of time passed between the Wheatley battle and her eviction, too.
Also, it's just a game.
Aperture Science's Enrichment Centre is housed in a giant salt mine somewhere under upper Michigan, where you can indeed go from forest to farmland pretty quickly. Not that surprising they have an emergency exit somewhere away from their 'offices'.