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Cigol, I think you underestimate the gameplay. The technology behind what they've done is immense. Modelling the portal interactions... most designers wouldn't even be able to get their head around what was needed, let alone start programming it. It is a huge stage forward in simulation. Then they took that and made a perfectly balanced puzzle game from it. Sure it's light and short (like a fairy cake perhaps) but we shouldn't hold that against it. To do so would be to go along with the propaganda that demands "heavyweight" games.

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But I think what he's arguing is that the presentation is what's more wowing than the gameplay itself, which is true, but I don't see why that should disqualify it from GotY. I mean, every adventure game would be shit by that reasoning, Half-Life 2 and the episodes would be worthless because they're mostly just more of the same, etc.

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The technology behind what they've done is immense. Modelling the portal interactions... most designers wouldn't even be able to get their head around what was needed, let alone start programming it. It is a huge stage forward in simulation.

I wouldn't go that far. It was a bunch of college kids that programmed it, remember. And in their version you could set portals through other portals.

Also: Prey.

And Prey is a good example because, really, presentation is the key thing again.

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Did anyone see this? Seems like a fun way of breaking your regular Half-Life 2 installation, if you're dying for more Portal stuff to try.

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Yeah, Prey had portals, but they were pre-set things. Really, the portals in Prey were more doors that you could sometime see yourself walking through via the door.

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not all portals in Prey were static

a friend made a portal gun for UT2004, it wasn't very well polished, and it lacked proper portal rendering (it was just render to texture, not dynamic portal rendering available through unrealscript in UT2004), but the portal functionality was quite versatile. You could put a portal on a vehicle and drive around and teleport everybody you "hit".

crappy movie of that ut2004 mod in an early stage. Quite some flaws and things that didn't work well. Then again, this was slapped together in a couple of hours.

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Yeah sort of. That's because mostly dynamic portals couldn't be created without a modified UT2004. I did create a modified one that did allow us to create portals on the fly. It was a quick hack, but worked rather well. But it's rather useless (and lost because my laptop disk crashed) because I'm not allowed to distribute modified binaries.

Portal will teleport you when you cross the border. It's just a rendering trick that makes it look like you are in two places at once.

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No, but cow-vomit green with a touch of gold is :yep:

Cows don't vomit, they regurgitate (off topic, I know). :getmecoat

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Cows don't vomit, they regurgitate (off topic, I know). :getmecoat

that's not the same thing... they can still vomit

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Something awful just had a photoshop phriday on portal. It had one very clever entry with gameplay potential: A very large cannon sticking out of a portal on the side of a van.

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Actually, the hamster wheel bit I liked because it was so weird and un-gamelike. At least it was more challenging to wrap your head around (why would they do that?!) and thus entertaining than the boring platform bits.

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Hahah that was a good one. The expected Republican rants have errupted in the comments thread though :P

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That game was full of fail imo. I bought it, got past like the 3rd mission and was like "Wow, what a bore this is" and uninstalled it.

Not as funny as the others me thinks. Only a couple of good points.

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haha, awesome and the comments are hilarious. So revealing when someone argues that the review shouldn't have a political message because the game doesn't have a political message, it's just a game about WWII... when it seems clear that the whole point of the political digression was that the game (and everything else glorifying American involvement in WWII) is making a (disgusting) political statement. :tup:

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OK, pass me the humble crow-hat pie; this was definitely top form from Yahtzee. :clap:

Maybe it was just the growing pains initially, or a lack of titles really deserving of being ripped into, that made the earlier episodes a bit erratic in quality and pace.

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I think it's more the natural oscillation in quality that every artist has. Now you're a genius, then you can't write or draw for shit =)

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