toblix

Portal 2

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Ok, so apparently I skipped a part, I did this (someone made a video of the same thing):

Woah. How did they miss this? That's a pretty big oversight.

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I pretty much disagree, other than the find the one portal spot aspect. And most of the time I enjoyed that or at least didn't care.

I liked the way they portrayed the environment as it was run down over time. The loading images and office space, and the areas that appeared to be condemned by humans and not machines.

The co-op has more of the Portal 1 style puzzles, as the conceit is that the players actually want to participate in the testing it doesn't feel weird.

(ending spoiler)

My only complaint about the single player is the first few seconds of the end movie. It really didn't feel connected to the rest of the game, and the turrets were kind of annoying.

I really thought the turret choir was cute, plus I was amused by the callback to the Animal King Scenario that's described by some video screens earlier in the game. Oh and you also can see the turret choir practicing in a secret room at some point in the game, though I didn't find it myself.

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Just finished single player in about 6-7 hours (according to steam). Really enjoyed it. Mechanically it's brilliant, the world design is great and some of the humour is up my alley. I adore the utter absurdity of the facility etc.

I did really really hate Wheatley throughout though. Why do people find Stephen Merchent funny? Is it the Bristol accent? His shit is the laziest humour imaginable, and he does it relentlessly. Luckily he's at his most annoying at the beginning and is only around for the minority of the game.

The ending was nice and silly. I don't think they should make Portal 3, it would be pushing it a bit.

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I didn't find Merchant to be laugh-out-loud funny (unlike GLaDOS, who was), but you can't tell me he wasn't perfect for the role.

although i'll admit that Merchant is at his best as a sidekick (the Gervais/Merchant/Pilkington podcast especially).

dunno :)

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See, as I don't live in the UK, I don't get exposed to such things (it did, in fact, sour me on Merchant just a little). Also seeing as I love most of the accents that come out of GB/England (Fucking Cockney) I quite enjoy his work.

I may be slightly daft.

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His shit is the laziest humour imaginable, and he does it relentlessly.

Unsure if you mean the humor he writes or how he performs. Neither seem to make sense, since he didn't write his lines for Portal and you can't claim that he's anything but a (perhaps annoying) ball of energy throughout.

I'm always at a loss as to why people DON'T find Merchant funny, and the only reason I can come up with that isn't somehow contradictory is overexposure... which, to be honest, IS a good reason.

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Perhaps his good-natured high-energy buffoonery strikes too close to home?

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I just finished the single-player and I like it quite a lot, but I'm surprised of how different it feels from Portal 1 : it's a much more story driven and story centric experience than the original which, from memory, was mainly driven by gameplay and puzzles... gladOS and the aperture universe just there to 'color' the experience.

Portal 2 campaign feels a lot like the Half-Life Episodes, with gameplay sometimes taking the backseat for quite a while to leave room for lengthy set pieces, exposures to background stories or characters interaction. Those are expertly crafted (the writing and voice acting are brilliant, and the environment animation are stellar - still doesn't kick ID's though), but I'm a bit disappointed that it didn't investigate yet another type of narration.

I don't know why, but it feels like the game is trying too hard to build a canon, complete, full and coherent universe; when, well, maybe part of the charm of the first one was that it wasn't trying to be encyclopedic about everything. I'm ambivalent about this, because Cave Johnson and 60s aperture science are really nice findings.

Maybe may main gripe is that, like Bioshock and a few other recent games, it suffers from the its background story being just way more interesting that's what actually happening during the game :

wheatley turning evil was very cheap and not completely justified since he could have broken the facility by simply being 'kindly' incompetent and couldn't help the player through puzzles because of the censorship routine. Same for GladOS deleting Catherine.. Also, I don't understand why the end is pre-rended, it would be so much better to have at least mouse of control as you go up and out

. Finally, somehow, I feel like there were a bazillion loading screens; most of which preloading could have get ridden of.

Still, it's a very well rounded game very clever in its puzzles and design : the new ingredients are really nice and the associated puzzles are great - with about the perfect ramp-up of difficulty and complexity. And the sound design is about the most interesting one I've experienced in a loooooonnng time.

I wanted to end on a positive note because it is a very good game on its own... but I can't shake the sad after-feeling that Portal just went from being this little quirky thing that was done with ingenuity to this institution whose weight makes it less graceful.

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Just finished. Steam says 6 hours but I think it was probably closer to 8. Anyway, not too long, I could have played a couple of more hours, but some areas did have me stumped for a long time: some of them jumps where you have to launch yourself from smaller jumps and shoot a new portal mid-air were somewhat finicky.

I really enjoyed the puzzles and stuff, but I have to partially agree with n0wak -- it just wasn't funny most of the time.

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I really thought the turret choir was cute, plus I was amused by the callback to the Animal King Scenario that's described by some video screens earlier in the game. Oh and you also can see the turret choir practicing in a secret room at some point in the game, though I didn't find it myself.

I thought

the turret choir was fantastic. The king turret being the bass had me cackling madly. Dunno, I have weird taste.

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I have to say, some of this "negative" feedback seems like a reaction to the overwhelming praise the game already had. I think if I'd gone in expecting the moon, I would have focussed on where it failed to deliver. As it turned out, I was expecting to be disappointed, preparing myself for more of the "twitch"-based puzzles from the first game (which I hated).

As it turned out to be something so much better and more enjoyable than I was expecting, I couldn't help but focus on its good bits.

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Unsure if you mean the humor he writes or how he performs. Neither seem to make sense, since he didn't write his lines for Portal and you can't claim that he's anything but a (perhaps annoying) ball of energy throughout.

Well presumably he ad libed it all with a barebones script, since it's identical to his bank advert voiceovers. The best way I can think to describe it is that he just feigns indifference and understates everything that's going on - and that's the joke, constantly, until he stops talking.

Relentless wall to wall dialog just isn't my thing at all and came as quite a shock in this case, creating the atmosphere of a bad animated kids film at times.

Anyway I hate complaining any more about this because I thought it was brilliant in every other respect.

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Well presumably he ad libed it all with a barebones script, since it's identical to his bank advert drivel.

It's for reasons like this that I'm glad I don't watch TV -- I am getting a little tired of his shtick, but it worked for the game.

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I have to say, some of this "negative" feedback seems like a reaction to the overwhelming praise the game already had.

In my case it's just not compatible with my sense of humour. But I did like everything else besides the writing, and even the writing was ok about half of the time. It's just there were a lot of times when the game was trying too hard to be funny. I've still to try the coop and I wish there were some challenge rooms, but I'll probably not play through it again for dev commentary.

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i'm about halfway through the commentary. Am i just missing them or are the commentary nodes very. very. sparse?

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i'm about halfway through the commentary. Am i just missing them or are the commentary nodes very. very. sparse?

I don't know, but they were so scripted that I couldn't listen to them for very long. Do they get any better than the early ones?

(Also: You should see a number to reveal how many are in an area, right? 1/4, 2/4, etc. Does that help ensure you're seeing them all?)

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Just finished. Steam says 6 hours but I think it was probably closer to 8.

Whoa. I haven't launched the game again, but the Steam stats now jumped to 10 hours! So it's definitely lying occasionally. I believe I may have actually spent close to 10 hours, 6 is too little as I had a 4-5 h session, a 1+h and a 2+h session.

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It's valve using steam to alter playtimes to make it look like the game is actually longer than it is.

...is what I'm sure they'll say/are saying

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It's valve using steam to alter playtimes to make it look like the game is actually longer than it is.

...is what I'm sure they'll say/are saying

I also hear Valve uses steam to implant hypnotic suggestions into our brains, to steal our games.

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GotY.cx for me. I loved every bit of this game.

The environment was so amazing, every part of the game felt really different. They made all the parts really unique and it worked!

The dialogue was the best I've seen in awhile in games, I loved the expanding of the Aperture Science backstory.

JK Simmons was more than perfect in delivering his lines, as Thompson said, this was also my favourite bit.

Best bit of dialogue in the game:

Stephen Merchant was great, it's really insane how much dialogue he and all the other voice actors had in the game, there's no way that I got to experience all in my first playthrough.

I was laughing my ass of all the way from the beginning to the very end, such a thrill ride. I really happy that I had tuesday to thursday off so I could really dedicate some time for this game and I did finish it off on thursday. There's also quite a bit of easter eggs and achievements that I did not get... so there is still things to experience in the game when I play it again.

My gametime clocked to Steam was 8 hours, but I'm pretty sure the actual time is closer to 10 hours.

Co-op I have not played and lets see if I ever will.

Did anyone else see one of the co-op robots running on a platform in one of the last Wheatley puzzles where he was "creating an exit that was not existing at first. I think it was at that time when he started talking about that he found some surprise for Chell and GlaDOS.

The loading screens were a bit weird, that's my only negative comment about the game. I can bet $60 of hobomoney that was because of the console versions.

Alright, we're done here.

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Sweet game. Obviously not as great as I had hoped, but still terrific. Quick review:

:tup:The Source engine has really come a long way, and Valve has to have some of the best design people in the business. It's obvious that the engine has aged if you compare it to recent, newly developed games like Crysis 2, but the stuff they've added (lighting, shaders, HDR, deformation) combined with their amazing design work still makes it highly competitive.

:tup:The deformation stuff is amazing – I'm surprised I haven't heard more people gushing about this aspect of Portal 2. Ever since they hired that Weta guy and the railway bridge collapsed in Episode 2, I've been excited to see what they would do with the tech for their next game. Apparently they just went crazy with shit colliding, bending, breaking, stretching, tearing and bursting. Whenever I noticed something was about to move, I just kept waving the camera around, trying to catch every detail.

:tup:Also, all the arms moving all over the place, trying to position their little plates in the right way.

:tmeh:The 60s/70s thing with the huge, empty dome was depressing and not that fun.

:tdown:I was hoping for a ton of Half-Life references, but there were/I only found very few! Realistically, though, this is probably a
:tup:

:tmeh:Reading the developer interviews way back they were clear about not trying to more of the same. For example, I only saw one cake reference in Portal 2. I was a bit disappointed that they went with a song in this one as well. It's obviously subjective and nitpicky, but with the level of popularity and attention Still Alive has gotten, you can't prevent people from comparing this new song to the last one, and, since it's a sequel, it'll come out badly. They probably should've gone with something completely different.

:tup:

They did a developer's commentary! I was afraid they were going to skip it, but it's there, and I'm going to play through it later. Anyone know if I can get my missing achievements with them on? I'm guessing not...

:tup::tmeh::tdown::fart::violin::buyme:

This isn't Half-Life/Episode 3.

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as far as i've been able to tell, you can't get achievements in commentary mode. even worse than that, there's no saving so you have to do entire chapters at a time and if you die you have to go back to the beginning of a level (not chapter) instead of a checkpoint. also there's not that many commentary nodes and even then half of them aren't very interesting.

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