LogFAQs > #950826266

40. Portal 2 (PS3, 2011)
39. Portal (Xbox 360, 2007)




I had played several of Valve's games before Portal including the previously mentioned Counter-Strikes, the Half-Lifes, and Team Fortress 2, but their excursions into the puzzle genre ended up being my favorite.

It wasn't until the Portals that I began to appreciate enviornmental-based puzzle games. I'm sure that I don't need to explain, but Chell, the protagonist, has now powers of her own, and the Portal gun she possesses is extremely basic. One button releases one color (blue/orange), another releases the other color. You can only have one portal of each color out and pressing the same button twice will result in the old portal being replaced by the new one. Going through the orange portal for example will have you exit via the blue portal, and vice-versa.

Despite the basic idea, they had a lot great ideas for the gun with the test chambers. Lasers, turrets, and springboards are just a small amount of all the clever uses the Portal gun can assist you with. While not an open-ended kind of puzzle game, there's more flexibility than you would think given the various obstacles, and they typically give you leeway with precision. Portal 2 actually added quite a few gameplay elements to the fold, maybe the biggest of them being several types of gels that make objects slide fast or bounce high. The learning curve for these were quite easier than one might think.

I sometimes forget that Sam & Max originated as comic books, so my vote the funniest games/characters probably goes to the Portals with GLaDOS, Wheatley, and Cave Johnson as three of the funniest characters in gaming. The passive-agressive GLaDOS, incompetent Wheatley, and cantankerous Cave are phenomenal from the moment you meet them. For a series where the plot isn't really important, creating such rich characters that you want to hear from again and again was probably quite the arduous task, but man, the final product that we get to experience just makes it seem like the writers were coming up with lines so fast and so easily. I know that the voice acting for this was exhausting, but damn did they knock it out of the park. We had a female villain quote contest within the past year or two, and GLaDOS had like 10% of the field. I think Wheatley and Cave Johnson did extremely well in Johnbobb's Best Character from X Year contest, so I know the majority agrees.

While Portal 2 adds a lot more to experience, including a separate co-op campaign, I do slightly prefer the original because it was one of the more perfectly succinct gaming experiences that I've had.

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KCF can't actually be a real person but he is - greengravy
If you smell what the rock is cooking he's cooking crap - ertyu