Portal 2

[MrHoatzin]

It blows my mind that metacritic is such an important aspect of the business of video games. Pubs might as well have a voodoo priest on staff to look at chicken innards every quarter for good omens. It just reeks of the pseudo-scientific onanism that business schools have infused into management and which the dogmatic free-market powerful have injected every aspect of life on earth.

[Squid Division]

  Kingzjester said:

Pubs might as well have a voodoo priest on staff to look at chicken innards every quarter for good omens.

I have some applications to fill out.

[a purple future]

ahhhh, Electronic Arts...

[Orv]

  ThunderPeel2001 said:

Don't know about Thompson completing it in 5 and half hours...

You'll notice I have 10 hours of Portal 2 on Steam, but have actually played more like 15/16. Apparently, the Steam timer stops functioning for a lot of people during Portal 2, reporting incorrect times. (For instance, the first night it came out, I played all the way through to the start of the

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Wheatley testing area

and had 2 hours played. I can attest that it was at least 7 hours because the freaking sun had come up again.)

[Squid Division]

Just finished it. Goddamn, that ending. Also, "

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no one tried to murder me, or put me in a potato

" has to be one of the best lines of dialogue ever.

[Korax]

  a purple future said:

where is that by the way? i completely missed it my first time through.

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When you reunite with potato GLaDOS. On the third floor of that office structure, there's a gray door in the back that's partially blocked off by some furniture. It automatically opens when you get right next to it and reveals a hallway with a few more doors, the last one of which leads to the drydock.

Also, potato GLaDOS is referred to as PotatOS by people in the commentary.

[K-bohls!]

So I just finished Portal 2 in

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5.3 hours

possibly due to the problem Orvidos described but whatever.

It is amazing.

I did find it to be fairly easy, to many times the test chamber would give the surfaces you needed and nothing else which led to about 2 minutes of thinking and 3 minutes of doing. I would blow through the puzzles and I wish there were challenge test chambers, but I can image the community will defiantly add hard as hell chamber which will make this game one of my favorites of all time.

I still have yet to start co-op so if anyone wants to start from the beginning and have a pleasant chat while we play that would be rad.

[ThunderPeel2001]

The only times I got really stuck was when I couldn't see where the game wanted me to go. The longest was in

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The Fall

, I think. When you have to catapult you through the

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Aperture logo

. I just could figure out if I had missed a portal-able platform or what.

The co-op mode is great. It's almost an entire single player game... but with someone else there. (Portal 2.5?) Just played through it with PiratePoo, lots of fun. A microphone is essential IMHO, though.

[a purple future]

  ThunderPeel2001 said:

The only times I got really stuck was when I couldn't see where the game wanted me to go. The longest was in

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The Fall

, I think. When you have to catapult you through the

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Aperture logo

. I just could figure out if I had missed a portal-able platform or what.

oh man, that is the ONLY time i ever got stuck. what a stupid place for it to happen too. it just wasn't obvious at all what you were supposed to do there, imo.

[Lu]

I would agree on the microphone thing. Really helps communication. Especially when you have to do timed stuff!

ThunderPeel and I went through all the puzzles reasonably fast, a few that stumped us for a short time and one both of us aren't sure if we actually solved it "correctly", but got stuck on that one for the longest time. It was the one where

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you need to get blue gel on 2 platforms way below, then bounce to the other side to the exit, but the blue gel tube is behind a bunch of emancipation grids.

We seemed to breeze past everything after that.

All in all, that was pretty great! It's really fun to try and solve stuff together and feels really good when you do figure it out. I hope they're gonna make more test chambers and allow you to easily play user created ones.

[Squid Division]

I'm gonna need a coop buddy

[a purple future]

  Squid Division said:

I'm gonna need a coop buddy

me too. unfortunately Comcast is being a piece of shit right now and i'm getting about 1mb downspeed when i should be getting 20mb.

so when it's back up to speed I'll need some friends...

[Orv]

I can't see Farmers Insurance commercials without adding "Cave Johnson here" to the start and "We're done here" to the end now. I look a little crazy doing it, probably.

[Jayel]

Just done playing co-op. What an amazing thing that was.

But I can't imagine myself doing it again (maybe after an amnesia). I imagine it's a very frustrating experience for both players if one knows the solutions and the other doesn't. Probably boring if both know the solutions. Did they mention anything about additional content post-release?

[ThunderPeel2001]

Pro tip: Don't con yourself into thinking you'll just give co-op a "quick go" before bed. You'll still be playing it two and a half hours later.

Edited April 21, 2011 by ThunderPeel2001

[BigJKO]

Fun Fact:

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The corrupted cores (including the hilariously inappropriate Adventure core) and the awesome defected turrets, were voiced by Nolan North. The voice of Uncharted's Drake. Amazing.

EDIT: Even the corrupted cores had insane amounts of dialogue:

[Thompson]

  BigJKO said:

Fun Fact:

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The corrupted cores (including the hilariously inappropriate Adventure core) and the awesome defected turrets, were voiced by Nolan North. The voice of Uncharted's Drake. Amazing.

EDIT: Even the corrupted cores had insane amounts of dialogue:

Best bit of dialogue in the game:

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[n0wak]

I just finished it and, honestly, it was a bit of a let-down and, more than anything, it made me yearn to play the first Portal again rather than replay Portal 2. I found the writing and the characters completely insipid and whiny as fuck. I couldn't stand them. It wasn't even funny.

Christ, all I wanted was a first person puzzle game. I just wanted to solve shit and when the game was giving me that it was fantastic. Some brilliant puzzles that made me feel like a genius when I had that a-ha! moment. Lot of cleverness in some parts of it.

But everything else beyond that, in the lore, was just fucking annoying. It suffers from that regular old strain of sequilitis: the desire to make everything bigger and better than the first. It needs to have these massive environments and set pieces and various settings and characters and dialog. But to me that is counter to everything that made Portal so great, which was its restraint and subtlety. Yes, a lot of that same humour was in the first but it was dialed back and not cranked up to eleven.

And the biggest disappointment? I complete the game and it doesn't give me any challenge rooms to beat. I spent more time trying to master those rooms after I beat the first Portal than I did in the regular "campaign" itself -- and I played through that at least three times. Trying to beat a test chamber with the minimum number of portals or for speed was massively satisfying. But that option's not here in 2. Is that restricted to co-op only? I have not been able to try that at all since, you know, the entirety of PSN is down right now. That's stupid. It gives me little reason to replay the game, especially knowing that if I were to I'd have to listen to their whining all over again.

Edited April 21, 2011 by n0wak

[Lu]

You found no joy in the dialog whatsoever? Hmm. I think you'll like co-op then, though. Minimal dialog and lots of "AHA!" moments.

[dium]

I can't argue with something as subjective as whether or not Portal 2 was funny or well written.

I don't think, however, that the atmosphere of the original Portal could be recreated and be effective. Everything about that game felt so new; it was very conducive to the subtle, mysterious atmosphere that the sterile environment went further to establish. This time around, though, we already know how portals work and we already know where we are and that GLaDOS is bad, etc etc. To me, just more minimalism would've felt stagnant rather than restrained.

If you like the direction they actually did take it in is a different matter, obviously. I love it to bits.

[Squid Division]

My biggest complaint has to be the quality of the

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test chamber (as opposed to set piece)

puzzles. The rest were awesome, but those felt so simple and half-a-Portal-1-puzzle to me.

I honestly didn't expect the game to be as long as it was, and it might have benefited from maybe trimming a small percentage of the set piece navigation.

[Erkki]

WTF. (Spoiler for chapter 6) How did

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GlaDOS get attached to my portal gun? It just happened on the elevator ride to chapter 7: reunion

[n0wak]

  DIUM said:

I can't argue with something as subjective as whether or not Portal 2 was funny or well written.

I don't think, however, that the atmosphere of the original Portal could be recreated and be effective. Everything about that game felt so new; it was very conducive to the subtle, mysterious atmosphere that the sterile environment went further to establish. This time around, though, we already know how portals work and we already know where we are and that GLaDOS is bad, etc etc. To me, just more minimalism would've felt stagnant rather than restrained.

If you like the direction they actually did take it in is a different matter, obviously. I love it to bits.

Oh, I agree with you. I do like the environments, the run-down nature of it, and the few little organic touches here and there (with things growing), but it lost me at chapter 6. That whole area felt so contrived, save for a few minor, minor spots that seemed to have some life to them (lobbies, mostly).

It is a hard balance. I do think that just sticking with just the lab setting would have been equally dull and they addressed that, it's just in some spots they went a little too far with it. But, like I said, the environments I did mostly like, especially when they were puzzle focused; it's just all the lore around it that I found so obnoxious. I could barely just explore any new area without someone going off on a long soliloquy somewhere. And then you die accidentally because the way you need to go isn't clear and you have to hear the whole damn thing again.

And that's the other thing. All these larger areas mostly "find that one portal-compatible surface in the haystack" kind of puzzles that were, ultimately, boring. Yeah, Portal had those too but not as much as this.

And I should be clear that I did enjoy the game, the puzzles and design of it, and the score (apart from the gimmicky stuff.) I just feel that Valve piled on all this extra shit, for the hell of having extra shit, to the detriment of the game's strengths. This is, sadly, prevalent with most video games, so I can't fully blame Valve.

[Erkki]

  Erkki said:

WTF. (Spoiler for chapter 6) How did

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GlaDOS get attached to my portal gun? It just happened on the elevator ride to chapter 7: reunion

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

[Forbin]

  n0wak said:

Oh, I agree with you. I do like the environments, the run-down nature of it, and the few little organic touches here and there (with things growing), but it lost me at chapter 6. That whole area felt so contrived, save for a few minor, minor spots that seemed to have some life to them (lobbies, mostly).

It is a hard balance. I do think that just sticking with just the lab setting would have been equally dull and they addressed that, it's just in some spots they went a little too far with it. But, like I said, the environments I did mostly like, especially when they were puzzle focused; it's just all the lore around it that I found so obnoxious. I could barely just explore any new area without someone going off on a long soliloquy somewhere. And then you die accidentally because the way you need to go isn't clear and you have to hear the whole damn thing again.

And that's the other thing. All these larger areas mostly "find that one portal-compatible surface in the haystack" kind of puzzles that were, ultimately, boring. Yeah, Portal had those too but not as much as this.

And I should be clear that I did enjoy the game, the puzzles and design of it, and the score (apart from the gimmicky stuff.) I just feel that Valve piled on all this extra shit, for the hell of having extra shit, to the detriment of the game's strengths. This is, sadly, prevalent with most video games, so I can't fully blame Valve.

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.

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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)

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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.