The facts so far on Portal 2
BY ANDY ASTRUC
I was in love once.
The year was 2007, the place was my heart. Valve (creators of the crystallised magic of the Half-Life, Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead games) pushed out a little game by the name of Portal. A puzzle game with rare wit and flair, Portal put us into the shoeless feet of an Aperture Science test subject with a gun that shoots wormholes.
Portal won every Game of the Year award ever, was given the Nobel Peace Prize, became Prime Minister of England and had relations with your sister. And now Portal 2 has been officially announced. Aside from my girlish screaming, there hasn't been much noise about the game so far. Here are the vital bits and pieces that are known:
* The game takes place hundreds of years into the future. Aperture Science HQ has fallen into disrepair, with broken test chambers and trees growing through the walls.
* Chell will return as your silent avatar, while GlaDOS (the homicidal computer with delusions of baking) will be the villainous villain.
* The personality cores (the stacks of robot-ball-things you may have glimpsed at the end of Portal) will feature heavily as NPCs, one of whom is responsible for bringing you out of stasis to the super-fun world of SCIENCE.
* There will be a co-op mode, but it will involve two friendly robots and be separate from the main storyline.
* Physics will play a bigger role with portals, allowing you to redirect the airflow from pipes.
* Magic paint. A collection of weird substances will be painted onto bits of various levels. Different colours will have different effects (increased momentum, rubber bounciness) and the portal gun will be able to reroute the paint to new locations.
* Music will be more a part of the game than before, with GlaDOS trying to use jazz at one point to break your spirit. Ridiculous, since I hum the Portal song all the time and there's nothing wrong with me. All the time. Time. I mean I'm still alive. Hum hum. Beep.
Valve has mentioned that they were flabbergasted by the huge success of Portal, considering it was more of a test project than a game. Portal 2 will be much longer and bigger than the original, and will have the full force of the Valve development team behind it.
Portal 2 has been loosely set for a release some time this year, and I'm hoping the ridiculously simple concept (shoot door-holes in walls) and the razor-sharp writing ("Didn't we have some fun, though? Remember when the platform was sliding into the fire pit and I said 'goodbye', and you were like 'no way'? And then I was all 'we pretended we were going to murder you'. That was great.") carries over to the sequel intact.
If you haven't played Portal already then you are dead inside. Fortunately you can fix that by buying The Orange Box on Xbox 360 or PS3 (a ridiculously good deal involving five high-quality games for the price of one terrible game), or buy Portal on its own for PC via Steam or in a real-world shop.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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Ah yes! Portal is indeed available on Xbox Live. And if you're at work, there is also a dippy little Portal Flash game.
You forgot to mention that Portal is also available as an arcade game on xbox.