Portal

This game is awesome; on the short side, but still amazing. It's basically a puzzle game with state of the art graphics and physics. You're a test subject in an "Enrichment Center" and you're using this "Portal Gun" to clear various obstacle courses; for example if you're standing in front of a pit of acid, you can shoot a portal on the wall on your side, then shoot the connecting portal on the wall on the other side, and simply walk through your portal to get to your goal. It gets much more complex as the game progresses; it's a first person game, but really tests your intelligence and reasoning abilities. It also has a simple but excellent plot, and great characters which you may find cute, creepy, funny, or all of the above. Totally original, and exceptionally fun, you have to play it!

I wasn't a person who enjoyed puzzle games much, due to there not being enough innovation in any of them. Then I played Portal and I was truly blown away. Yes, the game's length is something that should be considered, even being completable in one or two sittings, taking only three hours. But its what it does in that time that really seals the deal. The portal gun is an incredibly well-designed and very interesting concept, and you'll be hard-pressed to not muck around it at least once in the campaign. Throughout the game, new concepts such as turrets are added in to make more a challenge. The humour is great, with GLADoS' dialogue being written nice, but the game also knows where to stop itself, a large reason why the game is so hilarious. The game looks pretty good for a 2007 game. It's not bad looking by any stretch of the imagination, and you shouldn't be playing this game for its visuals. To rap things up, Portal is a must-play due to its unique take on the first-person shooter genre, and while you might be scared of its short length, picking it up in the Orange Box is a brilliant idea.

I should note that this game is part of the Orange Box, So I will conclude the whole thing here.

Let's start off with the Half life 2 thing. I didn't play the Half life before But I can say after playing this, I wish to Buy it! The Game offer's Unique character's and fantastic models that will make even the most well played gamer say ' what the ****!' the maps are extensive and are hard and satisfying to explore and conquer. But the enemy's are the only thing I have to say went a bit wrong. There good to battle and it's great to fight, But I see a repetition of enemies that make you tired of playing Half life 2 for a bit. But the Orange box solves that problem for a bit.

Let's look at Portal. Yes portal, You probably heard ( or about to) that the game is probably a revolution in puzzle games since Russians invented Tetris...they are right. The game is probably one of the best games I had ever played. Very different then Half life franchise, with only two characters, making this game very comfortable to new people who are uneasy to playing puzzle games. With GlADIS, the only speaking role in the game, is played wonderfully and you will antipate when she will speak next. But what about the game play? It's AMAZING! something I never seen is you can actually travel great distances without even using anything but a Portal gun. You have to understand that trying to even do this with the graphic's it shows is almost next to impossible for the playstation 2 or even playstation 3! The only thing bad I can say about this game is...well nothing! The game show's that you can still play a good game without bloodshed or going around a place rounding thing's up to make a star.

Not much to say about Team fortress 2. But I really wish I had Xbox live while playing this. The game is mainly online based so I can't say much.

Developer commentary's are in all the games and are easy to read. Buy this Game right NOW! 10 out of 10! Go out to your nearest best buy and buy this game! You will never be sorry!....Oh ****, I got to buy it!

Portal is my favorite puzzle game of all time. Utilizing superior physics that revolutionized gaming, it was both challenging and entertaining.

The central conceit revolves around a special gun that can create portals in walls, allowing the player to immediately travel from one window to another. The game is a series of puzzles the player must solve to reach a reward at the end. Besides being challenging, the game includes some very humorous elements.

Some have complained about the brevity of the gameplay, but this game was originally part of a 5-game compilation called The Orange Box, and Portal was deemed by many to be a minor inclusion in a collection that included the highly anticipated Half-Life 2. Portal was a surprising success.

However brief the gameplay might be, it is of high quality. And I have to say the ending (song) is my favorite of all time.

I had vaguely heard of Portal over the years; I knew the saying "the cake is a lie", had seen gamers on the internet doing things in real life to resemble the portals in the game and knew that it was part of a pack of smaller games (or something). The sequel coming out recently to universal praise made me decide to download the original off the Xbox Live Arcade and I was quite pleased with what I found. Having been a massive fan of recent game Limbo, I enjoyed seeing that Portal was somewhat of an inspiration for it since the concept of the game is that in each area you are presented with the situation as it is, the tools you have at your disposal and it should be simple logic to get through the room and out the other side.

In principle it is a great game although it does show its age with the loading times and the basic graphics. I enjoyed the game play and I enjoyed applying logic to come up with my ideas and then executing them. The puzzles are all well designed but they are perhaps a bit too easy to get through – it is only some of the later rooms that gave me pause for thought while mostly I was able to move through room after room with relative ease and at times it was a little disappointing to identify the solutions within a few seconds of entering the area. Although quite easy to solve, the puzzles are well designed and do require skill and timing to pull it off – getting the solution is the first bit, pulling it off is the next! The challenge rooms put into the Arcade version are welcome (the story mode took me just under two hours) and these do provide a bit more of a challenge – but the game is still surprisingly short even with these and, as I found it a bit easy, I will say I didn't have any of the "oh that's evil" moments that I had with Limbo, where 20 minutes of staring at the screen found me rewarded with a brainwave of the solution. The only time the game suddenly got hard was in those last few "advanced" maps – and this was a frustrating "hard" where everything had to be timed perfectly, in terms of "puzzles" they were still pretty obvious, just doing them was harder.

The humour of it all helps immensely and even my girlfriend (who simply doesn't see any point to gaming) appreciated this aspect of it. The song over the end credits is the perfect example but throughout we have some great lines from the computer behind the tests and I really got a kick out of some of the things she said. When you find yourself loving the turrets that are trying to kill you, you know that the game has done something right in terms of making characters! Visually the game is solid and effective even if the last few years have dated it quite quickly. The simple controls are easy to pick up and master so that mostly it comes down to how logical the player is in regards whether they can spot what to do. I think once in the story mode I was tempted to look the solution up but I resisted and I advise others to do the same at all costs because the whole point of the game is the puzzles, looking them up leaves nothing so why do it? I'll happily spend however long trying to work out the puzzle because this thought process is as much playing the game as using the controller is.

Portal is a bit too easy to be the classic and short that everyone claims it as when approached as a standalone game but it is no doubt a great game that has been influential. The puzzles are logical and quite rewarding on the whole even if some of them are annoyingly obvious (eg a room with a floor far below you and a wall above you is clearly a "momentum" solution waiting for you to do it). The humour to the game makes it that little bit more special and I did appreciate it for making me chuckle frequently as I played. I may have been years behind in terms of playing this game, but one thing is for certain – I will be picking up Portal 2 very soon.