{"id":698,"date":"2011-04-19T10:11:36","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T18:11:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/?p=698"},"modified":"2012-06-11T22:05:37","modified_gmt":"2012-06-12T06:05:37","slug":"bullet-points-portal-2-spoiler-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/screencuisine\/video-games\/bullet-points-portal-2-spoiler-free\/","title":{"rendered":"Bullet Points: Portal 2, Part 1 (Spoiler-Free)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/portal2-2011-04-18-21-38-45-30.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-699\" title=\"portal2 2011-04-18 21-38-45-30\" src=\"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/portal2-2011-04-18-21-38-45-30.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"229\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/portal2-2011-04-18-21-38-45-30.jpg 600w, http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/portal2-2011-04-18-21-38-45-30-300x114.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There will be no spoilers below, I&#8217;m just going to be talking in very general terms about the game (which I haven&#8217;t even finished). There&#8217;s too much fun stuff to discover on your own, which is why I avoided as much of the pre-release media blitz as I could. (And I feel like I&#8217;ve probably had too many spoilers in the Crysis 2 stuff I&#8217;ve been posting). I&#8217;m not even going to post screenshots. About the only thing I mention specifically below is about an actor who does some voice-work in the game.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway. Portal 2! It&#8217;s finally here, and out a few hours early to boot. It unlocked for me around 10pm last night, and after about ten minutes of waiting for the files to decrypt, I was able to start playing. I played about two hours last night, and followed it up with a little more this morning (I called in late). I haven&#8217;t tried multiplayer yet; I want to finish the single-player stuff first.<\/p>\n<p>How is it? It&#8217;s great and you should buy it and play it. Some general deets and thoughts below. If you leave a comment, please keep them spoiler-free as well.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What do we want from a sequel to one of our favorite games ever? More of the same stuff that made the original so great, plus a whole bunch of new stuff to make it feel like a whole new game. So far, Portal 2 seems to have accomplished this.<\/li>\n<li>Looks great, runs great, and is funny almost immediately. It&#8217;s good to be back at Aperture. Screw HL2: Episode 3. I&#8217;d like a new Portal game every couple years.<\/li>\n<li>Loading screens. A lot of them. I miss the way Valve used to load levels, sort of in the background or while in an elevator, without loading screens. I assume there&#8217;s some technical reasons they can&#8217;t accomplish this anymore. The loading doesn&#8217;t take more than a few seconds on my machine, but it&#8217;s still noticeable. Not really a complaint, just an observation.<\/li>\n<li>I have to admit, I&#8217;m a little impatient with the early test chamber stuff. The puzzles are fine, and fun, and satisfying enough due to some new puzzle elements, but what I really want is more story. Luckily, there is plenty more story.<\/li>\n<li>Stephen Merchant voices a character. He does a great job, very funny and charming. I&#8217;ve been a fan of his from the old radio show he did with Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington (their XFM show, pre-podcast, <del>which you can listen to here<a href=\"http:\/\/www.karlsroundhead.com\/xfmyears.htm\"><\/a><\/del> apparently, the link I posted earlier is no good). I actually prefer him to GLaDOS, simply because we already know GLaDOS from the first game.<\/li>\n<li>In fact, if Stephen Merchant could please come over and narrate for me while I play other games, I&#8217;d appreciate it. He&#8217;d be great in Crysis 2. &#8220;Oh, bugger! Look out! Aliens! Ooh, they seem <em>livid<\/em>.&#8221; Or if he could just come and talk to me while I do laundry, or pay bills, or whatever else, that would be great.<\/li>\n<li>Portal was a very short game, which was fine, but I had hoped Portal 2 would be longer and it certainly appears to be.<\/li>\n<li>There are more on-screen prompts than are probably necessary, but I&#8217;ll take all the help I can get.<\/li>\n<li>Some elements of this game remind me strongly of elements from a non-Valve game, but I don&#8217;t want to say which. In fact, this is kind of silly to keep going on when I don&#8217;t really want to say anything about anything.<\/li>\n<li>So, I&#8217;m going to stop.<\/li>\n<li>I want to go home now and play more. It&#8217;s a lot of fun.<\/li>\n<li>Also: In the game&#8217;s &#8220;Extras&#8221; section, there&#8217;s a little &#8220;interactive&#8221; &#8220;game&#8221; &#8220;preview&#8221; thing for the movie <em>Super 8<\/em>.  It&#8217;s worth a look, I guess? It doesn&#8217;t take long, and I don&#8217;t recall  ever seeing a promotional tie-in like this in a game before. It&#8217;s a little lame, honestly, but different.<\/li>\n<li>Also also: there&#8217;s a store where you can buy skins and hats and gestures for your Portal 2 multiplayer robot. I don&#8217;t know what my opinion of this is, but if people want to spend more to buy stuff for their robot, Valve is certainly ready to take their money. I wonder if all this in-game merchandise is being put into place for some new game further down the road.<\/li>\n<li>If HL2: Ep3 ever does ever come out, I wonder if I&#8217;ll be able to buy Gordon Freeman a hat.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There will be no spoilers below, I&#8217;m just going to be talking in very general terms about the game (which I haven&#8217;t even finished). There&#8217;s too much fun stuff to discover on your own, which is why I avoided as much of the pre-release media blitz as I could. (And I feel like I&#8217;ve probably [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[616,627],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.screencuisine.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}