Oh, to remember back to the early days of October. Summer was over, the leaves were dying, Halloween was rapidly approaching, but, most importantly, The Orange Box was about to be released. I was excited, but not jumping around, call out of work sick and play video-games all day excited. I mean, Half Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal all in one box? Thats enough to get anyone, even mildly interested in the Half Life franchise, a little hyped up.

October 10th came and I started up steam, unlocked my download, and plunged into Team Fortress. It was all good fun, but I would soon grow weary. Maybe I was just burned out or in the mood for something different, but that is beside the point. My attention would soon drift towards Portal, which would then proceed to blow my mind and completely engage me more than any game has done in the past few years. Sure you can put Portal down, saying it was to short, linear, whatever, but the solid gameplay and excellent writing proved more than enough to make it one of my all time favorite games.


First things first, the portals are FUN. Sure, they've been done before, namely in Narbacular Drop (developed by the group of students from DigiPen that created Portal) and Prey, but neither took them to the level that Portal does. Being able to shoot out both ends of your portal, for the most part anywhere you like, creates a very interesting and amusing game mechanic. When I first acquired the ability to shoot my orange portal, I played with it for a good half hour, popping myself out of walls and ceilings, hovering in between to portals as gravity sucked me back in, and thrusting myself into a few infinite loops. What a ride. A disorienting, nauseating, "what the hell just happened?" ride.

With all the fun to be had with the portals, it would be a shame if they were tacked on to an otherwise lackluster game. Lucky for us, the writers of portal are absolute madmen, creating one of the best characters I've ever had the privilege to hear ramble on. Every time GLaDOS spoke, my ears perked up and I gave full attention to my robot leader. Best of all, the stuff is funny. They added a nice tint of dark humor into GLaDOS' lines, and it works wonderfully.

Don't even get me started on weighted companion cube. Never before have I seen such a cult following for an inanimate object in a video game. Granted that most of this love stems from the way GLaDOS describes the cube and the writings you see on the wall (not to mention the polaroid pictures of people with companion cube taped over their faces, after they clearly went insane), but it's just good storytelling, and I hope to see much more of it in the future.

Then we get to the challenges that were included with the game. These really topped off the package for me. Normally I would ignore these in other games, as they don't really appeal to me, but I was very drawn to them in Portal. They come in three varieties: least portals, least time, and least steps. All of them require different thought processes and Valve knew that the portal gun could be heavily exploited to shorten up these levels, sometimes skipping them all together. They really made you bend your mind to come up with some of these solutions. I highly recommend figuring them out yourself if you have yet to do them, it's very gratifying.

Portal really came out of nowhere for me. I didn't know much about it before release, besides the few teasers that Valve had released. It really blew me away, and I just might call it my favorite game of the year; of the last few years even. This game is awesome, if you don't have it, buy it, and just enjoy it.

And who could forget this?
Would play again.