It was less than a year ago that my brother introduced me to Portal. Prior to that time, I knew very little about the game and the series it came from. I knew there were holes, or portals, that you jumped through, and they were orange and blue. I also knew the final song, though knew nothing of its meaning; I’d been sent a music typography video of the song:
The other thing I knew about the game was that it was popular with my gaming students, as evidenced by one of them singing “Still Alive” at our Variety Show three years ago.
In any event, I finally got my first taste of Portal in 2010, which was quite wonderful, and beat it within a few sittings (who didn’t?).
Portal 2 was heavily advertised; the billboards were/are all over in both Berkeley and at the Powell Street BART (I was shocked, as I only thought Tiffany’s and Apple would do such a thing!). After the thrill of Portal not even a year ago, I was super excited for Portal 2.
So far, I haven’t been disappointed! The puzzles were much more challenging, add to that the fact that I get motion sickness in these kinds of games (so the “look in the distance for what you need” made me ill, haha), it made for a fun time. I finally beat single-player mode a few nights ago. It was a good thing, not only because of the ending scene and final credits/song, but because it was the late nights that would leave me braindead the next morning, and this weekend is a school trip to Anaheim (me, 72 students, and 6 chaperones – yay!).
The voice-acting and the music in Portal 2 are both really, really top quality. I really liked the character Wheatley (the first thing you encounter in the game, I swear I won’t spoil anything else); the voice-acting, again, was top-notch. The game is basically the same with a few additions and new types of puzzles. There are lots of videos online of Portal play, but I’m going to throw in the ending song. I, unfortunately, don’t like this typography version as much as “Still Alive” (it’s a lot of variety, and not very uniform), but it was the only video online so far, and I didn’t want to post the actual ending sequence:
Yay!
