Anyway, we need more games like Portal. And by that I mean "short". It's the first game in a long time that I had enough free time to finish. Twice. With director's commentary the second time. The world needs more of that.
It's a different kind of game, where'n you need to use your brains (delicious brrraaaiiinnns...) to beat it. Which in theory is really cool in how it makes you smarterer, and how games should be less focused more on action and more thoughfultudeness, but inpractice kills a lot of the replay value, as puzzles that took 20 or so minutes the first time get solved in one the second (that's one minute. It's confusing because "one" and "second" are both in there, but it's not one second and is only vaguely related to ordinal numbering. It's like if MC Escher wrote a sentence. Speaking of MC Escher, how sweet would it be if he'd designed this game?).
What was I saying? The other problem I had was with the game's overreliance on timing-based puzzles, which just seemed kind of out-of-place and arbitrarily hard. If it was just the first (braaaiiinnnsss) kind of puzzle, I wouldn't mind, and the second (ooootthhheerrr kiiiiinnnddd) are mostly well-designed and keep the game from being too slow-paced but I'm confusing myself. The real problem with the more action-based puzzles (which more or less make up the second half of the game), is the camera. Look, I get it, Valve makes 1st Person Shooters. There were good reasons this game had to be in first person. But platforming in FPSeses can be well handled and has been done before in non-nauseating ways. At the very least I should be able to look down and see my feet.
Other than that no worries. The story's good, though it has some tone problems, trying to be both a black comedy and legitimately scary. The puzzles themselves are mostly well-designed. The cake isn't actually a lie (Spoiler!). The genre-mixing works better than most games that trying it do (in addition to the platformating, puzzleifying, first-personing, and horrortation, there are some cool stealth combat parts and exploration segments, and none feel shoehorned in).
Also, you can download "Still Alive" free for Rock Band, which nets it a bonus point, knocking it up to Seventeen Companion Cubes (out of a total A=XY+B cubed cubes).
*Sometimes I'm a very slow writer.
PS Rock Band 2 Update: I finally imported my Rock Band One song list into "The Duece" (as the cool kids most assuredly don't call it)... right in time for my Drums to break. So I've been brushing up on my singing, and occasionally using the RB1 Drum Kit, and getting a perfect score on "Float On" Bass, Expert (suck it). Also, finally (literally last week) I saw the credits roll (not sure how I did that, though), and then (literally three days ago) I unlocked (but have yet to play) the endless setlist.
By the way, the endless set list is way overrated...ended up doing it without pausing or failing a song...crazy man haha. Also, I'm a huge fan of the blog.
ReplyDeletea) how long did it take? (probably longer then it took me to beat Portal)
ReplyDeleteb)Did you do it by yourself or did you use subs?
c) Did you do it the cheater way (or as most people call it, bass)?