I've not been doing much recently other than playing
Portal 2.
It's been a long time since I've not slept in order to play a game.
If you weren't aware - the marketing campaign featured an
indie game pack being released on Steam about 2 weeks ago. The pack had 13 games, all slightly edited to feature various Portally things; small puzzles, content from the other games, and lots and lots of potatoes. It all culminated in everyone who owned one of the games helping GLaDOS reboot, by collectively playing the games - unlocking Portal 2 early.
It was wonderful, and I had a load of fun before I'd even played the game. It's some of the best marketing I've had the pleasure to be a part of in... well, I think ever. I don't think (or at least, nothing springs to mind) anyone's ever managed to get people to buy
other games in order to get you to buy their own. It was lovely, seeing thousands of people cooperating for a pretty extensive period of time. If you have the time, I'd recommend looking into what the
Portal ARG folk found along the way.
And then the game unlocked, 9 hours earlier (5.30am - a wonderfully barmy time to play video games) than it would have otherwise, and, well... it's a bit good, isn't it?
After approximately 25 seconds, I was sporting an enormous grin. It stayed firm for the entire 8 hours of single player (and, I must say, I was torn between charging on and staying to smell the flowers - it could have easily stretched to 10 or beyond had I wanted it to). There's also a whole other co-op campaign which I've not touched yet. Length is, of course, no consequence to the game - it's the journey you're taken on that matters. And what a journey.
Constantly surprising, constantly intelligent and witty, and most of all: constantly funny. Stephen Merchant is utterly sublime as Wheatley, and I would very much to like to see him do more in this regard. Ellen McLain surpasses herself as GLaDOS (and others!). Both are able to deliver some cracking humour and some incredible depth, and there are quite a few examples of both throughout.
My biggest gripe with the game is the lack of asset and level streaming - so you might be in the middle of a particularly exciting and intense part of the game and then--loading. 15 seconds later, it's all back on again, but you've just been taken out of it. It's pretty distracting at times. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the likes of Dead Space 2, but loading isn't something I really want to spend a lot of time doing.
Technologically, they've managed to continue to update the Source engine to look as fresh as most contemporary engines recently with some pretty spectacular dynamic lighting and destructible environments, and using both you get a genuine sense of scale at times. Aperture Science truly is an enormous place, and even now I feel like only the surface has been cracked.
The music is now dynamically played, building on itself as you complete puzzles and tasks, and it's amazing how satisfying it is to hear this happen. I'm sat here typing and bouncing along to it, if that's any indication of what I think of it.
I think the thing I take the most from it is just how brilliant it is to play such a genuinely good game, and not just one that's good because of a particular sequence or aspect - it's good because
everything is of such a high standard that I can't help but fall so utterly in love with it.
I really, really hope everyone else does too. For science. You monsters.