Portal 2

[Petr Schreiber]

Thanks to fact I have amazing siblings, who bought me Portal 2 game, I could go through this title not too late after release this year.
It is game really worth trying, especially:


if you like games which try to seek new ways
if you like beautiful graphics...
... which are not that demanding (played with antialiasing in 1280x720 on maxx detail on my notebook!)
if you like slightly mad combination of humour and horror
if you liked original Portal

If you didn't get in contact with the Portal games, simply said, they are logic action-games with story.

Although from first person perspective, during whole game you do not shoot anyone. You are equipped with "Portal gun", which allows (when shooting at wall) to create two portals.
Once you enter one, you go through the other out. That means - if you shoot one portal on wall in front of you, and second on roof, then walking into the first one makes you fall from the roof :p

It is quite hard to describe, but it is very clever concept. Both Portal 1 and Portal 2 are definitely worth playing. The first game is about 6 hours, the second about 10 hours of play (+ multiplayer).

Here few videos for better idea:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H50wW4eAFKo&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFM9kA7kfa4&feature=related

Official website: http://www.thinkwithportals.com/


Highly recommended!,
Petr

[matthew]

Hi Petr I got Portal when I brought The Orange Box for my Xbox 360, I only managed to complete it a short-time before Portal 2 came out though. I was going to get Portal 2 for my Xbox but I discovered that with the PS3 version you can play Co-Op with someone running the PC version, so I'll probably get it for my PS3 instead.

With the 360 version of the original game a developers commentary was included where they discussed how they created the effects in the game. It was quite interesting to watch, apparently the portal effect is created using something similar to the RenderToTexture feature in OpenGL.

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Matthew,

here the story is very similar - we got Orange Box when it was quite new, played the Half Life 2 with Episodes, but Portal got forgotten.
I installed Portal 1 in winter this year and whoa - I finished it in 6 hours of continous play (how crazy is that!) with mouth open, it was really great ride.

I think the Portal 2 lacks the initial "shock" of how portals work, but the other additions and really well sculpted story made it great experience again and really something to remember.

If you'll get the PS3 version, it would be fun to play the multiplayer - it is based heavily on cooperation, so no murdering each other.

The portal rendering is very interesting feature. I did some experiments with it in back in 2007, as can be seen on example code here:
http://www.thinbasic.com/community/showthread.php?8543-Latest-preview-amp-0.2.1-improvements&highlight=portal
... but the linked example has few problems, and the transition between 2 worlds is not smooth.

Once I have little less workload, I will try to return back to Portal games with some article showing "how to" in ThinBASIC/TBGL.
The portals are not the only interesting thing graphics wise in Portal 2 ... but I don't want to spoil too much ;)


Petr