The cake is a lie!

Some of you will get that title, but most of you that read this will have no idea what it is about. I played through a game called Portal this weekend since I had a quiet afternoon on Sunday. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it is a relatively short, puzzle based game. It took me about 4 hours all together from start to finish to figure out the game and then get through the 19 levels.

The game runs on the Half-Life 2 graphics engine. If your video card is beefy enough to handle it, the game looks gorgeous at higher resolutions. The game is relatively straightforward in that you are basically trying to move through areas and get to the next elevator location to move on. There are doors that require buttons to be held down to open.. so you use cubes from various locations to hold them down. How you get to the button or the cube for that matter is via portals. Eventually you get the ability to open both blue and orange portals so you can shoot your blue portal up high on a wall over a ledge somewhere and then shoot your orange portal into the wall where you are standing and it will open a hole that will put you right where your blue one comes out.

Its hard to explain really and the concept overall is not super complicated, but it does have some tricky areas and there are usually multiple ways to solve the same problem. It was a very interesting challenge and a nice departure from all the stuff normally made by Valve which produces the Half-life series and its usually first-person shooter type stuff.

This game was getting amazing reviews and ratings from everywhere. One of the things most commented on and enjoyed though even more so than the puzzle part of the game was the voice acting. There is a computer system call GLaDOS in the game that is basically running a narrative as you move through. Some of the comments it makes are just downright funny. It added a whole new dimension to the game and made it that much more enjoyable.

If you haven't checked it out yet, its worth the price of admission or a borrow if you have someone who has it on a Steam account they are willing to share with you. It's not long, but worth the time to experience it. I leave you with the Portal ending song sung by Jonathan Coulton:



And speaking of Jonathan Coulton.. I first heard of this guy when he did a lounge singer type cover of Sir Mix Alot's song 'Baby Got Back'. Its a riot and you should check it out as well.