Portal 2

WolfForager

The guys over at Insomniac celebrate the launch of Portal 2 :pac:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150222047529853&set=a.10150222047524853.359045.91127584852&type=1&theater

Gunmonkey

Krieg wrote: »

Just finished single player
Brilliant, fantastic, hilarious!
That is all

Loved the last 5 seconds before the credits.

Overheal

Gunmonkey wrote: »

Loved the last 5 seconds before the credits.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

wasn't terribly impressed with the game to begin with but as it went on I liked it more and more.

3 or 4 times now i've spent about 15-20 minutes just trying and trying and trying to get some ridiculously tricky multi portal manouver to work until about a minute before I'm set to give up and ragequit I realise that I was barking up the wrong tree entirely and 2 easy (almost obvious) portals did the trick,.

I want to finish it tonight, but I'm having issues with some of the final puzzles. gona keep at it and hope for the best.

Ronan

Looks like Gamestop updated their site to say it is out today (19th) - so might be worth trying there tomorrow if you are a console person.

SirLemonhead

As someone who found the first game really easy and only worth completing once..is Portal 2 any better than the original to warrant me looking into picking up a copy?

uberpixie

Playing coop with a mate and having a blast.

Haven't even looked at the single play yet!

SirLemonhead

uberpixie wrote: »

Playing coop with a mate and having a blast.

Haven't even looked at the single play yet!

Is it possible to "accidentally" kill your co-op teammate in numerous hilarious ways involving portals and lava pits/spikes and the like? :pac:

Overheal

SirLemonhead wrote: »

Is it possible to "accidentally" kill your co-op teammate in numerous hilarious ways involving portals and lava pits/spikes and the like? :pac:

Possible? Sometimes its encouraged!

#Daniel

SirLemonhead wrote: »

Is it possible to "accidentally" kill your co-op teammate in numerous hilarious ways involving portals and lava pits/spikes and the like? :pac:

Yep. Theres even achievements for messing about with your partner.

Headshot

Im not usually into these types of games but i thought id give portal 2 a shot and boy i dont regret it

Im loving it tbh, just a lovely change for me from the repetitive world of fps

pixelburp

I don't agree with people commenting on the looks of this game as a negative, or that the game is comparable to the likes of Crysis. It's not what the engine can do, or how old it is, it's how the developers use it that counts.

There's plenty of fancy technologies behind the latest engines such as Crytech's, but the end result was still a fairly uninteresting corridor shooter with some generic cityscapes. ID's Rage may be using a fancy new engine of theirs but the game still looks drab, monotone and boring.

Portal 2 may not be bleeding edge technology, but all the levels have a craft & attention to detail in them that makes all the dilapidated labs look beautiful in a way.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

just finished

fantastic ending, thrilling, suspenseful, emotionaly charged.. brilliant



srs
spoiler

dont read it

MY WEIGHTED COMPANION CUBE!!!! : D

Helix

pixelburp wrote: »

I don't agree with people commenting on the looks of this game as a negative, or that the game is comparable to the likes of Crysis. It's not what the engine can do, or how old it is, it's how the developers use it that counts.

There's plenty of fancy technologies behind the latest engines such as Crytech's, but the end result was still a fairly uninteresting corridor shooter with some generic cityscapes. ID's Rage may be using a fancy new engine of theirs but the game still looks drab, monotone and boring.

Portal 2 may not be bleeding edge technology, but all the levels have a craft & attention to detail in them that makes all the dilapidated labs look beautiful in a way.

i dont think anyone was using the graphics as a negative. portal is not about that

Big Knox

So finished the co-op today with a friend, didn't even look at the single player but it was fantastic. Great level design and really makes you both work to get through it!! Little short but still that's a very small negative.

Can't wait to get stuck into single player!!

johnny_ultimate

GlaDoS

you monster!

Evaporating my companion cube three times.

Oh, the emotional turmoil of this game!

Just got to the

escape

, start of Chapter Five. Loving it so far. Already a few head scratchers, although that could be because I'm now entering my 19th hour of the day. In any case, a truly brilliant game.

Healium

Menengroth™ wrote: »

the cake is a lie.

Grrrrr, no it's not!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5QveX3-1O8

Helix

finally got round to writing up my review anywayl. Helix says words about Portal 2

If there was ever any doubt as to how eagerly anticipated Portal 2 has been in the past few months, one need only look at the unbelievable hype that spread like wildfire through the internet late last week when Valve hinted at the fact that the game could see an early release. The potato driven madness that followed resulted in some of the craziest game related conspiracy theories we have ever laid eyes upon, as fanboys the length and breadth of the globe tried their best to uncover the secrets hidden within Valve’s latest ARG and help push forward the release of Portal 2.

Whether your view is that it was a legitimate fan participation exercise by Valve, or merely a very clever viral campaign used to boost Steam sales of select indie titles, the fact of the matter is that it was a glorious success. And now, after all the hype, it’s finally here.

When you’re following from on a hugely successful new IP, it’s imperative that you strike the correct balance between offering existing fans exactly what they want, and making the game as accessible as possible to the countless newcomers who are bound to get swept up in the marketing madness. But when the original game was something as fresh and innovative as Portal, the tried and tested sequel rules go right out the window.

What Valve have done here is nothing short of masterful. They’ve covered all the bases with apparent ease, delivering what will surely go down as one of the best sequels of all time. Everything that made the original so good is back and has been greatly improved, while the new additions go above and beyond what anyone could have reasonably expected.

Given that the first game was little more than an experiment, as Valve’s Chet Faliszek admitted in our interview with him earlier this year, the aim was always to push on to bigger and better things – but with that came the risk of diluting everything that made the original Portal so special. If Valve had screwed up in any real way with this title, their legacy would have been tainted forever. They didn’t. And it hasn’t.

Portal 2 follows on from the events of the original, and you reprise your role as Chell who has been awoken from countless years of stasis following her deactivation of her newly found arch nemesis GLaDOS, the darkly comedic supervising robot of the Aperture Testing Facility. Armed with just a portal gun and your wits, you again find yourself thrust into a series of tests while seeking a way to disable GLaDOS for good – however, this time around things are slightly different.

The first half of Portal 2’s single player campaign plays out very much along the same lines as the original. After being reactivated GLaDOS is understandably unimpressed with her “murder” at the hands of Chell, and has decided to put her through an endless chain of increasingly more difficult tests to exact revenge in typically sadistic style.

In order to accommodate players who were unfamiliar with the first title, the early stages are quite pedestrian by Portal standards, easing newcomers into the mechanics of the portal gun system. For those of you who are unfamiliar with how it works, it’s actually rather simple. Your portal gun shoots two different types of portal. The first is a blue one, the second orange, each assigned to a trigger on the controller. Once you have deployed both a blue and orange portal, you’ll be able to instantaneously transport yourself from one to the other simply by walking, jumping or falling through. At its most basic, that is essentially all there is to Portal.

Obviously things are made a little more complicated by virtue of the various puzzles set for you including automated gun turrets, highly focussed laser beams and the increasingly useful Weighted Companion Cube – just a swanky way of saying a box. Using the Portal gun’s tertiary function, gravity manipulation, you’ll be able to carry these Weighted Companion Cubes around your various testing chambers in order to use them to solve puzzles enabling you to progress to the next room.

It doesn’t sound all that impressive, we know, but when you witness it in full flow it’s truly a sight to behold. Portal 2 is as much a lateral thinking experiment as it is a video game. Every ounce of your gray matter will be required to successfully navigate your way through each chamber, with new ideas and suggestions on how best to utilise the functions of the portal gun introduced at regular intervals.

Very quickly the game becomes as much about figuring out how best to manipulate the in-game physics to your own advantage as it is about thinking linearly. Very few games stimulate the thought centres of the brain as Portal 2, just like very few games possess the ability to leave you feeling incredibly stupid after finally solving a puzzle that has had you stumped for half an hour (or the best part of 9 hours in my case, damn you chapter 6). “Why didn’t I think of that earlier” is just as common a reaction as “God damn you Valve you evil geniuses” during gameplay, although both tend to follow other thoughts so full of graphic and explicit terminology that we daren’t commit them to print on a family website.

Portal 2 takes everything the original game established and expands upon it in ways you never thought possible. There are fleeting moments early on where you get glimpses of what is to follow later, when the game takes an unexpected twist into exploratory waters. The feeling of being able to run around the facility without needing to outsmart GLaDOS’s tests feels almost overwhelmingly fresh within the confines of the established game world.

Assisted by Wheatley, a dim witted robot voiced by Ricky Gervais’ sidekick and all round funny man Stephen Merchant, whose job it was to look after the thousands of test subjects held in stasis following GLaDOS’s demise (a population reduced to just one after a minor mishap stemming from inadequate power being supplied to the essential life support systems) your escape unfortunately hits a slight setback when freedom is within touching distance. And by slight setback I mean Wheatley reactivates GLaDOS… and boy is she pissed at you!

Eventually though, thanks to the bumbling Wheatley actually managing to do something right for a change, you manage to get the best of GLaDOS and escape into the bowels of the Aperture facility. While you would typically expect this to be near the culmination of the campaign, it actually marks somewhere around the midway point. Unlike the somewhat short lived original, Portal 2 is quite substantial. Even if you’re one of the lucky few whose brain is perfectly wired for this sort of challenge you’ll likely find yourself racking up somewhere in the region of 8 hours for a complete play through (assuming of course you stop to take in some of the sights and sounds on offer). If, like me, you’re prone to bouts of complete idiocy, you can expect to lose somewhere in the region of 15-20 hours to your first complete play, which isn’t really ideal when you’re trying to beat a deadline, let me tell you.

On top of all those lovely hours of new gameplay, Valve have been kind enough to introduce some all new concepts to the game. Those of you who have been following the title closely in the past few months will no doubt already be aware of the inclusion of Repulsion, Propulsion and Conversion gels, coloured blue, orange and white respectively. Each of these gels has its own distinct properties that prove to be conveniently handy when it comes to getting around the game world from the second half of the campaign onwards.

The Repulsion gel converts regular hard surfaces into violently repellent ones, acting in much the same way as you’d expect a big goopy blue trampoline to. The obvious applications here are to enable you to reach previously inaccessible areas by virtue of “bouncing” atop the Repulsion gel – although as you progress, you’ll need to think a little harder about the best way to utilise it.

Propulsion gel is used to speed up the relative velocity of anything that touches it, accelerating Chell or anything that happens to come into contact with it to breakneck speeds, giving you the ability to traverse huge distances with a single leap – or smash face first into a wall really, really fast.

Finally, Conversion gel allows you to turn non-portal friendly surfaces into the perfect site for your latest traversable gateway. This comes in particularly handy later on in the game where appropriate surfaces are conveniently less common.

Taken individually, the new gels are a good idea, but when thrown into the already established mix they’re nothing short of a masterstroke on Valve’s behalf. They have enabled huge changes to the in-game dynamics, as well as opening up the potential for a huge number of new puzzle types allowing the twisted bastards who design the levels a whole new suite of tools to work with.

For many, one of the most memorable features of the original game was its wonderfully dark sense of humour. GLaDOS’s brutally judgemental and over the top sarcasm proved a real driving force behind the game’s narrative, and you’ll be happy to learn that this is another area where things have really gone into overdrive. Within the first few hours of the single player campaign, there are countless laugh out loud moments, mainly stemming from GLaDOS’s stone cold delivery of some of the most cutting one-liners ever heard in a video game, but also helped in part by Merchant’s enjoyable stint as Wheatley. The humour does die down a little in near the end, but when it raises its head again you just know you’re going to be in for a real treat.

Arguably the most important addition to the Portal universe with this sequel has been the addition of co-operative mode. Claimed by Valve to be the single most requested feature following the release of the first game, the team have done an excellent job in putting everything together in such a way that promotes not only teamwork and co-operation, but also screwing with your partner in the most inconvenient of ways, just as they’re about to reach a goal or milestone, purely because you can. And because it’s funny. Although they may not necessarily think so.

The puzzles within the surprisingly substantial co-operative mode put even the best from the single player campaign to shame with their ingenuity and, in many cases, dastardliness. The main thing to remember here is that you are part of a team – failing to act in such a way (aside from the occasional hilarious portal beneath your partner’s feet when he’s not looking, of course) will lead to complete and utter failure of the task at hand.

The best bet here, initially at least, is to stick to playing with people you know – at least until you grasp the basics enough to feel confident enough to jump into the big bad and often foul mouthed world of strangers that awaits you. If you’re the strong silent type (or you just hate talking during online gaming, like me) then you’ll get quite a bit of use out of the handy market system implemented by Valve.

Obviously aware that not everyone enjoys the delights of conversing with faceless strangers while staring intently at a TV screen in the hope that nobody walks into the room at that moment, Valve have to be commended for taking the chance on such an unproven system in order to make the game accessible to everyone. Assuming you and your partner pay attention, these context sensitive markers will just about do the bare minimum to communicate your intentions, making progress possible, although in reality it’s a hundred times better actually talking, you know, with your voice.

The co-op mode introduces us to two brand new characters, P-Body – a turret gun – and Atlas – a modified personality core, like Wheatley from the single player mode. Rather than trying to shoehorn this new style of play into the existing single player format and storyline, Valve have instead gone with the approach of creating an entirely new one specific to the mode.

The interactions between the two robots, coupled with GLaDOS’s never ending stream of sarcastic abuse never fail to raise a smile as you make your way through the Co-operative Testing Initiative. We could very well be looking at a brand new gaming double act, and if the reception of the game’s early trailers are anything to go by, they look likely to go on to be every bit as GLaDOS was after the first game was released.

If you forced me pick an area where Portal 2 fails to excel, I’d probably be inclined to point my finger at the graphics. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is not one of those “oh the graphics are crap, don’t bother with it” rants you would normally associate with the most pathetic dregs on the internet, this is merely an observation that the ageing engine is surely approaching the end of its shelf life.

The physics are absolutely spot on, that’s not in question, but the game lacks the sheen and finesse of some more modern titles. It’s perfectly serviceable, and there are still plenty of moments that manage to take ones breath away, but remember, you did force me!

With two lengthy and thoroughly enjoyable campaigns on offer here, alongside some of the best writing ever seen in a video game, Portal 2 takes all that was good about the original and turns it up to eleven. It does have a few moments that could possibly have been signposted a little better (or at least an option to turn on an “I’m really stupid and I’ve spent an hour on this bit and I’m still stuck” help system of some description), but usually taking a break from the game will be enough to get you back on track when you try to tackle things again from a new perspective.

All the new additions work brilliantly, from the new characters to the three gels, and the fact that it actually feels like a real game now as opposed to an all too brief experiment just proves how good a development studio Valve are. While you’d perhaps have feared that Portal 2 couldn’t possibly live up to expectations if it were made by anyone other than Valve, the delightful reality is that they’ve actually managed to exceed them.

If this is the sort of improvement we’re going to be looking at with each additional iteration of Portal, then bring on Portal 3! Hell, I won’t even complain if that one sees a 6 month delay too!

Gunmonkey

Also, this kinda flies in the face of all the whiners over the ARG.

http://www.destructoid.com/valve-complete-pack-given-to-golden-potato-owners-199181.phtml

Valve gave everyone who found all 36 golden potatoes the Complete Valve Pack, with any duplicate copies on an account being giftable.

Basq

Wahey.. my €40 copy for the PS3 just arrived from Gamestop.

Now I've to sit here all day waiting to play it!

Healium

Basq wrote: »

Wahey.. my €40 copy for the PS3 just arrived from Gamestop.

Now I've to sit here all day waiting to play it!

Really? I paid €5 for postage. It had better come today :pac:

Mr Freeze

My XBOX copy arrived this morning.

At work at the moment, hopefully, I will get a go on it this evening. Damn fine weather, I might go training instead.

spiderjazz

Anyone know anywhere in Cork that has broken street date for this? I just rang Gamestop in Douglas and they're still saying tomorrow.

Ronan

Ronan wrote: »

Looks like Gamestop updated their site to say it is out today (19th) - so might be worth trying there tomorrow if you are a console person.

Can someone please confirm if it's on sale in shops? I'm not paying 50 squid on steam when I can pick the ps3 version up and use the code to download from steam anyway. Also, I wonder how they will take trading back in the ps3 version after???

Mikeyt086

I rang Gamestop in Bray and they said its not on sale till tomorrow.

Shiminay

pixelburp wrote: »

After a couple of hours playing this I have come to the following conclusion: this is not a video game, this is an interactive comedy, 'cos I haven't laughed this much since ... well, Portal 1 I guess. The haters must be ADD-riddled idiots because who'd want to rush through a game this enjoyable and fun? They must have missed most of the funny stuff...

Whoever wrote the script & gave Stephen Merchant the gig to voice the robot deserves a holiday because it's quality stuff. Genuinely funny lines delivered so naturally. I'm torn between Glados' sarcastic psychosis & Merchant's witty babbling

"I found some bird eggs here, jammed up the door mechanism ... "
"Arrgh, a bird!"

Ok, it's funnier in the game I admit

^^^^^^ This. I think you've summed up my own thoughts on it perfectly pixelburp. The writing is fantastic and Merchant is great. The bird quote mentioned was one of several short snappy bits that will make you laugh a lot.

GLaDoS is even more warped as she's now given up the pretence of being there to help and to test in the name of science and is now hell bent you your destruction and insulting you for killing her all those years ago The videos that play on the walls as you exit the lift are all great little extra touches too. I particularly loved seeing the Thermal Discouragement Beam's one

I'm looking forward to giving the multi player a go in due course, but I'm told that it follows on from the single player slightly in terms of story, so finishing the SP first is preferrable

bertie4evr

Nowhere in Kilkenny selling it either. Went to Gamestop and told them the website said it was released yesterday. She went and checked but still refused. BAH.

marco_polo

I just walked out of gamestop in Stephens Green SC with a PC copy for 34.99(5 more than longford by the looks of it ).

Consoles versions deffo not on sale there until tommorrow though.

Colibri

Gamestop stocking the console versions for 54.99 and the PC versions for 34.99. Shocking price difference - I'm aware of the PS3 deal and the fact that console games tend to be more expensive but still. Daylight robbery!

kearneybobs

Colibri wrote: »

Gamestop stocking the console versions for 54.99 and the PC versions for 34.99. Shocking price difference - I'm aware of the PS3 deal and the fact that console games tend to be more expensive but still. Daylight robbery!

If you can, head to HMV. Almost all new releases there are €45 at launch. All the big ones anyway. Anyone confirm the price in HMV?