Portal: Still Alive; Even More Extra-dimensional Hyjinx

Ryan Fulton — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:29:38 -0500

Come October 22, Xbox fairing fans of Valve's Portal will be delighted to find an expansion available for their favorite mind-bending pseudo shooter on XBL's Marketplace.

You can expect to find an additional 14 challenge maps, and assumedly, more witty banter from computers with sultry voices. Expect to pay out somewhere around $15 for the privilege. Granted that's more than the game's original percentage based price in The Orange Box, but if you're like me you were only interested in Portal anyway.

Image courtesy of Brickshelf.com

[GOTY] Best Game of 07: The Orange Box

Aaron Dunlap — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 13:37:52 -0600

Despite what some award-show winners have to say, this wasn't a very excellent year for games. Think of the biggest, most-anticipated games of 2007 and think about how they turned out.

Halo 3 was probably the most anticipated game, and while its multiplayer component is pretty expansive, the single-player campaign (you know, the reason most of us buy a video game) was mediocre and occasionally downright boring. Assassin's Creed was another hugely-anticipated game, and it had the graphics and control scheme we all wanted, but in the midst of making all that it seems that Ubisoft forgot to throw in an actual game. What about Crysis? One of the most-hyped PC releases by the Microsoft camp? It sold less than 90,000 copies in its launch window.

Only a few of the anticipated games of the year really met anybody's expectations. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is, well, it's Call of Duty 4. You guys seemed to really eat up BioShock, too. Super Mario Galaxy is amazing as well. Our Game of the Year award is supposed to be about innovation, though, and aside from being very well-made products, what this year has really innovated things?

What about The Orange Box? Was anybody really excited for that? Were leaked screenshots filtering onto the web and rumors flying like they were for Halo 3? Not so much. People weren't really lined up the block to get them some Orange Box. Without much fanfare, it just... arrived. And when it did, our eyes were opened.

The Orange Box has three primary components and two secondary components. The big ticket items are: Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. The not-so-big-deal items are Half-Life 2, and Half-Life 2: Episode One. That alone is pretty innovative. For your $50-60, you're getting 3 new (albeit short) games, one somewhat-new (new for consoles) game, and one game that happens to be one of the top-5 games ever made. How often does that happen, a game's expansion pack coming out and including the full game and the previous expansion pack plus two ancillary games that are downright genius by themselves?

Portal, though brief (for most people), is a brilliant game. At heart it's a simple puzzle game, but through unique means it is given more character than most full-sized games. The cake is a lie, I'm still alive, weighted companion cubes, this game has produced more internet memes per hour of gameplay than any other game could ever hope to achieve. It's complex and simple simultaneously, beautiful and ugly at the same time, charming and depressing in the same moment. The concept of portals is intriguing and a technological marvel, but it would be quite simple to make 19 levels of portal-puzzles become a boring heap.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two is another giant leap forward for the Half-Life 2 franchise. The Source engine has been spruced up with new dynamic lighting effects, a particle physics system, and a new graphics system to allow for beautifully expansive vistas to be rendered in real-time. The way the story unfolds around you and the ingenious-as-ever level designs are all top rate. People who haven't played Half-Life 2 get confused when people like me go on about how amazing the level design is, but once you've had a taste for Valve's work you can't stomach anything lesser. Play through Episode One, Episode Two, and Portal with the creator commentary system enabled and you'll understand just how much thought and work went into nearly every element of the gameplay design. Valve's games get months and months of testing and tightening before they see the light of day, and it all shows. The sheer level of quality in any of these games is just staggering when compared to the sloppy layouts, imprecise goals, and backtracking you find in most modern games.

It's a congested season for online multiplayer games. Halo 3 with its mega-millions user base is probably the most-played game right now and Call of Duty 4 with its perhaps-superior online element is drawing a lot of players, but Team Fortress 2 is still wedging its way into the market. Perhaps the longest-developed multiplayer game we're likely to see for a while, TF 2 has as much character as any other Valve game. It's not Counter-Strike in terms of repressed teenagers working out their social issues with actual guns, it's something better. It's something for everyone. Everyone who likes shooting folks, at least.

Let's not forget Half-Life 2 and Episode One and the fact that The Orange Box is available for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, so for the people who aren't PC gamers, this could be their first chance to play these games. That in mind, there's dozens of hours of offline gameplay in this box. It's easy to discount an "old" game as not being worth anybody's time, but Half-Life 2 should be above such trivialities, being again one of the best games ever made.

If I can talk for a moment about the endings of Episode Two and Portal, sure they're not exactly the definition of "closure," but they're also not shameless, unsatisfying, "Buy the sequel" endings we're getting from nearly every game this year, from Assassin's Creed to Unreal Tournament III to Crysis . There's a difference between leaving the people wanting more and simply forgetting to include an ending. The Valve products leave you wanting more, the other games just destroy any sense of finality to the ending and kick you in the shins for having the audacity to become attached to the story.

So our Game of the Year is a compilation of 5 other games, partly because each game is an amazing product on its own, partly because the whole concept of packaging them all together is pretty innovative, and partly still because it's one of the few games of the year that didn't leave me disappointed or annoyed after it all. If I could instigate any change to the gaming industry, it would be more play-testing.

Most games these days are only play-tested while they're being developed to make sure there's no glaring bugs preventing the game from working, and as soon as the game is done it's stamped on a disk and rushed to stores via overnight shipping. Some games get a few weeks of post-completion play-testing, if there's time. Episode Two and Portal were play-tested for six months, deadlines and launch windows be-damned. They're not just looking for bugs and glitches, but seeing how people play the game, making sure they understand what they're supposed to be doing. If a goal is ambiguous, or if people are frustrated by an element, they change that part of the game to make sure everything is as clear and as fun as possible. Play through the games with the commentary enabled to hear just how much work goes into each element.

If Assassin's Creed had been play-tested for six months, I imagine I would hate it a lot less. They might have had time to realize that the gameplay is extremely tedious and overly-repetitive , that the game spends the first 6 hours telling you to avoid sword fights and the last hour putting you in nothing but sword fights, that the plot is ridiculous and impossible to follow, and that everybody is talking way too much. If Kane & Lynch: Dead Men had received any play-testing, they might have been able to do something about the entire game being a train wreck.

If anything, The Orange Box and Valve deserve Game of the Year just for striving for quality in a time when doing so is unfashionable, but they're getting it for reaching quality in a time when it's seen as too much work.

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Portal: Still Alive; Even More Extra-dimensional Hyjinx

[GOTY] Best Game of 07: The Orange Box