For science

[davidn]

We finished the main storyline of Portal 2 a couple of nights ago, and I should say right now that there's absolutely nothing that I can say about it that isn't a major spoiler as far as I'm concerned. Even if I avoid the story entirely, there are so many elements that I really loved discovering entirely for myself - I especially enjoyed the Britishness of it, and the game has an odd sense of humour that rarely works in the genre due to the inconvenience of having to include the player in the script somewhere. I was pleased this time to get to the game before said game's legions of stupid fans on the Internet proceeded to ruin it - it was a new experience to be able to play through it without being able to recite the whole thing from collected fragments of text.

So don't read any of this if you haven't played it! (Sites I post to other than Livejournal don't have the benefit of cuts.)

I'm not sure how many people will agree with this, but the layout of Portal 2 reminded me strongly of the Abe games, with you exploring through multiple different sub-sections of a vague industrial building. The budget has been increased noticeably since the first, and throughout its much longer playing time it alternates between sets of puzzle rooms and action/obstacle sequences where you use the skills that you've picked up in the identifiable "levels". In places it feels rather like a Disneyland attraction as you're encouraged to barrel around routes through collapsing buildings, making plans up as you go and having to change routes very quickly as girders smash through walls or paths plummet into the abyss (though it does ruin the flow a bit if you accidentally follow them). But despite being so linear, the scripted sequences feel very natural - you're always forced on to one path, and yet you never feel boxed in, contributing to the game's sense of... hugeness. In others, you have to pick your way around precarious towers like in Prince of Persia and work your way up to the top.

While I'm on that subject, it took me much longer than you would think to realize that Portal was a puzzle/platformer - I had mentally classified it as a first-person shooter just for its perspective, despite it not having weapons. This time, I felt more strongly that it was a puzzle game, especially during the test chambers which were set up as individual puzzles - rather than just getting through them, I found that we were looking around each room first, working out the elements that we had and how they might be combined to be used, in a much more similar way to something like Rescue Rover than any other first-person game. New items get introduced on their own at first, and then as parts of much bigger puzzles where you have to combine many different elements, such as lasers, light bridges, and the dispenser pipes full of coloured "gel" that make the test chambers look like the aftermath of an episode of Fun House after you've finished with them.

As I mentioned, the sense of scale you get is incredible - in the first game, you had the thought that you were somewhere huge, but you never saw outside the enclosed maze of test chambers until near the end when you were taken off into claustrophobic tunnels. This time, in the middle of the game you're thrown into the depths of Aperture in an abandoned salt mine, and you discover just how massive it is - you're shown years upon years of buildings, with their contents somehow preserved in time. And when you discover that many of them are capable of being moved around like a huge Rubik's Cube, you start to feel even more small and at the mercy of the computer that's testing you.

I'm serious about not reading this, now

Since finishing it, I'm actually much more convinced of the tied-up GlaDOS metaphor than I used to be - as you can see in the best scene (best for having some of the funniest moments, the most distressing noise I've ever heard a computer make, and for the awful feeling you get just before the big twist), the AI housing is what drives personalities to insanity, not the AI itself. As you're forced to travel with Potato-GlaDOS later in the game she seems markedly less psychotic, and you're told that the computer gives its core a euphoric response to testing, encouraging it to abandon all rationality or care for its subjects and think of nothing but to blindly test, test, test (a feeling I can certainly sympathize with after doing my final CT2 playthrough).

The sense of cheerful wrongness in the game's sense of humour comes through in the history of Aperture, as well - in the first game, you were pretty much blind to what the company was like before everyone disappeared, but the story you pick up as you go through the various abandoned facilities gives you a view of them from the beginning. They were never... evil, exactly, in that they never intended harm - their problem was more just that they were completely mad. Their childlike fascination with "doing science" (as quoted by GlaDOS herself in the song that you've heard eight million times by now) without any apparent human understanding of anything they were doing comes through in ideas like the repulsion and propulsion gels being marketed as food additives, and the portal gun being overlooked as the greatest technological marvel than mankind has ever known and used instead as an aid to testing springy platforms. And the very last action that you do in the game is a wonderful moment, giving you an absolutely perfectly calculated amount of time to realize what you've just done.

We've still got the two-player puzzles to go through - I had wondered how the robots in the adverts were going to be incorporated, and nobody told me that there was actually an entirely separate game hiding in it. I've heard it mentioned that they invented the robots to give the two-player mode less of a sense of... mattering if you died - I'd love to hear the rest of the director's commentary, but as you only get it on the PC, I'm going to have to wait to see if the Playstation Network ever works again first. (I was reluctant about getting the PS3 version until I read that you effectively got the PC one free with it, and the controls really are nowhere near as unwieldy as you would rightly expect.)

One of the greatest things for now, though, is listening to the Barclay's Bank adverts, which Stephen Merchant voices in exactly the same way as he did Wheatley. Now, it's impossible not to think that you're being advised to switch to a fixed rate mortgage by a personality core who was specifically programmed to make really bad decisions.

Those videos are already full of comments like "They told me if I filled up my ISA I would die!". But at least they'll be funny for the next couple of days.

Comments

[kjorteo]

I never actually played a Portal game because that kind of puzzle is just dramatically beyond me--I wouldn't be playing SpaceChem if I was at all dumb when it came to puzzles in general or anything, but something about that very specific... you know... now-you're-thinking-with-portals way of thinking, I just can't do it, and it makes my brain hurt when I watch Yiffy and Slither go through it. But I of course had to watch them, because the writing is outstanding and, well, it really is a remarkably good game if you either can actually think with portals or have someone nearby who can handle that part for you.

There were two things that particularly impressed me. One, the writing. I knew right from the way they handled Wheatley's introduction (Space: say "Apple") that the same kind of humorous presentation of the first Portal was back, if not even stronger than before. Two, the expressiveness. You (in the single player campaign) are the only human character in the game and you have to do portal corner tricks to even see yourself--everything you actually see in-game is a robot. Usually a very simplistically designed robot, like the personality cores. And yet, somehow, Wheatley's "expressions" are crystal clear and beautifully rendered--despite being little more than a metal sphere with a glowing eye in the center, when he gives you an icy death glare, you definitely receive it.

Edit: Also, it could just be because the meme hasn't worn out its welcome yet, but the comments on that video that are sufficiently clever at tying the lines to the mortgage theme ("What if switching to another tracker hurts? What if it REALLY hurts?") are actually pretty funny.

[davidn]

It's an unusual approach to a game, being given only one mechanic (which goes against pretty much all spatial logic) and having to use it in so many different ways to solve everything - and there are still a couple of rooms for which I really wasn't sure if my solution was the intended one, but it feels so good once you work out and successfully manage a route to the exit!

Even when not playing, though, I imagine that it's as good a game to watch - quality scripting and acting is something that's eluded games for a very long time, and observations such as "One of you is doing very well - I'm sure the other will begin excelling should this suddenly turn into a pie-eating contest" are worthy of Blackadder, sometimes. I sort of ran out of coherent space in the main entry (I could really have gone on for ages) but I'd meant to mention the sheer... personality that everything has as well. I think the secret is that even though Wheatley is just a little robot, the eye is one of the most expressive things we have in terms of conveying feeling - and he's just perfectly animated to get that mood across, simple though he is. I feel that a lot of love's gone into this game.

Which makes it unfortunate, of course, just how efficiently the Internet following of Portal managed to suck all the personality out of it. I'm laughing a lot at these variations on a theme as well - though I have to imagine that even "The cake is a lie" might conceivably have been funny the first time that somebody heard it :)

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

Since you haven't had a chance to play through the commentary, the animator for Wheatley who was capable of getting so much emotion out of an eye was Karen Prell who apparently worked as one of the puppeteers on Fraggle Rock among other things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeBqvIzcU7c Wheatley dubs are going to be a popular thing for videos I'm sure.

[kjorteo]

Okay, that dub is awesome, but watching it also made me realize even more just how amazing the animation is at getting emotion out of a simple metallic eye sphere. You can even watch it muted (I just did) and the way the movements convey expression (body language but without a body?) is just absolutely stunning.

[davidn]

There are definitely going to be a lot of them appearing... I think that even though this sequel didn't provide anything that leapt out at me as something that the Internet was going to be repeating for the next ten years (and I'm very glad of it for that), I think that Wheatley himself's going to be the meme this time.

[davidn]

I'd heard Fraggle Rock mentioned alongside Portal 2 before - it isn't part of my memories from growing up, but... it's clear that they brought in people who really cared about what they were doing. It really does show!

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

"you're always forced on to one path, and yet you never feel boxed in"...

Which reminds me, did you wind up feeling the same way that I did -- that the path you felt clever for taking usually actually wound up being the one that the developers wanted you to find?

[davidn]

Yes, I did - sort of, at least. After you mentioned it I was actively looking for moments like that, which sort of defeated the purpose - but I could see what you meant at various points during the exploration/Prince of Persia phases. There were also a couple of puzzle solutions that I'm not sure were the intended ones, but I'll have to describe them after I sleep!

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Ack, yeah, in hindsight I shouldn't have said anything, sorry. X3; But, like I said -- I was already second-guessing myself anyway, and I figured that the same might happen for you... at least that way you had some context for it.... (or did that just wrap it into triple-guessing...)

[davidn]

Aaagh. Now I'm thinking about even the way that I went through the game too hard! I don't remember specifics, but especially during the chase sequences, I always felt the hugeness of my surroundings, and that there were so many places just around me - without ever feeling that they were actually out of reach, even though the game was taking me firmly down one path. Or something like that.

[kjorteo]

The only time I know of where I got that feeling and it actually wasn't intended was in IWBTG, in which, on no less than two occasions, I found a hard-to-exploit (because you're not even supposed to, obviously) bugged way of getting past a section and honestly believed that's what you were supposed to do, because what you were actually supposed to do was even harder.

[davidn]

Honestly, it's difficult to tell in that game if something's intended or not. Just getting past... anything by any means possible is an achievement in itself.

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

I think the best moment of this for me was when I got to the master turret and Wheatley told me to take it out. I did so and was about to carry on when I remembered they had defective turrets that were being thrown out a little bit earlier and I wondered if they had programmed the game to do anything special if you took one of them and put it in place as the master.

[davidn]

Yes... that's a good example of the 'creative' unexpected path being the right one! I actually did quite the opposite at that point - I instantly tried just stepping into it myself to confuse it, which earned me some sort of achievement but didn't advance the game. It was at this point that I became impressed with Wheatley's response to inaction, as much as action - which is an important step in getting something to look intelligent. He'll mentally dawdle around for ages, dropping progressively greater hints through his rambline until he goes "Oh, I know - try catching one of the defective ones and bring it back here!"

I found myself hanging around a lot just listening to everything he had to say, and I'm sure I still missed a lot of dialogue.

[davidn]

This was the puzzle I was most unsure about my solution to. My tactic here was to use the spring, but I thought I had to place the portals during the very brief time when I was just over the spring and about to be catapulted through the ceiling - of course you can do it during the much longer time you're in the air instead, because you'll fall down into the portal on the floor and be flung to your destination anyway!

That said, this series of videos is pretty inept, being labelled "Walkthrough" even though he clearly has very little idea what he's supposed to be doing, so other even more obvious solutions may be available too.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I shot myself to the top of one of the 1960 test chambers. But the game just warped me back to the proper testing area unceremoniously.

[davidn]

I think I did have one moment like that... I didn't manage to go out of where I was supposed to go, just that it wasn't clear to me that going somewhere would result in dying. I think I'd managed to spring myself over to one of the vague round structures in the salt mine area, and the game just treated it as if I'd fallen into bottomlessness.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I took my time playing through Portal 2, wanting to savour the game as much as I did with the first one, and while I enjoyed the story and the sense of scale, I found it to be lacking in the same humour that the first one had, despite loving the occasional joke that was absolutely brilliant.

It's strange, I love the game, but I feel that the sheer size of the game made it harder to keep the humour level high. Maybe I wasn't observant enough or something, but I'm running through it a second time with the Developer Commentary on as I always like hearing things about the behind-the-scenes, and even then, those seem to be kinda sparse.

Stephen Merchant's performance was spot-on, though. I love hearing all the various things he said (and I hear he ad-libbed rambling to make it sound more natural), and as discussed, the puppetry of Wheatley, despite him being a mechanical sphere, was incredible.

Dear lord, I didn't really remember that GLaDOS scream until replaying the video. Maybe I blanked it out. Now that I've played it three times since, it's gonna be etched in my memory for good.

[davidn]

I've transferred to the PC now (I was impressed that the save data was carried over) and I'm also feeling the sparseness of the commentary... I remember in the first game, there seemed to be an interesting decision made around every corner, because they were feeling their way, but this time you're left to yourself for long periods before a new element is introduced, and I was worried when one of the earliest bubbles talked not about the design choices made but how many splines had to be reticulated to create the objects for the breaking-up room - although the idea of putting the player in a virtual room elsewhere and then rendering their viewpoint in the "real" room so that they couldn't get stuck on the objects was nice.

Perhaps their less frequent apperances, as well, are due to the length of the game, including more of each element before the game moves on.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I like developer commentary, too, and I was also surprised by the sparseness of it in Portal 2.

It's so sparse, that--a little after getting the portal gun--I thought the commentary system had disengaged, or that maybe it only loaded commentary for the first few areas of the game and that I was expected to exit back to the main menu and then load in commentary for later areas, because there were not any commentary bubbles around!

Also I feel they could have done more with their commentary opportunities in this game, although some of it is nice to listen to.