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Tag Archives: portal
Gaming Memories – Portal
Format: PC
Release date: 2007
Portal is one of those games that sprang out of nowhere, taking everyone by surprise and causing a storm all across the internet. With almost no hype, and zero expectations, it came bundled as a throwaway extra in The Orange Box, arguably the best game bundle ever made.
My fondest memory of Portal was watching my friend Adam play through it for the first time. He stayed around my house one night, which in itself was quite a rare thing, and I insisted he play through Portal because it’s short, sweet and hilarious. The reason I remember this night so well is because Adam had been recommending games and movies to me for as long as I’ve known him, and it’s rare for me to have a chance to show something new to him. He’s also quite hard to impress, and I wanted desperately for him to like something that I introduced him to. And he loved it. We started at midnight and he didn’t beat GlaDOS until about 3am, but the entire time between was us cracking up and basking in the sardonic cruelty and piss-taking of one of gaming’s greatest antagonists. When the brilliantly silly end-credits song ‘Still Alive’ came on, we were both grinning ear to ear.
This happened within the first few weeks of the game’s release, and I was so glad to enjoy that game with Adam before all of the lying cake memes wore out their welcome. I regularly go back and play through Portal, just to be entertained by GlaDOS. It’s very close to being the perfect game. Read More ››
Learn with Portals
Oh Valve, what crazy awesome things will you do next? Some lucky school kids got to visit Valve HQ to learn about “spatial awareness” and “physics”, when really all they were doing is building cool Portal maps. It’s part of Valve’s new plan of helping educate children in a more engaging way or something. I’ve always thought one of the best ways to get kids to focus on boring and complicated subjects like science and maths is if somehow they were presented in game form, but its not something we see taken remotely seriously very often. Click below to see a video of some of the luckiest little sods…
Life After Aperture – I scratch my back, I scratch mine
As gamers, we all like to imagine at one point or another what the characters and events in our favourite games would be like in the shape of a live-action production, whether it be the Halo movie that Peter Jackson was going to direct before it died on its arse, or the strong possibility of a Mass Effect movie, which by all means could still flop around on the floor like a dying fish out of water. But, isn’t that precisely what almost all big-budget video game movies are? Fortunately, there are always individuals who are willing to make unlicensed, short indie films based on the games we know and love, entirely for fun and not for the sake of making millions. Outside Aperture is a great example, and entirely worthy of your time.
Posted in Thoughts
Tagged escape from city 17, half life 2, minecraft, minecraft: the last minecart, portal
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