Another great example – Dan took the same amount of time (6 hours) to do the first one as the second one. I still did it more quickly than any puzzle in Portal 1, but once you’re in that frame of mind you’re going to go much more quickly. That all stopped when I got to the area with the significantly new tech. It was great because I felt so smart given how quickly I was progressing. Even when they introduced some new elements early on, it was still a cakewalk for me. So while I struggled mightily to get through the later puzzles in Portal 1, I flew through the first third of Portal 2. Unlike other types of games, Portal’s puzzles are hardest when you first encounter them because there is nothing intuitive about “thinking with Portals” whereas any game with a gun is pretty self-explanatory. Second, it’s really not fair when it comes to the Portal franchise. Dan and I are both in agreement that any review that focuses too much on playtime is missing the point and may even lose some respect in our eyes. First of all, I think that except in cases of extremely short length, the length of a game should not be important. I’m mentioning this only for the curious, not because I think it matters. (Raptr says 11 hours – I’m not sure what causes the discrepancy other than that I played a few sessions for 45 min and maybe Raptr rounded up?) So that’s slightly less than three times as long. What is much more accurate is the 9.1 hours I’ve logged for Portal 2. I’m not 100% sure how accurate this is (because logging was not always done on), but Steam says I played Portal 1 for 3.7 hours. But the game was so great, it became a darkhorse hit. The first game was just a small game in the Orange box for which the real draws were Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. They all do a great job and it really, really pulls you into the narrative. There’s a reason why Giant Bomb has a category for best Nolan North performance in their yearly video game awards. The crazy thing is that I was only SLIGHTLY exaggerating. There isn’t a video game that has released in the past 3 or 4 years that doesn’t have him at least doing an auxiliary character’s voice. Nolan North is providing some voices, of course. There’s an appearance by Stephen Merchant doing such a perfectly amazing job if this were a movie he’d deserve an Oscar or at least a nomination. Of course GlaDOS has the same voice actress doing a great job there. They live by the motto, “show, don’t tell” within this game. Unlike Final Fantasy X, which I’m finishing up around the same time as Portal 2, which stops everything to do an info dump on the player, Portal 2 is much more subtle. Yet, despite focusing on the story-telling – the way Valve does it is not distracting. So most gamers hadn’t come across it if they weren’t deep into the fiction and I didn’t realize there were contradictions until it was pointed out to me. All those details came from the fake Aperture Science website Valve had setup. A few small details here and there have been retconned, but they were never explicitly stated in the first game. But you come away with a much better understanding of Aperture Science than you had with the first game. There are still a LOT of unanswered questions at the end of Portal 2. If Portal 1 is about your character being completely in the dark, Portal 2 is the exact opposite. In fact, there was a two year gap between when I started and finished the game. And the puzzles were great fun and really got my brain going. It was an artform as much as any other movie or book. The sense of not knowing what’s going on and GLaDOS’ obvious demented nature made for a dark video game the likes of which I’d never experienced. If I have to sum up Portal 2 in one word: brilliant! I really enjoyed the first Portal a lot.
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