Portal, The Game, Is Free Until May 24Th

[Conner_Bw]

Portal is a cool game, I spent the better half of the last two days playing it.

http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/

The Steam engine thing isn’t so bad either. Seems to me like an easy way to buy games. I’ll probably pick up the Independent Game Bundle (on special) this week. A Linux version is rumoured.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_steam_announcement

[patto (Syflom)]

yeah this is a big deal for the mac.
thanks

[choice]

I think that people that haven’t played this yet really don’t know what they are missing.
Some of the advanced levels are boggling!
Hoping eventually I won’t need to go into windows to play any games.

Seems like they have ironed out most of the bugs and glitches since release day.
Very fun stuff!

[Beatslaughter]

If you have played through the main game and finished it, get this one. Quite a bit harder to solve:

http://portalmaps.wecreatestuff.com/

[Conner_Bw]

@choice

Seems like they have ironed out most of the bugs and glitches since release day.
Very fun stuff!

Yeah, I spent a bunch of hours and finished the game with a bug that made it so all the portals were black. I didn’t even know that was a bug. Yesterday there was a fix and, wow, I could have had an even better gaming experience but it’s too late! Haha.

[Marc_Shake]

I installed portal and I liked it. Somehow at least.

The good thing is, the concept is quite cool but the bad thing is, everything looks the same. The engine is able to do so much better stuff

[BYTE-Smasher]

@Marc Shake

I installed portal and I liked it. Somehow at least.

The good thing is, the concept is quite cool but the bad thing is, everything looks the same. The engine is able to do so much better stuff

Portal was meant as a minigame. It was developed fairly quickly as an addition to the HL2 “orange box” package. As such, it probably didn’t have much of an art budget. I personally like the fact that they focused more on gameplay then art. I get sick and tired of games that just strive to look good, and lack in the gameplay area.

[Fullofkittens]

@BYTE-Smasher

Portal was meant as a minigame. It was developed fairly quickly as an addition to the HL2 “orange box” package. As such, it probably didn’t have much of an art budget. I personally like the fact that they focused more on gameplay then art. I get sick and tired of games that just strive to look good, and lack in the gameplay area.

+1

The writing is the really good thing about it. And the length: I like that it’s a an interesting game that you can still finish in just a couple of hours. It seemed like they did as much as they could with the portal gun, decided that jump puzzles in an FPS aren’t really that fun, and decided to just make it really funny at the end and then stop.

I’ve heard rumors over the years that the portal gun will make it into a Half Life sequel.

[BYTE-Smasher]

@Fullofkittens

I’ve heard rumors over the years that the portal gun will make it into a Half Life sequel.

You can actually use a cheat code to get access to it in HL2

[edit] Sorry, it’s a complete hack, not just a cheat code:

wU_br2cZPlc

[vvoois (vV)]

@BYTE-Smasher

I get sick and tired of games that just strive to look good, and lack in the gameplay area.

Good looking games don’t always necessarily have to go with lack in game-play.
And games looking good doesn’t necessarily need to mean every object has to be rendered out of a gazillion polygon’s.
If background and 2d-art is giving the right atmosphere, i would be happy with that too.
But i don’t really settle for very simple looking games, unless the concept is either very addictive, or has a lot of humoristic sarcasm.

[patto (Syflom)]

@Marc Shake

The good thing is, the concept is quite cool but the bad thing is, everything looks the same. The engine is able to do so much better stuff

I think that style it has goes well with the world and character the game puts you in.

[Void_Pointer]

Thanks for the heads up!

[vvoois (vV)]

@BYTE-Smasher

You can actually use a cheat code to get access to it in HL2

[edit] Sorry, it’s a complete hack, not just a cheat code:

Portal Multiplayer instructions, if you want to do multiplayer as well:

I have gotten multiple people (2) in a portal LAN game, however it’s usually buggy and tends to crash a lot, here’s how I’ve done it so far:

Start portal and open developer window
Type in
dissconnect
sv_lan 0
maxplayers 5
map (whatever map you want here)

once in game, you need to let your friends know your game’s ip address in order to connect (again, this works for lan only) todo this type in the console: status
and then the console will give a list of stuff about your server/game. just send the IP address number to your friends and then have your friends type in console:

connect (ip address here)

don’t forget to turn on sv_cheats, and I also noticed the game tends to crash if both of you bring out your portal, which sucks.

Possible fix (discuss before starting to play):
change_portalgun_linkage_id # (0, 1, 2, 3) Have one person use Linkage ID 1 and one use Linkage ID 2. Maybe that’ll work.

Add in Impulse 101, and Portal = win!

Haven’t tried this with HL2:DM though. But if it works, that would be fun…

[Void_Pointer]

Hah… this game is too funny! I had to upload this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruT7N1LRaBA&feature=player_embedded