PORTAL 2 – An Appreciation
I’m not a huge one for gaming. I say that, knowing
that it’s a statement that can be disputed easily, depending on your
perspective. I’m not one of those guys (and they are mostly guys) who will sit
up for three consecutive nights, shooting their way through a new release of a
game series they’ve been enjoying for a decade, but I can quite easily lose
five or six hours to a session of Madden NFL. I think the difference with me is
that I like the games to be challenging, mentally. I’m not interested in just
accruing weapons and slowly slaughtering the entire population of a fictional
town, or laying waste to a post-apocalyptic Zombie-strewn wasteland, and that
seems to be the premise for 95% of games released in the 21st
Century. I’d rather have to think, than just be a thug.
Which brings me to ‘Portal 2’.
Released by Valve in 2011, I must confess that I
didn’t know anything about it until I found it in a second-hand shop in Norwich
two years ago! If you’re not familiar, it’s basically a problem-solving game
where you make your way through various rooms, each one trickier than the rest,
in which a homicidal computer operating system has designed obstacles that you
have to get around, over or through. I said ‘basically’ and that is putting it
VERY basically. With my background in scientific learning, the physics of it
are superb. You are armed with a gun that fires ‘portals’ onto certain
surfaces. These portals allow you to transport instantly from one part of the
room to another. By using these, you are able to navigate your way around
seemingly impossible rooms.
I feel like stopping now, because I’m just not doing
it justice.
So – to change tack slightly – let me just endorse
it without explaining it.
There is so much I love about it that I don’t know
where to start. The backstory is brilliant, the scientific knowledge involved
in the processes you use is faultless (although sometimes barely more than
hypothetical) and the characters, although there are not many of them, are
incredibly deeply realised and enjoyable. I don’t believe there has been any
game before or since that has nailed their casting choices so completely. Stephen
Merchant as a wise-cracking piece of software that helps, hinders and harasses
you in equal measure? J.K. Simmons as Cave Johnson, the ‘voice from the past’
whose pre-recorded messages explaining the story are genuinely hilarious? Yes
please, and yes thank you.
Have you ever read a book that was so good you felt
gutted when you reached the last line? Have you ever watched a film that meant
so much to you that you wished you could see it – for the first time – all over
again? That was how I felt, and still feel, about this game. I can go back and
play it again, and I may not remember all the sequences of movements needed to
complete each task so it will still be a challenge, but it won’t be the same as
experiencing it as a fresh new set of problems. I can play through it and enjoy
the wonderful script, but the lines won’t surprise and delight me in quite the
same way as they first did. It is nearly ten years old, and it is still as good
as anything ever produced, for any console.
If my personal genie is reading this and preparing
to appear before me, let me save you the trouble of climbing from your lamp. I
have one wish and one wish only. PORTAL 3 TO BE MADE AND RELEASED SOON, PLEASE.
On an unrelated, but not completely unrelated topic
- it’s ridiculous
that the computer systems they use in Jurassic Park look so dated, and yet the
computer graphics on the screen still hold up as good.
RC 14-5-20
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