Portal 2

I forgot to mention last week, but when I played through the original Portal, I played with the commentary on. This meant that there were dialogue boxes that you could activate floating around all over the place. This also was very annoying because when you activated one and GlaDos was talking then you couldn't hear a damn thing.

But with Portal 2, they fixed this problem. When you play through with the commentary, anytime you activate a commentary node the voice will always be louder than the voice on screen. Except now you can't,  save with the commentary on, which causes all sorts of other problems...

But I digress, meet Portal 2, better and longer than the first Portal. You still get a portal gun and have to solve all sorts of physical problems with it. You still play as Chell, our silent protagonist who may or may not have brain damage as Wheatley, a small, lovable (but incredibly stupid) robot who breaks you out of a ruined Apature testing facility, only to inadvertently restart GlaDos, whose back and incredibly pissed at Chell for killing her in the last game.

What I like about Portal 2 was quite a lot, the puzzles were great and there were plenty of innovations from the last one. The inclusion of gels, light bridges, excursion funnels and aerial face-plates, all things that heightened the experience of puzzle solving and made the gameplay even more fun. What I didn't like was that oftentimes I'd find myself looking all around the place just for the one place to put a portal, especially when you're traversing the old, unused areas below the Apature Science Center. At one point, this happened for so long that I invented a fantasy of myself being "King of the Rock" and I'd shoot 2 portals just so I could look at myself and have someone else to talk to.

Other than that, Portal 2 offers at least three times as many hours as Portal 1 did, solid puzzle solving and, other than a few hours of being stuck here or there, is just plain fun. Overall: A+

Portal

Portal is a game for the ages. It's something that's not only fun, it's a completely original idea for a game. It's a puzzle-first person game created by Valve in 2007. It's a fairly short game, the first time through you can beat it in one sitting, and most people only knew about it because Valve had thrown it on The Orange Box as a bonus feature. But really, this became one of the most iconic games to come out five years ago and even after all this time (five years is eons for videogames) it's still has a few hours of amazing gameplay.

The story of portal is that you wake up from a sleeping chamber in order to be tested by the AI GlaDos. GlaDos had been programmed to test, even after everyone else has died. You play a young lady named Chell, though I don't know how anyone knows that since your name is never mentioned and Chell never speaks throughout the whole game. But, as Doc Mitchell once said, "if that's your name, that's your name" so we'll go with it.

 You test and solve puzzles throughout the whole thing. GlaDos keeps insinuating that after the final test you might be immediately murdered, but is that what really happens? Play it and see.

The puzzle portion comes with the portal gun, you shoot one portal on a wall, shoot the other portal on another wall, go through one, come out the other. It teaches you a knew way to think about physical problems. It teaches you how to think with portals.

Overall: A. This is such a great game that I don't even mind that you can beat it in less than 3 hours if you know what you're doing. If you've never played it, you should.

FTL

Totally forgot about doing one of these last week. Oh well, I'll try to do two over the next week.

FTL is a kickstarter game that was released in September of 2012. The plot is that you've got information that can take down the rebel fleet (I'm assuming you're holding it on an old R2 robot). So you take your ship and go as fast as you can (faster than light, I'm assuming) to the other side of the galaxy so that you can save the Federation from the onslaught of the rebel fleet.

But wait, there's more: Not only do you have to get there before the rebel fleet shows up and take over the galaxy, but you also have to buy resources like fuel and missiles, experience random encounters every time you make a jump, fight ships, save ships, be uncontrolably mean to ships, oh and also DIE!

That's right, death is a big part of FTL. More than likely, the first few times you play you'll die before making it to sector 4 let alone sector 8 (the last sector), but don't worry about that, it seems that death is just another part of this game. And hey, as you play your one ship in your hangar can swiftly grow into more (there's a total of nine ships) and every time you die you just switch ships if you have one and try again. A bit of advice, if your ship catches fire, get your crew into a safe room and open doors to the outside to vent the oxygen and put out the fire.

Overall: B This is a very challenging game. Inspired by tabletop gaming and real time strategies, plus how quickly you can play a round before dying, it makes for a very addictive experience. It's lacking in a few areas, one being story, no actual explanation about why the rebels rebelled, no story for your crew or anyone else's crew for that matter. They just give you a ship and orders to get to the other end of the galaxy. Graphics-wise, it makes me think of old-school 16-bit systems, like the SNES or the Sega Genesis, which is kind of cool in a retro sort of way, but it does gives some desire to something more. The gameplay is solid and highly addictive, like I said, but without a real story and nothing to strive for but more ships. It doesn't give you a whole lot to keep playing the game for. My advice is to play it for a week, and then keep it on your desktop to remember what an exciting week that was (and then come back to it whenever your bored with the latest sub-par addition from a major videogame company, God knows there's enough of those).