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+