A Gamers Voice

Success! I got myself an XBox 360 on Sunday along with Halo 3, The Orange Box, Destroy All Humans: Path Of The Furon, and Sonic The Hedgehog. As luck would have it, on Tuesday I caught the Flu, which had me packed, quarantined, and pampered in my room all week long. So, one can imagine the gaming hours I got in. Or at least, should have. Now, with 5 straight days of alone time with my newly acquired gaming system, I am certainly shocked that I didn’t get more gaming in than this… But, This is an inventory of my success. Beat one Sonic level. Got roughly half way through Halo 3, Played an hour of Half-Life 2, Got to the second level of Destroy All Humans, and completely beat every aspect of Portal. Haha, so it sort of speaks for itself to say the game that got me was Portal. Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve played Portal. I played it at a friends house when it was first released and instantly knew it was true love. Immediately after I bought the game. Shortly after that I realized I don’t have an XBox 360. Yes, a stupid choice, but in the long run it held smart, I feel. After these almost two years of NO PORTAL and having to go back to astranged, mundane games such as Red Faction 2, Tetris Worlds, and Shadow The Hedgehog (games I once thought would never be usurped as my favorite) I seem to have become newly infatuated with GLADoS and her zany antics. I know this is gonna sound like a plug, which it might be, but now that I am “thinking with Portals” shall we say, it’s like my whole world is in Portals. It’s this strange new way of seeing challenges. Any other game has an almost guided line for how to get there and, while Portal has a somewhat basic “get from here to here using this” method, it doesn’t hold you to any specifics. One particular room (Test Chamber 18) is shown here:

The method that I used was very different (and, not to brag, more efficient…) from this players method, until the room with the turrets. And, one thing I didn’t notice when I was first in this room, was that this room also has tons of different solutions that all get you to the same place. In fact, this player manages to practically skip that entire room.

Ways I never thought possible to complete the level. So imagine; if you can, independently, create these methods on your own, you’ve surpassed the ability to think with Portals, and began the ability to use an area of your brain that games like these were meant for. To these people, Portal isn’t a game anymore. It’s a tool. And I’ll be surprised at how fantastically they use Portal 2.
But moving on past Portal, I’ve gotten around to getting in to the whole “Halo” thing, admittedly late, and I must say that on a big ass HD TV, Halo really is the game above all others. This is quite a thing, coming from me. I used to despise Halo, loathe it. I’d played the first two on little TVs and always thought to myself “Jesus… Half-Life is waaay better than this…” But there’s something so epic about this third installment that it changes my perception of it. Of course, I’m spending the whole game thinking “this’d be some much more awesome with portals…” but that’s not the point. On the other hand, sometimes I find myself preferring Half-Life 2. It just depends on what game I’m in the mood for. A partial puzzle/action/shooting game is definitely Half-Life 2. But for the epic/destroy all/shoot everything epic killfest, it’s definitely Halo 3. It’s the moods that determine which game is “better” I suppose.
In closing, I present you this.

Good-Bye!

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