Portal 2 Released!

[Peter]

http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/portal-2/1135636p1.html

Bah, grrrr, bugrit, etc.

[Darragh]

Valve time.

[Peter]

Preloaded and ready to go. Come on, Steam!

[Peter]

Flying hotel rooms! ~*iguana*~!

[Darragh]

I wish I wasn't so poor. Portal is one of my favourite games of all time. It's getting brilliant reviews as well. I'm going into the tax office tomorrow to see if they owe me any money.

[Peter]

I have a life, so I'm taking it slowly . Plus I want the most hours' fun for my money, so I'm still on the training levels. GlaDOS has become really mean... I miss the slow reveal of her insanity that was such a great feature of the original game.

[Darragh]

How far are you now, Peter?

I managed to convince my brother to buy this on our shared Steam account a week ago. I just reached Chapter 7. I've been doing a Chapter per sitting. So far I really like the direction in which they took the game. It's a near perfect sequel.

[Peter]

Second pass of single-player I'm trying to collect the achievements I missed the first time as I rushed from test to test.

Loved all the AS-through-the-ages stuff.

[Darragh]

Just finished the game there. It's really nice to play a game that makes you smile so consistently. I think I had a smirk on my face from the start of the end boss until I got back to the main screen. Really enjoyed it.

Only problem was it was not very hard I don't think. Only a handful of chambers were difficult. I was stuck on one near the end for quite a while. It had blue goop and a blue/orange beam. Nasty one.

[Peter]

I thought the finale was easier than in the first game, which rather surprised me. A lot of the puzzles were sequential - do the first part, do the second part, do the third, off you go. The tricky one you mentioned (blue gel on turrets?) was better because it relied on the the player making an original imaginative leap rather than simply repeating the standard sequence of Portal moves. We could have done with a few more like that.

The second time through, the melancholy of Aperture's decline and the sadness of Caroline's fate shine through more. And it's fun GCFscaping the music and sound effects.

[Darragh]

Yep that's the one I was talking about. It made me actually believe it was impossible and my game was broken for a good 5 mins but it's rewarding when you figure it out. I think an easy end boss made sense. They had to stay true to the character of Wheatley who was an idiot . I think it was intentional anyway.

I think we will be getting plenty of extra difficult chambers through both user generated content and hopefully free Valve generated content.

They paced the game perfectly as well. My playtime when I finished was 4.9 hours. Just as my interest was starting to wane ever so slightly I get treated to that end sequence. Looking forward to my more in depth second playthrough.

[Darragh]

Double post but hey ho.

http://www.thinkwithportals.com/music.php

Valve are releasing the Portal 2 soundtrack for free.

I've always admired Valve as far as their music is concerned. They are masters. You can tell that the music is there for a reason. Half-life 2 and Portal 2 have brilliant soundtracks. They take a minimalist approach. During the game it's used to up the tension or make an already exciting scene more so, they play on emotions. End game is just magical.

[Peter]

You probably already know that you can use GCFscape to extract the sound files from Source games. It's a much smaller download!

Also, this: http://sebastianwolff.info/news/2011/04 ... -cappella/

(Hmmm. Sounds a bit off at 1:17 - 1:20)