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Rustychops wrote:

Nope went uphill. Haven't talked to one person who said they didn't love it.

Just to argue semantics for fun here... the two are not really equitable... you can go far downhill from Portal 1 and still have a great lovable game.

I'm fairly sure they hit par, but there was absolutely nothing wrong with Portal 1, and you really can't do better than that even if you add content.

I'm sure Yahtzee will review it, and we'll have to see if he actually believes it got better from Portal 1 by adding content.

Portal 2 is great fun both single and co-op styles. I would have liked a longer experience and level editing, but we'll see overall a great game. You could save money if you rented though.

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Zidjian wrote:

Portal 2 is great fun both single and co-op styles. I would have liked a longer experience and level editing, but we'll see overall a great game. You could save money if you rented though.

Level editing...........hmmmmmmmmmmm........

so i played drakensang online last night, was good fun and hell im even more itching to play POE or diablo 3 than ever now :-(

Reasons why I did not enjoy Portal 2 as much as Portal 1. This will probably contain some spoilers but I'll try to keep them to a minimum and I'll let you know when they start farther down the post.

The puzzles weren't nearly as interesting. Most of them were fairly simple. They generally had one trick and once you figured it out all the pieces fell into place. In Portal 1 the puzzles were much more complex. The later puzzles involved multiple rooms and and long chains of interconnecting systems that required substantially more critical thinking. Almost all the puzzles in Portal 2 were confined to a single room and only had one obstacle to overcome. It also didn't help that you were only allowed to place portals in certain specific spots which basically gave away how to solve the puzzle. Obviously, if you go into a room and there's only one spot to place a portal then you know you need to put a portal there. It sounds stupid but that's how almost all the levels in Portal 2 were designed. This got better toward the end when the white goo allowed you to place portals on any surface but you can only get the white goo to a spot where you can place a portal to begin with so again the solutions were made fairly obvious.

That's not to say that some levels in Portal 2 weren't difficult. Some certainly were, but they were difficult for the wrong reasons. Several times the difficulty came from searching for that one wall spot were I could place a portal that would solve the entire puzzle. That doesn't take any thought though. It just takes thoroughly searching the room. Other times the difficulty came from needing to pull off a very precise acrobatic task. The sort of thing that you need to try over and over and just wait for the one time that you get lucky and all your jumps line up just right. Again, no thought involved because it's fairly obvious what you need to do beforehand. I was generally able to grasp what I needed to do within a minute or two of entering a room which was not the case with Portal 1. Many of the puzzles in Portal 1 required much more creative thinking.

Loading screens! I can't believe it. It's 2011. A game like Portal 2 should have absolutely no loading screens. Ever. No excuses. If I can wander Liberty City or Oblivion and never encounter a single loading screen then Portal 2 certainly should not toss me to a loading screen every other room. Streaming in content has been a standard technique to avoid loading screens in video games for many years. A big company like Valve that likes to pride themselves on production values has absolutely no excuse. The fact that the loading screens only took a few seconds makes it even worse because it just shows how easy it would have been to stream in the next level in the background. Make me walk down a long hallway or make the elevator ride last longer. I don't care. Anything is better than a loading screen. I must have stared at 100 of them through the game. Valve got lazy. Period. No excuse.

The story was uninteresting. That's not to say that it wasn't interesting. It was just highly predictable. Every twist that was coming was given away several loading screens previously. Of course, Portal 1 didn't really have a story but that worked to its benefit because you were never quite sure what you would be doing next. Portal 2 just drags you by the nose through a fairly bland and pedestrian plot that you really have no interest or investment in.

Minor story spoilers begin here. As I said the story is very predictable so I wouldn't even call these spoilers. I was never once surprised by one of the plot "twists".

I did not like Wheatley. He was annoying. At first I found him quirky and humorous but his constant worthless talk got old. I really enjoyed Wheatley at the beginning of the game when he was your sidekick. That was a good role for him and I think they could have developed some interesting puzzle mechanics for carrying him around and plugging him into consoles. I think the game would have worked very well like that. Unfortunately, they decided to make him the villain and that's where things really went downhill. Wheatley is a moron and moron's don't work well as villains. Morons are always always always the sidekick and there are many very good reasons for that. It really just leads to a bad dynamic where you're not actually fighting and outsmarting some omnipotent AI like in Portal 1. In fact, as the hero, you're not overcoming anything in Portal 2. You're really just staying out of the way and allowing Wheatley to defeat himself with his own idiocy. That's hardly heroic. Or interesting. The final battle against Wheatley was a perfect example of this and it ended up being hugely boring and insultingly simple. It was very anticlimactic to say the least. And the scripted moon bit was something you would expect to see out of a mindless game like CoD, not Portal. If you're going to have me fight a boss then at least let me personally defeat him. Don't snatch that satisfaction away from me in some absurd deus ex machina cutscene. Maybe I would have enjoyed the final battle more if I was actually invested in the idea of defeating Wheatley, but as I've already said, Wheatley defeats himself and you're just trying to stay out of the way. Glados was a hundred times the better more interesting villain.

The writing was relatively bland. I should rephrase that and say Wheatley's writing was bland. Glados as the villain had much more nuanced writing. Wheatley's writing was really just dumb slapstick. Portal 2 was an exercise in how many stupid things Wheatley's can say over the course of the game. It was tolerable and amusing while he was your sidekick, but after he became the villain it just didn't work at all. You end up going through the game listening to your archnemesis make a complete fool of himself with every word that comes out of his mouth and it just does not generate a desire to defeat him. Listening to Cave Johnson is such a reprieve because at least he's somewhat more intelligent. Even then, all of his lines are intended for the same sort of slapstick humor as Wheatley. I'm sorry, Valve. I'm not 12 anymore and I appreciate a little depth to my humor. Wheatley may as well have told a bunch of fart jokes and it would have achieved the same things. Glados is really the only 3 dimensional character with a personality in the entire game. Even then, as soon as she becomes a potato she becomes just as two dimensional and uninteresting as the rest.

I had the most fun playing Portal 2 in the early stages when Glados was still the villain and still her old snarky, sarcastic, vengeful self. As soon as Wheatley became the villain the game took a turn for the worse and it just kept going downhill all the way to the end.

The ending song was nowhere near as good as it was in Portal 1.

That all said, I did enjoy the game. It's a good game and worth playing through once. It's not what it could/should have been but it's still pretty good. Definitely not worth $60. I'm very very glad that I didn't actually buy it. I'd suggest renting the game or waiting for it to drop in price by half.

Well i agree with you it doesn't feel like a complete game. However the short experience defiantly is fun. I would say they just need to put in a level editor and additional dlc(probably left some extra stuff out. Then the game would be worth the 60 bucks. All in all its not a regretful purchase at all.

Oh yes, the loading screens are really annoying... However it's the only thing i dislike right now. Have played the game till chapter 4 so far.

See i have to disagree. I believe that the game deserves the purchase however not everyone has a job. I would say to rent it. If you want to buy a game that will last you longer than 15 hours move on. That being said Portal 2 should be in any game collection.

The best example i can give would you rather experience a road trip in sunfire. Or racing down a drag strip in a F1 car.

Sure its short, but you could do far worse than portal 2. I would like to see post-purchase support though.

Also Zeto, you do realize Zero Punctuation is a satire of video games? If you need other people to tell you what game are good or what games are not you can miss out on real gems of games. Not saying Zero Punctuation does that, but as we all know mainstream media isn't always truthful ie; they will promise a favorable review for certain favors like exclusive coverage, etc.

I think mainstream reviewers are dishonest, and the general populace is too forgiving. Yahtzee caters almost exactly to my likes and dislikes of games, and my general mentality of reviewing. Satire is just a particular form of review which carries the flaws a bit further than regular review.... honestly I don't care about the good points of a game as much as I care how badly flawed it is, since my decision to play something or not isn't based on the content itself, but rather by how flawed the game is as a whole.

Anyway I find his reviews to be impeccable and honest... there is essentially no other popular reviewer that does that, or can get away with it without being fired. I take his recommendations as gospel.

? the content is all that matters.
Firstly true technical aspects of a game are very important, but i would rather have a game with less polish and better story and gameplay over a perfectly polished boring experienced.

Oblivion with all its fun had a lot of flaws in the technical aspect. The gamebryo engine was to blame for a lot of it, but still it was a great game.

Also as with any review regardless of how honest you think he is a review is simply that. An opinion based on the biases and judgements of one person. Its important to looking at multiple reliable sources is important in any matter including video games.

I remember a game getting bashed on really bad by the mainstream media for some reason and in all actuality it was a perfectly fun title. I can't remember what it was called though.

That is one reason why i like demos so much. As nothing is as good as your own perspective to tell if you will like a title or not.