Prometheus was punished by the gods for giving the gift of knowledge to man

[shichahn]

So I finished Portal 2 last night. Well, the single player anyway.

So very, very much love for this game and this series. Portal was great, and Portal 2 manages to be even better in some truly spectacular ways. And while I feel like the ending is pretty conclusive... I didn't see how they could make a sequel after the first one, either. So we'll see. I would be satisfied if it ended here, but how can I not want more?

Favorite random trivia bit from the Half-Life wiki: apparently Valve originally intended for Wheatley to be voiced by Richard Ayoade, but decided Stephen Merchant fit better. And while I think I agree... just the very thought of Richard Ayoade in a Portal game is so freaking amazing that I hope they find a role for him somewhere one of these days.

As a heads-up to all of you who don't already know, I will be doing my usual summer disappearing trick as of this coming Sunday, and will be between various isolated places in Oregon while I train new banding interns. And so as always, I will be semi-difficult to reach until sometime in August, but I will do my best to check my phone and email when I have service.

(This probably goes without saying, but spoilers are in the comments.)

Comments

[flameraven.livejournal.com]

Read the TVTropes page for Portal; it's been updated for Portal 2 and there's a lot of stuff in there I didn't notice (like the fact that one of the potato batteries from Bring-Your-Daughter-to-Work-Day is Chell's) which have really interesting implications.

They wrote the history after Portal, so it's possible they just changed their minds about the timeline once they were developing for Portal 2, and just let it stand as the company's "official" history. It's pretty clear from the recordings that Johnson is batshit insane from the get-go, anyway. Who else would do experiments that create mantis men, turn people's blood to gasoline, and purposely create tumors in test subjects so they could cut them out later? And THEN stick his assistant's brain in a computer to run the place? He was totally not all there.

I figure she'd test with the robots for awhile, but you just know she's going to get bored eventually... ):

[shichahn.livejournal.com]

Haha, I will do that. Yeah, Chell's potato project is the freak mutant potato, and one of the materials was "something from daddy's work" or something like that, so she's almost certainly the daughter of one of the staff. Apparently there is a little girl in the Portrait of a Lady, too, who can only be seen if you turn up the brightness in the image - I found the painting on my first go-through but didn't even think to mess with the monitor brightness when I saw it, of course. So I have yet to look at that. But I'll see what else they have on the TVTropes page.

Also I was reading today about the original concept for Portal 2, which apparently was actually a prequel set in the 50s and didn't involve portals as a gameplay element at all. The full story is apparently only viewable if you buy an iPad app, frustratingly enough, so I'm waiting for someone to crack that, but as much as I do love Portal 2 I wish they hadn't entirely scrapped the prequel idea. They just got too much negative feedback from play testers, I guess, who all wanted Chell and GLaDOS and portals in their Portal games.

[flameraven.livejournal.com]

Yeah.... I understand that. Like, why call it Portal if it doesn't involve the Portal gun? That's the entire point. Honestly, I'm still confused as to why the robots are on the cover of the game. I am not all that enchanted by the robot designs (Atlas is okay, P-body is....weird.)

I think they did a good mix with allowing us to see the old 60's-80's facilities and learn all the backstory while still tying in to the main story. And I think Chell waking up hundreds of years later is pretty unsettling in itself.

[shichahn.livejournal.com]

I haven't even seen the cover, haha, I've just seen all the concept art for the covers. Got mine on Steam. :p I guess they really wanted to sell the multiplayer aspect?

I'd still like to see all that even older backstory, though. I find the whole thing a lot of fun. There was something about being a scientist/staff member/test subject of some sort in the facility, and something about Johnson having an army of robots to try and stop you with. Obviously a lot of crazy chaos went on behind the scenes.

Also I really want to see what happens to Chell. Because Valve keep hinting at how she and the Portal storyline will tie into the Half-Life storyline, so I hope they actually manage to unite the two in a game sometime in the future.

[flameraven.livejournal.com]

Ah. We have the Xbox version. For some reason I can't keep my attention on computer games (and my computer is not awesome enough to handle the graphics anyway). The cover shows P-body jumping between portals. Which is... just not nearly as epic as GLaDOS glaring at you in the ruins of her room, for example.

The older backstory would be fun, and would be something I could sort of see them exploring in Portal 3? I think people really wanted to see Chell make it out of that place, though, and I can't say I blame them. Poor Chell.

[flameraven.livejournal.com]

I also have to say: I do want to play Half-Life now. All I know about it is that apparently Black Mesa tried to create a portal gun and instead got headcrabs. But I might have to just watch my roommate play it, because I fail so badly at FPS's. Like, not only do I fail at playing them, they actually give me motion sickness and headaches. I got about half an hour into the story mode of Halo 3 and had to quit. It was pretty upsetting. :/ But I need to know about the aliens, and I do hope they'll tie Portal 2 and Chell into the story somewhere.