Thanks to a clause in my contract with Meteoid (frankly, I don't want them videotaping me sleep anymore.), I've had to sell myself out once again to the snarky bastards at Valve. I don't find a huge problem with this except, the inevitable. Valve is milking the Havok Engine until they can't anymore, then, they drugged it and force-milked it for a while longer. The bastard child that came about in the process of this was Portal. Now, I'm not a puzzle gamer so games where I have to use my brain to figure things out is not worth it. I went online and found some awesome codes with which to exploit the console and win the game automatically very well written strategy guides, or walkthroughs, whatever you'd like to call them. The thing is though, it gives you a tutorial on how to do most of the stuff you need to know Like Half-life (the first one) gave you an Idea of how to work with the things and fire your weapon, because using a mouse is beyond your reach and was very hard to use. The fact that I needed to go to a strategy guide made me think about how much of my life I've wasted on irrelevant rambling on games that I usually don't beat without the help of my sidekick; The internet. Although, I must say to my surprise Portal was actually fun. Very fun. When you finish a puzzle you get that feeling like you're god, obviously using a PORTAL GUN does make you god. I mean it's a gun, that shoots fucking portals, what more can you ask? Here's the neat-o part about this. When I finished portal and was in a feel good-ey attitude I mustered up the courage to fuck with my copy and download some mods. One of the first results was adding the maps from HL2 and the rest of the relevant HL2 content and then play the levels of Half-Life 2 with the portal gun.

That makes playing HL2 totally worth it a billionth time around. this time you can shoot a portal on a wall and then one below you, then, you can shoot the officers in the back of the head, and they don't care. It's awesomely awesomer, because you can get into places you aren't supposed to be without using that dastardly noclip. You're probably going to say, OH HOW COULD YOU? YOU CHEATED AND USED THE CONSOLE? Well for starters, hell yes I did. The thing is once you beat a game using the console makes it fun to spawn enemies or generally do whatever the hell you want. There is some discrepancy as people have said to me, You could easily buy Garry's mod for a couple Euro and stop bitching. Unfortunately, I don't have ANY money. The thing is that Garry's mod has a community of people who create these weapons without licensing and randomly steal content from other games like Halo and.. Well that's it. The rest of the weapons are a selection of models stolen from a free source presumably because they're all watermarked. The one thing they've stolen and coded while camping their mother's basement was the Portal gun. It's fine and dandy, but fuck Garry's mod, I want to play Half-Life 2, as intended, with the portal gun. Not a physics mod, now stop e-mailing me about it. At the risk of going insane over almost nothing I'll continue on about Portal. It's a fun game, but using other source games with the Portal gun is far more intriguing.

Scoring:
8/10

Half-Life 2: Portal (mod):
9.5/10

There you have it, my thoughts on Portal.

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Email this cool dude: baltic99@visualstyle.us