The Cake is a Lie: A Portal Review

Portal quickly became an icon for geeks everywhere, with catchphrases that are still heard like, "The cake is a lie," and the song "Still Alive." As the game begins, you are waking up and find yourself a participant in some sort of strange experiments. You make your way through the game with the urging of a computer named GLADoS. It's a first-person one-player puzzle game in the guise of a sort of first person shooter. Originally, it was released as part of Valve's Orange Box, along with Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life Episode 2. Once you beat the levels you could also mod them. By far the best part of the game is the dialogue, delivered by GLADoS, which includes things like "Please note that we have added a consequence for failure. Any contact with the chamber floor will result in an unsatisfactory mark on your official testing record, followed by death." It's fun to play through just to hear her! But the puzzles can be really interesting too. The puzzles come in the form of separate rooms in which you have to use your portal gun to get out. Your portal gun makes...Portals! One portal you can go in, the other you can go out. So, by shooting the in portal on the floor, and the out portal on the ceiling, you will fall out of the ceiling. There are lots of really neat ways to use the portals.

Portal is very easy, though sometimes tricky. I am not a strong first-person shooter player, but Portal has been a lot of fun for me. It's also a short game, so don't expect 80 hours of gameplay from it. It's nice to casually do a level now and then. If you use Valve's Steam program, you can buy Portal for $20, the Orange Box for $30, or the "complete set" that has 20 different games, for $100.

To play Portal, the minimum system requirements are as follows: 1.7 GHz Processor, 512 MB RAM, DirectX8 Compatible Video Card, Windows 2000/XP/Vista. If you're right at these, you might need to turn the video quality on the game down. The recommendation from Valve is to have a P4 Processor at 4 GHz or higher, 1 GB RAM, DirectX 9 compatible video card, and Windows 2000, XP, or Vista. They're not terribly high requirements; I don't meet the entire recommended, but the game still seems fine to me.

Portal is a lot of fun for both avid and casual gamers alike, so I suggest you try it out!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1127708/quotes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_(video_game)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/400/