We tried out the co-op multiplayer in Portal 2 last night…

There’s a nice little interface that allows you to invite your Steam friends to a co-op game.  Much nicer than simply being paired up with a random stranger, or having to wade through a server finder, or something like that.  I’m sure there is some kind of matchmaking system out there…  I can’t imagine they’re going to force people to only play with folks on their friends list.  But I didn’t use it, so I can’t say much about it.

Seems like the person who sends out the invite winds up as Atlas/Blue.  Don’t think I like that too much.  I would have preferred to be able to pick which robot I was when I joined the game.  But I guess there aren’t that many different ones to choose from…  And it doesn’t really matter anyway.

So, we started out in some kind of a training course.  Learned the basic mechanics of playing co-op.

You’ve got some quick commands that let you tag things in the world…  You can indicate where you’d like your partner to stand, or where you’d like them to place a portal, or which button to hit, or what they should look at.  You can even do a countdown to throw a switch together.  Makes communication fairly simple…  Even though we were sitting in the same room, and just talking to each-other, being able to tag stuff in-game was still handy.  Made it easy to place portals and things like that.

You’ve also got some gestures you can do.  They’re completely useless, but fun.  And you seem to be awarded more gestures as you progress through the co-op.  Which really makes me wonder why you’d bother to buy them in the cash store…  But maybe I wasn’t paying attention, and those are different gestures.

Playing with another person is interesting.  You’ve got two pairs of portals.  Orange gets and orange and a red portal…  Blue gets a blue and a purple portal.  The portals don’t cross-link – you can’t go in an orange portal and out a purple one.  But you can chain them together to accomplish some interesting things.  You can use a couple portals to jump off something high and get flung out of an angled surface…  And then a couple more portals to catch you on the other side and throw you down a hallway.

The teamwork is very weird.  After playing through both Portal games all by myself, it seems almost counter-intuitive to have another person along.  Puzzles seem downright insoluble until you remember that you’ve got another person along who can push buttons and open portals and things like that.

And even then, the puzzles are mindbending.  You think it’s hard to think with just two portals?  Try thinking with four.

So…  We went through the tutorial bit.  Then we went to the hub.  It’s a main chamber that links to all the real courses.  And there’s a jumbo screen that shows some interesting information…  How many steps you’ve taken, how many science points you’ve earned.

We did two courses, though I don’t remember what they were called.

GLaDOS is back, and she’s heckling the robots.  Although she seems kind of disappointed that she can’t actually harass you like she could a real human.  I can easily see her growing to miss Chell, and hunting her down for a repeat appearance in Portal 3.

Each course consisted of a number of puzzles set in the now-familiar Aperture Science Enrichment Center.  Moving panels, gleaming which surfaces…  The kind of stuff you expect from a Portal game.

But, after completing a number of those puzzles, we were then sent off the beaten track…  We were sent to a level that looked more like it belonged to the old Aperture Labs – the disused section down below the Enrichment Center.  We were first sent to find a disc, and later some blueprints.  When I found the disc and inserted it into the computer it said something about unit locations…  And when Terri found the blueprints we noticed a sign that said we should not upload the blueprints, right before we did upload them…  I’m wondering if GLaDOS is actually using us for some more nefarious purposes.

There seems to be some kind of basic plot or storyline going on here, with the robots becoming increasingly human (or at least more emotive) as the game progresses.  And GLaDOS seems to have something up her sleeve (again).  I wonder if there’ll be some kind of co-op boss battle when this is all said and done?  Or if we’ll ever find out what exactly we’re doing outside of the Enrichment Center?

Will be very interesting to see…

Terri finished Portal 2 yesterday, which means I can finally post my thoughts without having to worry about spoilers.

All things considered, I think it was a good game.  Good level design, nice graphics, roughly 10 hours of gameplay, interesting storyline…  I definitely think I got my money’s worth.  The folks who are complaining that it’s too short, and they don’t like the cash DLC store, and the ARG was crap…  Well, they can go to hell.

The cash DLC store has absolutely no impact on the actual gameplay.  It’s all cosmetic stuff.

The ARG has absolutely no impact on the game either.  It was just some marketing stuff to sell more games.  Nothing more than a fun ad campaign.

And the people complaining that the game is too short are doing something wrong.  The first Portal game was so short it couldn’t even be sold by itself – it was bundled in the Orange Box.  The first Portal game was only an hour or two long.  I got about 10 hours out of Portal 2, and I was not taking my time.  If you’re finishing Portal 2 in less than 5 hours you’ve got to be absolutely sprinting through it and not paying any attention to what’s going on around you.

So, ultimately, I think it’s a solid game.  Definitely a worthy sequel to Portal.  Definitely a good purchase.  I’d recommend the game to just about anyone.

It’s very interesting to see how they managed to turn a building into a character.  How the test chambers themselves manage to tell a story.

You’ve got the abandoned, decaying test chambers in the beginning.  They look like something right out of a Fallout game.

Then GLaDOS wakes up and starts putting things back together.  The panels act as extensions of her will…  Like her arms and hands…  And she seems more embarrassed at the state of the labs, than angry at you for killing her.  She’s quickly tidying things up and trying to make the place look presentable.

Then Wheatley takes over and you wind up in the old labs…  The old labs, plus Cave Johnson’s pre-recorded messages, tell you the story of Aperture Science’s rise and fall.  From a prestigious institute partnering with astronauts and war heroes and Olympians to test their products…  To bribing homeless folks to participate in tests…  To mandating all employees participate in testing…

And, along the way, I noticed something odd about the testing…  It doesn’t seem like you were ever really testing a product. In the first Portal game it’s kind of assumed that you’re testing the ASHPD to make sure it works correctly.  But as you make your way through the old Aperture Labs in Portal 2 you discover that they had a portal device (though it certainly wasn’t handheld) back in the 60′s.  So they knew the device worked.

In fact, the tests are more like the mazes you’d send a lab rat through to see if they can get the cheese.

Which makes me wonder what exactly was being tested in Aperture Science through all these years…

You eventually make it back up to the new labs, which Wheatley is doing a great job of destroying.  And it’s interesting to really see behind the curtain, to see how the new labs are put together.  It’s all just panels put together, hanging over a yawning chasm – not actual rooms and buildings.  And it’s kind of disturbing when Wheatley crams different test chambers together, or moves the chamber you’re in, or drops something through a chamber.  Makes the whole facility feel very fragile.

And then you’ve got the fight with Wheatley…  And this is where I got a little annoyed.  The Wheatley fight seemed far too easy, and didn’t make a whole lot of sense.  And then the ending didn’t make much sense either.

Fighting Wheatley seemed far easier than fighting GLaDOS in the first game.  It was very easy to him him with those bombs.  Very easy to grab the cores and plug them in.  Seems like I had a much harder time with GLaDOS in the first game.  Seems like there were time limits, or distractions, or more hazards, or something.  I died several times trying to shut down GLaDOS…  I defeated Wheatley on my very first try.

And then he’s trapped the button, which seems far too clever for him.  We’ve spent basically the entire game hearing about how dumb he is.  About how he’s been built from the ground up to make bad decisions.  And he went and trapped the button.  Which, while it didn’t work quite right, is actually a pretty good idea.

Then you get blown up, and you’re injured, and all you can do is shoot a portal at the moon…

Now, I understand why that works.  I know that conversion gel and all those white surfaces that you’ve been shooting your portals at are made from ground-up moon rocks.  I get it.  But…  How is the moon so readily available when you’re supposed to be deep underground?  I mean…  After you defeat Wheatley and get on the elevator you wind up passing through several more floors before you get to the surface.  So, why is the moon visible right there in the main room?

Anyway…  You get sucked out to the moon, and hang on to Wheatley for a while, and then GLaDOS is back in charge and fixes everything and hauls you in.  But I’m a little fuzzy on how exactly that happened.  The first time you did a core transfer it took a few moments…  There were whirs and sparks and GLaDOS was un-plugged and Wheatley was plugged in…  And none of that seems to happen this time around.

Granted, you’re busy trying not to die on the moon, so I might have missed something…  But it doesn’t seem like there’s enough time for the transfer.  Especially when you consider that she’s also had time to fix the meltdown.

Anyway…  You get hauled back in and black out for a while.  You wake up a little bit later and GLaDOS has had time to repair that main chamber.  You’re briefly introduced to the cooperative robots.  GLaDOS deletes Caroline, and then lets you go free…

Which seems a little atypical to me.  Seems like GLaDOS held on to a grudge for an awfully long time just to let go of it at the last minute…  Doesn’t seem very characteristic of her…

You hop in the elevator, go up a floor or two…  And there’s some turrets waiting to shoot you.  I was actually pretty happy to see them.  Thought GLaDOS was up to her old tricks again.  Thought she was going to try to kill me again, or capture me, or something…  And she doesn’t.

Then you’ve got the floor full of singing turrets, which just seemed random to me.  No idea why they were in there.  I recognized the giant, leopard-print king turret in the back…  But I’m not sure what any of that had to do with the game itself.  I don’t really recall anything with singing turrets at any previous point in either of the games.

It kind of feels like they were just stretching out the ending.  Trying to make it more interesting, or epic, or weird.  Like there wasn’t really much point to the singing turrets.

That whole ending-sequence – from the beginning of the boss battle with Wheatley to seeing Chell walk off into the sunset – felt sort of weird to me.  Thrown-together, less-polished, random, stretched-out…  Like they weren’t quite sure how to wrap things up, so they just threw in a boss fight and some kind of ending movie.

Of course that isn’t really the end of the game…  I’ve got the co-op to play now.  Which obviously takes place after the single player storyline.  And I’m anxious to see how that works out…  We put in a couple hours last night, and I’ve got some stuff to say about it, but this isn’t really the place.  I’m getting long-winded enough as it is.

The gels and funnels and faith plates and lightbridges were all neat…  Felt appropriate in the setting…  Made interesting tools…  Changed the game mechanics nicely…

But I felt like too much time was spent on them.  Like the game became too focused on the new mechanics, and the portals got left behind.  To a certain degree, I guess this makes sense…  You need to introduce the new stuff, let people play around with it, get familiar with the new mechanics.  We had a full game to get used to the portals.  So I guess I’d expect to see some focus on the new gels and things, at least for a while.

But it seems like the portals almost became secondary.

You were using portals in solving the puzzles…  But you were basically just using those portals to position the gels, or lightbridge, or funnel, or whatever.  Portals weren’t really the solution to a lot of the puzzles – the gels were, or the funnels, or whatever.  The portals were just tools to make it happen.

Especially if you compare the final boss battles…

GLaDOS is defeated entirely through use of portals.  A couple portals to redirect the rocket into her and knock off a core…  A couple portals to hit the button and drop the core into the incinerator.

The Wheatley fight requires you to cover the room in conversion gel before you can use any portals at all.  Then you use portals (on the conversion gel) to throw the bombs back at him…  But you have to use the repulsion gel to bounce up and grab cores…  The fight would be just plain impossible without the use of the gels.

And that didn’t feel right…  I mean, the game is called Portal, not Coversion Gel.

Still, despite my whining, it really is a solid game.  Lots of fun.  Thoroughly enjoyed myself.  And now I’m playing co-op and going back through looking for achievements.  So it’ll be a little while before I put it away and move on to something else.

Finished Portal 2 last night…

It probably took me about 10 hours to play the game from start to finish.  That’s certainly shorter than I’d like, but it seems about average for a game these days.  And I haven’t touched the co-op yet…  So I think I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of this game.

Thoroughly enjoyed it.  At least as good as the first game…  Better in some respects, worse in others.

I liked that there weren’t so many twitchy puzzles that required you create portals while sailing through the air with split-second timing.  There were a couple of those…  But they were largely absent from this game.

I didn’t so much like that the game was less open-ended.  In the first Portal, entire rooms would be covered in white panels.  You could create portals almost anywhere you wanted.  Part of the difficulty in solving a puzzle was figuring out where to put the portals.  In Portal 2, a lot of the time there’s just one or two white panels, and the difficulty in solving the puzzle is simply finding those panels.

Not going to say too much more about it right now…  Terri is still playing, and I don’t want to spoil anything for her.

Suffice to say it was a terrific game and I can’t wait to try out the co-op.

Nerf NOW!! has a comic today that illustrates what I’ve felt is one of the biggest differences between Portal 1 and 2:

And the commentary is spot-on:

Portal 2 is an amazing game.

With this out of the way, I will now elaborate on something I noticed, which is how it manages the puzzles along the game’s experience.

In the original: you were thrown into a room, with the goal to leave one way or another, using your portal gun to shazzam your way to victory.

The sequel does more of the same, and adds new pieces to the puzzle, such as the very fun accelerating gel.

However, the white panels where you are able to put your portals are few and far between.The result is that now most of the puzzles are solved by choosing which one of the 4 or 5 panels available will get which end of the portal gun. Probably only one of them even, as the other is usually occupied on a light bridge / gel faucet / gravity beam.

The biggest challenge for me in the end was typically finding the panel in question. Some are cleverly hidden but it’s more often than not, it’s a matter of perception rather than logical thinking. Plenty of times I didn’t know what to do, so I just ended up just scanning around for lonely panels and based on their location, I found what I needed to do.

Still, I don’t think this makes the game worse, I think it just kinda gives it a different feel. Like it’s now a treasure hunt for hidden panels instead of a gravity riddle with portals.

On another note, I’m pretty glad they took out the twitch aspect of some jumps. If you finally found out how to solve a puzzle correctly, now it’s resolution is smooth and simple – no more flinging portals while breaking the sound barrier in mid-air to project yourself perfectly in a tiny gap.

That said; I’d not object to a few of these kinds of challenges on future custom maps, if they end up being made.

It’s a good game, go play it!