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Portal 2 (PS3) Status: Finished playing I started playing this game on Monday 30 May, 2011 // I stopped playing this game on: Sunday 6 November, 2011
Current opinion of this game
Great fun, though a bit long for me. Your mileage may vary, especially if you didn't play Portal.
November 6, 2011 10:19:41 AM
So, my son eventually tired of Portal 2 leaving me to ponder whether or not to play the single player campaign before finishing the co-op. We never got far enough in the co-op to see any of the new additions (paints + floaty-tube thingies) so I figured I might as well give the single player a go. I've already finished the game (yesterday afternoon) and I have a decidedly mixed taste about it. It's a good game and I enjoyed it, but the first half was definitely underwhelming. It was neat to wander around and re-learn many of the puzzles and so on, but it sort of dragged a bit. Wheatley is wonderful, but GladOS was a bit tiring, which is strange. It also felt quite noticeable how they'd chip in with quips and commentary once you reach certain milestones: mostly the beginning and the end of each level. Everything did change roughly halfway through, which was fun. The new "narrator" (Cave Johnson?) was a refreshing change and it was nice to discover some more of Aperture's history. How big is the place, really? The puzzles were also more interesting because, for once, they started to feel (even if they weren't actually) more open in that I could experiment until finding a solution rather than trying to discover what the only solution was. Portal 2 definitely feels like a tighter experience, but I felt a noticeable sense of loss when it came to my puzzle-solving. This might be a bit unfair, because I imagine that were I to go back to Portal 1, I'd probably find that most puzzles have a single solution...but they didn't FEEL like that for me. This might be due to a sense of wonder (wow, portals are cool!) which didn't exist for the sequel (oh, it's portals) when compared to the new things (paints!) for which I did have more of a sense of wonder. I guess what I enjoyed the most in the sequel was the progression through the old aperture levels together with the greater variety of voices including the new narrators as well as the robots, cores, and so on. In all, a shorter game might have worked better for me, though I'm probably the only person on the planet to think so. :-)
June 2, 2011 10:27:19 AM
I guess I'm going about it the wrong way because instead of playing the main game, I'm playing the co-op campaign with my son. I figured it's time he tried something different than Little Big Planet... I was worried that we'd have trouble with the whole first person thing as well as the main mechanic (the portals). I was also curious to see if the story/narrative/humor registered with him at all. I figured that he wouldn't get it at all. I was wrong! While we haven't paid much attention to the "long" dialogue, it's the short witty and contextual gags that work the best. Even my four year old cracked up (literally LOLed) when GlaDos quipped "Nice catch, Orange" after I failed to catch a falling cube... We all laughed at that one... Result so far? We're loving it...and can't wait until the weekend to try again. As far as the puzzles are concerned, so far I've been doing most of the directing...but I am a bit nervous about what will happen once things get a little more complicated and also start to require more coordinated action (timed jumps and that sort of thing).

Portal 2 (PS3)