Читать книгу The Gamer's Bucket List - Chris Watters - Страница 11

Portal 2

PC, X360, MAC, PS3

First Released Apr 18, 2011

The story of a woman with a portal gun and an artificial intelligence with a sadistic sense of humor first captured our imaginations in Portal, a spectacular, if short, game released in 2007. By shooting this gun at one surface and then another, you could create two oval-shaped portals. Walk in one and you come out the other. Jump off of a ledge into one and fly out the other. Put one on the floor, one on the ceiling above it, and you can fall forever. Playing around with the portal gun was great fun, and using it to solve the tricky puzzles was very satisfying. Tie it all together with an A.I. guide that slowly transitions from innocuous instructor to malevolent manipulator, and you’ve got a lovely little game.

Portal 2, then, is this lovely little game blown out in every direction to make a sequel that is bigger, brainier, and more bizarrely hilarious than its predecessor. The small test chambers open up to a sprawling scientific complex, packed with outlandish new discoveries and plenty of portal puzzles. There’s a cooperative mode, so you can team up with someone else to take on even tougher puzzles with twice as many portals.

And then there’s the writing. Portal 2 has some of the most sublimely funny writing ever to grace a video game. From the ambitiously maniacal founder of this strange science facility to the sophisticated A.I.’s that vie for your loyalty to the demented talking machinery you must wrangle, there are perhaps more quotable lines in Portal 2 than in any other game. These characters aren’t just comic relief either; they are sympathetic and nuanced and genuinely intriguing. (Yes, even the spherical one that just yells about space most of the time.) You’ll laugh, you’ll cheer, you’ll have a fantastic time, and you’ll never volunteer for a scientific study ever again.

A.I.’S SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS

Okay, fine. Let’s all act like humans. ‘Look at me. Boy, do I love sweating. Let’s convert beef and leaves into energy and excrete them later and go shopping.’