Here’s the Portal 2 teaser that Gabe Newell unveiled at Sony’s press conference yesterday. As you can imagine, the response was rather enthusiastic. From the looks of it the new testing facility is located in a jungle somewhere. It’s pretty run down at first, but it looks like GLADOS is hard at work repairing it and making it more devious than before.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve always thought the original Portal was a bit overrated. Chuck will probably flay me alive for saying so but it just never did much for me. By the time I got around to playing it (Half Life Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2 dominated my attention for about a month), the internet had run the game into the ground so I was sick of hearing about it.
It was definitely funny in a sardonic kind of way, but I think it got so much attention because it was the first genuinely funny game in a market full of humorless space marines. “The cake is a lie” and such felt like the obnoxious randomness that passes for cleverness these days. I know the delightfully mad geniuses behind Old Man Murray wrote the dialogue and it was pretty good, but I still don’t think Portal was the comedic masterpiece it’s cracked up to be. So…now GLADOS is all mad and hurt, because you fought back when she tried to immolate you? How is that funny? How does it make sense?
The constant delays also get under my skin. Why does it take Valve over 3 years to develop a sequel to what amounts to a glorified tech demo, on an engine they built and know inside out, with assets they own? To be fair it was a highly creative and cerebral tech demo, but 3 years is pushing it when Bioware can construct a masterpiece like Mass Effect 2 in less time. Call me a misanthrope, but when something’s so popular, I’m more inclined to be skeptical.
