digitalemur: a yellow coreopsis or tickseed flower on green background (Default)
Mx. Coreo Jones ([personal profile] digitalemur) wrote2008-01-07 10:04 am

The cake is a lie.

Back in August when I heard that Jonathan Coulton had released a song for the credits of some Half-Life 2 mod, I listened to it, did not understand it, and liked it anyway. It was crankily nutty in a way that fit my mood WAY TOO WELL at the time.

Still kinda fits.

Yesterday [livejournal.com profile] sstrickl showed me Portal.

Holy crap.

HOLY CRAP.

I was in love after about 5 minutes.

And now I understand the song! (Okay, I had to look up the reference to Black Mesa, but otherwise.)

So if you know somebody who has Portal, and you have a little time to spend watching them play or playing it yourself, it's a short game and it's probably the best watching-someone-play experience I've had.

Don't be too disturbed when I pick lines from that song for my new journal titles. Because it's been 6 months now. And I'm Still Alive. And there is science to do. And the cake is a lie.

Hey look, GLaDOS has a MySpace page! (And there's a very nice little explanatory video there too.)

Update: 5 minutes later, James IMs me. He has a Weighted Companion Cube as his icon. He hasn't read this, he's just had that icon for a while now. Holy crap. He points out that the Portal people also wrote Psychonauts. This makes so much sense! So Psychonauts fans? You should play Portal. Portal fans? You should play Psychonauts. I will just watch and squee. They should mix the two! I know bacon cake sounds like a bad idea but how bad could it be?

[identity profile] sstrickl.livejournal.com 2008-01-07 06:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, you do use that method when euthanizing... the... oh, I can't finish, it's so terrible :(

[identity profile] grnarmadillo.livejournal.com 2008-01-07 06:30 pm (UTC)(link)
Huh, I didn't think of using portals to drop stuff in. I'd just leave the stuff by the incinerator and portal back over after pushing the button. Guess what the devs say in the commentary is true - it IS hard to convince players to look upwards to see that yes, there's a portalable ceiling there.

That's the beauty of this game, you never know when there's some clever solution you've missed. :)

[identity profile] sstrickl.livejournal.com 2008-01-07 06:54 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, I don't know whether there's one in the euthanization area -- there probably is, but I also fall back onto carrying the cube to the furnace, especially given the time limit involved (though portals are always faster than carrying!). I'd imagine there isn't just to make it that much more traumatic -- after all, if you could use portals, you could avoid watching the cube falling to its demise :(

[identity profile] digitalemur.livejournal.com 2008-01-08 01:59 am (UTC)(link)
I think the incinerator for euthanizing the you-know-what had a high and rather obscured ceiling over it, so it wasn't an option to do it there. But man in the final battle [livejournal.com profile] sstrickl got pretty effective at placing a thingie, going over to press the button, and then portaling the thingie into the incinerator!

[identity profile] digitalemur.livejournal.com 2008-01-08 02:01 am (UTC)(link)
In general, the sheer number of clever solutions possible is kinda scary!