The Orange Box: Portal
480 words, 1 image 
It’s been a few weeks since I bought The Orange Box for the Xbox 360. I believe this single DVD package stems from Valve’s realisation that while they had a number of saleable products ready for Christmas 2007, none of them quite warranted a full price release. So, we get a bundle. On that DVD there is:
- Half Life 2 (formerly a full length PC game)
- Half Life 2: Episode 1 (formerly a short PC game, the first of a series)
- Half Life 2: Episode 2 (a new episode)
- Portal (a brand new short game)
- Team Fortress 2 (a brand new multiplayer-only game)
We’ll take them in the order I played them, starting with Portal.
Portal is a first-person game in which instead of shooting bullets, you shoot doors, or portals. One trigger creates a blue portal, the other creates an orange portal. If you step into the blue portal, you come out of the orange portal, and vice versa. If you peer into the blue portal, you see where you would end up if you went through, just as if it were an ordinary door.
If you place the portals correctly, you can see your “self”, a slim female in prison clothes. She has woken up in some kind of test chamber. You don’t know why, and all you can do is perform the portal related tests until the opportunity to do something else arises. If you place one portal on the floor behind you, and the other on the wall in front of you, you can gaze at your own arse, which is quite shapely despite the prison clothes.
As portal takes you through a series of increasingly tricky puzzles, the voice of GladOS, a loony computer, narrates. GladOS is funny, but sinister. She supplies some semblance of a plot to the puzzling.
The game is very carefully constructed to gradually introduce the concepts you need to solve the puzzles. If anything, I thought the difficulty increased too slowly - but it was all over in four hours or so, so I suppose there would have been little point in rushing these things. Still, it’s a while before you get to aim your own portal, and a while longer before you get to aim both, and that’s somewhat frustrating.
The fun really begins when you start messing with momentum. “Speedy thing goes in - speedy thing comes out”, as GladOS explains. If you’re some height above a flat surface, and you put a portal in that, then another portal in the wall, you can jump into the floor, and come shooting out of the wall with the speed you gained during your fall. It’s a shame there’s no replays to see that happening from an external viewpoint.
I can’t go into the plot, or the characters you build relationships with - these are worth finding for yourself.
Portal is thoroughly recommended. It’s engaging, funny, satisfying, and doesn’t outstay its welcome.