Portal vs. Portal 2

I think I may be the only person on the planet who's not madly in love with Portal 2, but who's also not completely unimpressed. We all know I'm a retro curmudgeon, and that I've gotten into the dangerous habit of challenging popular opinion, so it should come as no surprise that I prefer the original Portal to the sequel that virtually everyone is hailing as The Second Coming of...well, Portal.

The first Portal remains one of the most perfect games I have ever played--and considering I'm something of a perfectionist, that's high praise. When I play video games, my primary interest is in the gameplay: Portal offers an excellent learning curve, keeps a close eye on the pacing of the puzzles, provides challenges that require thoughtful and skillful solutions, and...really, I could keep going, but suffice it to say, the gameplay is the primary focus of the game, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

The visuals are deliberately crafted to keep the focus on the puzzles, too. Level architecture is appropriately complex, but the decorations are kept simple to avoid drawing attention away from the brain-intensive challenges. Some people have complained about the sterile white walls of the Aperture Science testing chambers, but that's like complaining that minimalist music doesn't have a lot of instrumentation. Portal is as pretty as the technology of the time allowed, but the visuals are deliberately not of primary importance.

As for the story, the entire plot can be summarized in a sentence or two, but it's the subtle and gradual unraveling of the details that makes the story compelling. That, and the increasingly unstable computer AI who does all the talking. There's a lot of room for interpretation in the things GLaDOS does and does not say, so in some regards, the player gets to create and explore his or her own version of the story. Story isn't the main focus of the game, and it's conveyed with just enough mystery and suspense that players have something to chew on during the pauses in their puzzle-solving.

Of course, you can't mention GLaDOS's dialogue without talking about the humor. Regardless of whether you find the game to be funny (and the vast majority of people do), the humor principle the designers followed is solid: gradually contort the computer and her words into something far more absurd and sinister than the player expects. An appreciation of irony, absurdity, and/or twistedly evil ideas is all the player needs to be tickled by the writing in this game.

Now, let's compare this to Portal 2: There's plenty of absurdity and twistedly evil ideas, but there's also a mean streak to the humor--some of it is clever and unexpected enough to be pretty universally funny, but anyone with any kind of sensitivity to, say, being overweight or adopted, might stop laughing when GLaDOS starts making what are essentially well-articulated fat jokes. Most of the humor, however, is fairly absurd, but the absurdity leans toward idiocy and lunacy more often than not. (In fact, there's an achievement for lunacy, but that's a different story altogether.) So, we have a shift from humorously defying people's expectations to relying on the inherent humor of stupidity, insanity, and being fat and adopted.

That being said, there are quite a few jokes that are adapted from the first Portal, and they straddle the fence between fun reference and uncreative duplication. Still, a lot of the material through the first half of the game feels very much in line with what the previous installment has to offer, and there are some fantastic laughs, but something about the writing doesn't feel as quotable this time around...and the dialogue gets more and more mundane between the last ramblings of Cave Johnson and the final showdown. Even the closing song, while quite catchy and performed well, is disappointingly pedestrian compared to "Still Alive." I chalk it up to focusing too hard on telling the story.

Whereas Portal is unquestionably a gameplay-oriented game with graphics and dialogue that are attractive enough to help maintain interest, Portal 2 strikes me as a story-driven game with gameplay tailored toward advancing the plot and showcasing the pretty graphics. This approach is not intrinsically good or bad, but it's decidedly not my preferred style, nor is it completely in line with the feel of the first game.

To its credit, Portal 2 employs a design tactic that keeps the player focused on the puzzles, but it's a tactic that's only necessary because the environments are so huge and visually distracting--portal surfaces are usually only found in places where you need to use a portal, and they generally cover just enough surface area for you to land your portal in the right spot on the first or second try. Even when an entire wall is portal-safe, an observant player can typically detect some subtlety or pattern in the wall texture that indicates where a portal should be placed.

On my first playthrough, scouring massive rooms for any distant portal surfaces brought back a few unpleasant memories of the hidden object challenges in Metroid: Other M. If all the environments were breathtakingly beautiful and a joy to explore, I might not have minded, except I'm running Portal 2 on a computer that can barely display screenshots of the game. I have played a lot of computer games, and never in my life have I needed to turn every single graphics option to the absolute minimum setting.

Emancipation grids appear to be non-functional without the fancy special effects, and bouncy goo erratically changes colors when it pours out of the spout, splattering on the ground in patches of solid color that look like they were lovingly crafted by a 3-year-old in Microsoft Paint. The game gets awfully light on gameplay in some places, and while the rest of the game looks nice enough, the sections that are supposed to inspire awe and focus on the story come across as dull filler...especially when you have to wait around for characters to stop yakking.

With the exception of the final boss battle, the original Portal never forced you to stop what you were doing if you wanted to listen to the dialogue in full. In Portal 2, excessive dialogue slows down the game significantly if you stop to hear everything. Wheatley in particular likes to talk your ear off, most often in places where there's no real reason (such as a complicated puzzle) to stick around. If you're interested in the plot and the prospect of hilarious dialogue (and I imagine most players are), you'll probably find yourself standing around a lot, waiting for characters to hurry through their unnecessarily long pauses and finish what they're saying.

Still, Portal 2 is a lot of fun. It's just a different type of fun than the first game, and it's unfortunately not always the kind of fun I enjoy most in my video games. For me, Portal 2 is at its best when some wisecracking computer interjects with an absurd general assertion of "fact," or when the story develops with the gameplay as opposed to instead of, or when I spend more time on creative portal use than on locating a viable surface to initiate creative portal use.

It's a good game and a good sequel that acknowledges the insane popularity of its franchise without resting too much on its laurels. There are clever challenges and funny lines and interesting plot twists. There's also a nice homage to the first few levels of the original Portal that serves to demonstrate both how much things have changed and how first-time players (assuming anybody skipped the first game and started with the sequel) can start thinking with portals, in a way that won't detain the veterans for too long.

I just think it loses sight of what made the original so great, in favor of what makes certain other games so great.

I have plans to try out the extensive co-op mode, which I imagine will be much more gameplay-oriented than the single-player story mode. I'm not enthused about multiplayer gaming becoming the future of single-player games, but it's not necessary to expand on that here, as I've already explained on this blog why multiplayer gaming is not my thing. Let's hope that Portal 2 still has a few good surprises in store for this curmudgeonly gamer.