today, i finished playing portal2. well, sure its an old game but both portal games have a special place in my heart. when i was growing up, video games were stigmatized big time, my parents would always go out of the way to tell me video games are bad, and i think the media was to blame for most of it to be fair. the media always co-related the term “video games” with “addiction” and “violence”, and from my parent’s point of view, it makes sense for them to keep me away from it. but like everyone, i too had a rebellious teenager phase, so i did play a ton of games lol. but the first game that i saw as more than some mind-less fun was the first portal game.
back then, i had a very simple idea of a video game. my brain had classified video games into two categories. the first category was “the open-world do whatever you want kind of game”, almost all the gta games fell in this category for me. sure, these games had story-lines, but i didn’t quite focus on them lol. i was either too young to understand them, or i didn’t really care. i just used these games as a fun, but very limited open-world sandbox. pulling of tricks with glitches, driving cars, causing havoc, etc. and somehow, younger me had the time of my life doing it. the second category was “reach objective games”, these were games that had an objective that i had to reach. i mean, surely most games do fit in these category, but the most importantly, the only motivation to reach the goal was the dose of dopamine i’d get by doing it. games like “dragon city”, tetris, dx ball fell in this category. the point is, i didn’t acknowledge games as something could appeal to emotion, until i played the first portal game.
the setup of the game is really simple. there is an evil robot ai thing. it wants to conduct tests on you because thats its mission. and everyone else is dead. and at its core, it is a puzzle game, but every element of the game relied on this premise. everything from the game design, to the dialogues, made it almost feel like in not playing a “game”, but im actually consuming media, like a movie, or a book, it just happend to be interactive. it was at that moment that i realized, games are no different to them. i just had a very wrong understanding of what a “game” was.
so if i loved the portal games so much, why did i only play portal2 now? lol, so that has to do with the hardware i owned back then. i had a computer with 2 gb of ram rocking a dual-core 2ish GHz cpu. while most things i did frequently on my pc worked okay on it, getting games to run on it was a pain in the butt. both portal games were so well optimized that you could get them to even run on a potato. but my potato really didnt like portal 2. it did launch, but it wasn’t really playable. also, props to valve for optimizing the heck out of their games. i love it when a piece of software doesn’t use more resources that it really needs. writing software like that is really a work of art lol. alas, the mordern trend is to make everything a web app. oh well, a man can dream.
AND MAN WAS IT SATISFYING TO FINIALLY FINISH BOTH PORTAL GAMES :D
tl;dr: i really enjoyed the portal games. it’s high up there for me, along with games like nier automata and undertale. :D