Only managed to play through the intro this morning so far.
Those first 10-15 minutes have been better than anything except some of the most memorable parts from Portal 1.
Can’t wait to try Co-op!
I don’t get the store however. Some of the stuff you can purchase seems cool, but this isn’t Team Fortress 2. It’s a puzzle 2 player Co-op game. I doubt anyone will play it through more than a few times, right?
Where’s the incentive to purchase all this bling then?
Haven’t finished Co-op, but Single Player took about 6-hours (just going by Steam in-game time, it probably is a little less since I dicked around watching the Extras for a bit).
This game is all about the details, and one I really liked was how the music would subtly change when you’re solving puzzles. The hum of a laser or a hard light construct would work as an additional track or instrument, and the track gets ‘fuller’ as you progress through a puzzle. In room 13, they really go all-out as you start taking out turrents…
For what it’s worth, it took me 8 hours and I didn’t think I was messing around all that much.
Also, co-op should have it’s own story, tying more parts of the mythology together. Didn’t start that one yet though, waiting for a pal of mine to finish his single-player run.
Eh, I remember when I was little and $50 carts gave you about 3-4 hours of playtime (assuming the game wasn’t Nintendo Hard). It’s hard to get worked up about it when I keep it in perspective. If it was 6 hours of pure mediocre, then it wouldn’t be worth it, but it heavily depends on the quality, and clearly they thought padding it out would have been to the detriment to the story and/or gameplay (there’s only so many puzzles they can make before it becomes boring, and only so many mechanics they can introduce before it becomes overwhelming). I don’t want to force developers to make games artificially long, there are so many games that were “good until…”
Should shorter games charge less? Maaaaaybe, but there is a stigma against cheaper games, and I suspect that factors into it. It also depends on how much they had to pay the people responsible, Valve puts a lot of effort into paying top-of-the-line storywriters and such, so I think the price tag may be justified, but then again I’m not exactly their accountant so I can’t say anything for sure.
Final puzzle spoilers:
[spoiler]Did anyone else completely forget the clue that lunar dust conducts portals and shoot at the moon because
It was prominently focused on the screen at the time
It would be totally frickin awesome
or am I just weird? It wasn’t even a shot in the dark for me, it was mostly just “I’ve always wanted to see whether this would work…”[/spoiler]
So it’s perfectly in line for a Valve game as far as hours/dollar, assuming you play Co-op.
Arkham Asylum:
Retail: $60
Avg Length: 12-16 hours (ballpark figure from internet)
Scaled to $50: 10 - 13 hours (scaled by 5/6)
It only starts paling in comparison if you start comparing it to your RPGs (Mass Effect), or long Action Adventure games like Zelda, whose ratio is almost $1-2/hr, depending on your sidequest obsession, and it really pales to JRPGs, who often have under a dollar per hour.
Portal 2 is perfectly in line with Valve’s normal pricing, and is in line with Arkham Asylum (and possibly other similar games, I couldn’t think of enough recent AAA titles in a similar genre to compare), but it seems fairly normal.
Gah! I’ve been sitting on my porch all afternoon waiting for the stupid UPS truck to arrive, pre-ordered thru amazon. And it still isn’t here yet! By the time it comes, if it does, the power will be out and the massive tornados will be lifting the roof from my house.
I’m so bummed:mad: And I have to work tomorrow. And the whole family is coming in for Easter starting tomorrow. So no time for sinjin to play but today.:smack::smack::smack::smack::smack:
I’d rather shell out $50 for a short game jam-packed with high-quality gameplay from start to finish than for a longer game riddled with mediocre filler in between set pieces. There are other serious development issues when you demand that a game company extend the game time of their projects, but that’s a hijack for another thread.
I’m just happy it runs on my mediocre laptop. The fact that a game this detailed will run on a machine with no graphics card is pretty impressive IMHO.
It’s so old and yet can still look good, but since it is so old, it’s just so damned scalable.
So I’m still scratching my head at the item store. Really, who the hell is planning on buying anything from there? Much less the whole enchilada. A few hats and emotes ONE other person will see, the one or two times you will play this game in Coop for like $80?
I’m up to chapter 4 after about 2.5 hours of gameplay.
Love the story, the dialogue, the ATMOSPHERE. The chambers don’t only seem to be “alive” but they all exhibit signs of decay and destruction in a very animated way. Like the panels that try to put themselves in the right position. Awesome.
The actual puzzles so far however (I’m in puzzle 17 or 18 so far) have been incredibly easy. I mean SUPER easy compared to the first portal.
Unless they ramp up the difficulty and number of steps you need to overcome them right quick, I think that will be my biggest disappointed with the game.
Just way too easy.
I haven’t checked all of the options in the main menu, however. Are there different difficulties for the levels? In the first portal you could try even harder versions of all the puzzles on subsequent playthroughs, is this the same for Portal 2?