To be clear: it’s not 2008. I’m a late PS3 adaptor, and I’ve just now bought the Orange Box. I’m at room 16 and I’m having a lot of (infuriating) fun.
Here’s the situation: halfway through room 15 there’s a sort of winding corridor flooded with acidic water. There are (I’m about to find out) three platforms that come out of the corner, travel along a straight line, and then disappear into the wall again. It seems pretty clear what I have to do: shoot a blue portal where the first platform reaches the wall, jump through the portal onto the platform, shoot an orange portal where the other platform ends up, jump back into the blue portal and out the orange portal onto the next platform, repeat until I reach the other side or have slowly become colourblind. The problem is I can’t get the timing right: jumping onto the platform, shooting the orange portal, and jumping back into the blue portal before the platform has moved too far away (and the other platform is no longer in the desired place) proves to be too much for my 31-year-old fingers.
So after n times of trying (n being an embarassingly high number) I discover that if you venture into the entry portal just far enough, you can sort of poke your gun out of the exit portal without actually stepping into the next room, shooting a new exit portal: that way, if you just retreat afterwards, you end up there instead of where you came from. I had shot a portal through another portal in a few rooms, but only straight ahead, without actually peeking through the portal. So I figure: okay, so I can get onto the second platform without ever having touched the first one. Try that a few times: same timing issues going from the second to the third platform. Then I think: if I can do it going from 1 to 2, surely I can do it going from 2 to 3? And what do you know: it works. Peaking through the 2-to-3 portal, I find out I can make a hole in a wall over solid ground and complete the corridor without ever using the platforms (and, technically, without stepping through the intervening portals).
So, I made it through, but without using the platforms: I find it hard to believe that they’re there for no reason, and the whole “carefully leaning into the next room in the nothingness between portals” thing doesn’t seem very elegant to me. So, what do you think: did I do it the “right” way, or did I exploit a glitch in the game? Did you use the platforms, or not?
Man, I can’t wait to get my hands on that cake…