Damn, I’m stuck on an early level (somewhere around room 18 or so?) and haven’t heard much of this dialogue yet. How long is this game, anyway?
“I don’t hate you.”
Not very, actually. 19 levels, with the 19th being the “longest” (you’ll understand).
The game is brilliantly funny, for reasons listen above. ‘‘The cake is a lie’’ would probably have been funnier if I hadn’t heard it a thousand times first, but fortunately, I had no idea what I was getting into with Portal. I think it’s one of the single best strategy games ever, on par with Lemmings. Its only drawback is that it’s too short.
I loved Companion Cube with all my heart. I have a picture of it on my desktop. It took me so long to incinerate it. I looked for other ways, but alas. 
The companion sphere, on the other hand, is a jerk.
If you get through the challenges fast you miss a lot of it.
Yes. All my GLaDOS quotes are from the first four or five rooms.
“The cake is a lie” isn’t meant to be funny in game. In the context of the story… (spoiler for FoieGrasIsEvil)
it’s just meant to be a warning that IIRC doesn’t even make sense the first time you see it, because you haven’t been promised the cake yet. Only later does the party stuff kick in.
Also, the scrawled messages are clearly from a crazy person, and as mentioned above they’re more vaguely sinister and creepy than intended to be ha-ha-jokes. Though the poetry pastiches are clever and mordantly humorous.
Outside the game, “the cake is a lie” became a meme that was cute in an in-joke sorta way. Sometimes it made me laugh if the reference came out of nowhere. It’s fun to be caught offguard by a reference to a game like Portal in a discussion about, I dunno, a political speech.
So forget that single line. The rest of the game, primarily GLaDOS’s dialogue but also the turrets and (again spoilage prevention for FoieGrasIsEvil)
personality spheres and the fantabulous “Still Alive”
is all funny and clever and twisted and lovely and huggable. What’s it like to lack a soul, OP?
“The cake is a lie” was never meant to be funny.
The whole point was that it was ominous.
One of the early rooms involves a comment from GLaDOS that says that after you complete all the tests in the all the rooms:
“…you will be baked and then there will be cake.”
The captions actually render this as “…you will be baked garbled cake”.
The “cake is a lie” thing is only seen in the back areas of the various test chambers (i.e. the parts of the test chambers that aren’t officially parts of the chambers) as you play through. It is a warning from other participants/rebels/whoever. When you get to the final level you discover that the cake is nothing more than a fire pit (with a cake symbol over it).
The reason the programmers chose cake was that they wanted the PC to have an ultimate goal, and apparently one of the designers said “Everyone loves cake” or something to that effect.
Seriously, if GladOs isn’t a funny PC game character, who is? I cannot think of any others that come close to this level of humor, and I say this as a veteran of all the old Lucasarts adventure games.
I thought the whole “cake is a lie” thing was pretty funny. You’re running around with this computer making these weird, ineffective attempts to mess with your head, which come across as a computer utterly failing to understand human motivation - except that, it turns out that her previous victims fell for it completely. I picture the poor schlub who predeceased you going through all these struggles, thinking, “At least there’s cake at the end.” When they find out the truth, I picture them doing the full-on Darth Vader, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
It is sort of ominous, too, but mostly as an artifact of parody - it’s making fun of similar games like System Shock that have used the ominous grafitti trope before.
GLaDOS was amusing in a wry and dry sarcastic way, but you’re comparing against Sam and Max here. Come on.
I also found the polite little machine gun sentries to be hilarious.
The song is by Jonathan Coulton. I love his stuff and you can get him singing Still Alive from many places.
On his live album he announces at the end of the song that there is cake for everyone and the crowd chants
The Cake is NOT a lie.
(there actually is cake I guess)
They’re funny in very different ways - so different that it’s almost a stretch to compare them at all. Especially considering how subjective humor is (the OP’s obvious soullessness aside :P).
For example - I personally enjoy Portal’s style of humor more than that of Sam and Max (though I love 'em both), because I’m particularly susceptible to understated, character-driven humor that makes you smile rather than laugh out loud. I get why someone would find Sam and Max funnier, but as much as I do laugh when I play Sam and Max, my emotional response never quite reaches the heights of amusement I felt during Portal’s best moments. When GLaDOS matter-of-factly informed me that my failure would result in a negative report, followed by death, or when one of those adorable little turrets sighed her forgiveness for me as she tumbled off a cliff, I was thoroughly amused, even if I wasn’t busting a gut per se.
I played with subtitles on so as to catch everything. I usually do that if the game supports subtitles.
Then who wrote the graffiti? And when?
Doug Rattmann. Aperture Science employee who survived the deadly neurotoxin and was then forced to go through the Enrichment Center.
The genius of the game – for my money, at least – was just as someone described before. It starts out pretty normal, taking you through a pretty typical-seeming tutorial. There’s something very subtly unnerving about the sterility of the environment and the gently distorted voice, but it’s easy to shrug off: this is a Science Place and a little otherworldly. It seems almost like a parody of talking computer AIs and corporate training and of, well, a tutorial.
You poke around. You discover you can destroy those creepy cameras. You get a little dubious when there’s floors of acid and you chuckle at the wry humor here and there. Ha-ha, the programmers have a sense of humor.
But it gets slowly, slowly menacing. Little things. Tiny, tiny details. It makes a huge damn deal of that Companion Cube – why? Why does it have hearts on? It doesn’t do anything. Why’s it so important? Is there something inside it? Someone? That’s entirely ridiculous… then again, you haven’t seen sunlight or the outside of this building in a while and reality is starting to skew a little. By the time you’re seeing pulled-out wall panels and insane scrawls on the wall, well, the game has built up an amazing tension.
I played this game before I ever touched Half-Life. By the time I got to the level
of the entrance where the army comes in I was desperate, overjoyed at the thought of seeing the sun, a little unbelieving that I was able to survive. I remember seeing the scientists gratefully greeting the soldiers and then getting confused when the soldiers opened fire. I thought – I was tired at the time, sleep deprived, so forgive me – that some aliens had shown up behind the scientists before they were scripted to come out and the stupid NPCs had gone off half-cocked. I came down to help, I couldn’t find any dead aliens, but suddenly these guys were shooting at me! I had no choice but to kill them and, as I stood there surrounded by blood and corpses, I came to the realization that they had no intention of rescuing us at all.
I felt delightfully betrayed in a way few games have been able to replicate. Except Portal.