Portals Prelude

The Game Room
#1

http://www.portalprelude.com/

Anyone else playing this?

My thoughts:

-The voice acting and script are horrible. I understand that this was a small mod team, but cmon. These guys have to have known at least someone in their circle of friends with a decent sense of humor. It really feels like they tried too hard on this aspect and wound up screwing the proverbial pooch. The nonsensical dialogue is enough to make you want to turn the sound off.

-The actual gameplay is fun, but only because you get to fool around with portals again. If the original game were this hard and unintuitive it would not have near as many fans. I was stuck on the third chamber (the one with the big flight of stairs you cant climb) for hours, and I have played all the advanced and time trials from the first game. I know how to think with portals, so it ain’t my fault.

-Even after all of the above whining, I will still play it all the way through. That is a credit to the game dynamic. It’s so horrible frustrating at times, yet more rewarding than you would expect.

Anyone else have thoughts?

#2

Sorry, gotta bump it. Someone has to be suffering along with me here…

#3

I was looking forward to it, but it really pales next to the real thing. The voice acting is awful. And already on Test 1, I’m hit with the ‘puzzle’ being obvious, but the execution overly difficult. (Launching over the pit, coming up *just *short on the few tries when things actually seem to go right!) At least in Portal’s later tests, there was some kind of balance to trickery and twitch skills. If the first step is any indicator, this is going to be pretty frustrating.

I might just replay the original instead… it’s been a while.

#4

Ha! This is exactly what I started doing today.

Im stuck on the level in Portal Prelude in which you have to get across the catwalk with the force field. I can see how to do it, I can see how to time it, but 3 hours later and I cant execute it. That is horrible game design.

#5

It’s still going to be a few days before it finishes downloading, so I don’t have any first-hand experience, but the creator sounds like a dick.

I’m sure everyone understands if he simply can’t make his mod as good as the original game, but I think that pretending that “true Portal fans” prefer his way is laughable.

#6

I went to the site to download it but the post on the front page was essentially a “No, you suck!” to someone who found it to be too difficult and I decided that it wasn’t worth even poking at.

#7

Playing it? You mean it’s out???

I read your thread and :(, As a huge fan of Portal I was looking forward to this.

I’ll give it a try.
edit: I wonder if the people who found it difficult ever did the advanced levels on Portal.

#8

I have done all the advanced levels in the original Portal. The average level in PP is much more frustrating than the original.

In the original Portal, once you figured out HOW to complete the objective, it was relatively easy to do it. In Prelude, even after you see what to do, actually doing it can be maddening. In some instances it takes near pixel perfect jumps and timing to reach a platform, only to have to do it again to advance. Very frustrating and not as rewarding.

#9

Agreed. The advanced levels in original Portal where kind of hard, Prelude is just frustrating. I’m at leel 9 now, and I’m not sure I’m going to keep trying.

#10

I’ll grant that PP is extremely hard and frustrating. I ALMOST threw it in the proverbial bin but I persevered and now I’ve got quite far in. It starts off HARD and is sort of erratic after that… Some levels I did first time through sheer fluke.

And… the voiceover… Is that some kind of advanced software that can convert the banter of fourteen year olds into the voices of grown intelligent men?