Portal 2

It's 2007. My Golden Year for videogames, when I had groundbreaking and ingeniously fun games to play like Bioshock, Super Mario Galaxy, and some online Halo 3 action.

And Patrick was playing equally great games like Mass Effect, and Assassin's Creed.

So only a few months after Bioshock came out, one of the games that really sucked me in and I loved playing, Patrick brought home this thing called Orange Box. I'd never played Half Life, so I had no idea what this thing was all about. Patrick played some Team Fortress II and it looked like a lot of fun, but not really my kind of game.

So I tried out the little add-on puzzle game, Portal.

Let's save the 4-year-old news by jumping forward to 2011, where I have been eagerly anticipating the coming of Portal's sequel, and even had Patrick pre-order it from Amazon for us. If you don't know anything about Portal, go play it. It was fantastic and probably one of my all-time favorite games.

So, now we fast forward to today, where I have finished the single-player story of Portal 2. And Absolutely loved it. I literally laughed, no: guffawed, out loud about 20 times during the game. Stephen Merchant, this fine fellow from some great British comedies, including Extras and The Office, did the voice-work for one of the main characters.

Stephen Merchant

This was something I was originally a bit skeptical of. How can you top the voice of GLaDOS in the original Portal, equal parts malicious, hilarious, and sinister in a way I have never seen before or since? Would they do away with GLaDOS? Would they continue the story of Portal 1 Where we left off? Would Stephen Merchant's voice be altered to sound more robotic like GLaDOS's was? Would I play the same character? Would there be cake? All very big questions that would have to be handled very carefully in order to not upset super-fans like me.

Spoiler alert: Stephen Merchant's portrayal of his character Wheatley was absolutely amazing. Did not disappoint. The game itself was fantastic as well. The puzzles were perfectly balanced: difficult enough that I wouldn't always know the solution until messing around for a satisfying amount of time, but not so difficult that I would ever rage-quit. The storyline was engaging, had unexpected twists, and always had me wanting to get through the puzzles as quickly as possible to see what lay ahead.

Best of all for me though, as with the first Portal, was the dialogue. From the words they were saying, to the inflections they said them with, the dialogue of the Portal games is extremely endearing to me.

GLaDOS Quote:
"Federal regulations require me to warn you that this next test chamber... is looking pretty good."

Wheatley Quote:
"Don't worry I'm absolutely guaranteeing you 100% that it's this way... no it's not this way."

There are lots more funny audio clips from the game where those came from, but I say: Go Play Portal 2! The puzzles are challenging, the wit is delightful, the imagery is beautiful (in its own test-chamber dystopia way), and the story will keep you hooked. Apart from being difficult to explain, and the disorienting nature of the spatial relation puzzles, I even recommend the Portal games for non-gamers. It is a cool concept that challenges most people's preconceptions of what a videogame is supposed to be like.