Sunday, May 5, 2013

I Wish I Had a Portal Gun

Perhaps one of the most unconventional genres of games are puzzle games. From the classics such as solitaire and Minesweeper to more recent developments like Bejeweled, people of all kinds and all ages partake in the occasional puzzle game from time to time. However, a gaming franchise has taken the notion of a puzzle game to an entirely new level. Valve Corporation, company known for games such as the Team Fortress and Half-Life franchises and their content delivery service, Steam, developed a game that revolutionized the meaning of a puzzle game with the Portal series.

In Portal, the primary objective of the game was to navigate your way through the Aperture Science Enrichment Center designed by an artificial intelligence known as GLaDOS. To do this, you must use the Aperture Handheld Portal Device, or "portal gun" to create wormholes between two flat planes. In some cases, the only way to solve a puzzle was to carry momentum through a portal, a key game feature that was developed for the game. In the second installment, they added more features such as repulsion and propulsion gels that allow the player to jump higher and accelerate much faster respectively. They combine to make a challenging game that requires some thought as opposed to the shoot first without thought games that most first person games end up being.

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