Portal 2 Catch-All

Well, Gear 3 is April, and AFAIK that's the only hard date out there.

Scratched wrote:
AnimeJ wrote:

Man, next year is gonna be hellaciously hard on my wallet at this rate.

Yes, there's a large amount of stuff being rammed into Jan/Feb. Why can't they use summer? There's f-all being released right now.

Well, some of these titles may get pushed back to summer!

So... maybe i'm just a little underwhelmed but was the "surprise" that Portal 2 is coming to the PS3?

I think it is more that steam cloud is coming to PS3.

Duoae wrote:

So... maybe i'm just a little underwhelmed but was the "surprise" that Portal 2 is coming to the PS3?

Norfair wrote:

I think it is more that steam cloud is coming to PS3.

Man, now I know how Boogle feels.

I'm not sure if these have been linked... but if you had any doubts. This WILL be game of the year when it is released :O

Portal 2 Demo (Part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5THiN...

Portal 2 Demo (Part 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq2mZ...

Portal 2 Demo (Part 3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGlyQ...

The only thing I can say is HOLY f*ck

Wow. Just...wow.

If those are some of the actual levels, they will take significantly longer to puzzle out than the original game. I was watching what they did to solve some of those thinking
"It would take me 45 minutes of trial-and-error to discover that method, and probably another 15 to execute it correctly."

...Not that a longer game is a bad thing, mind you.

Yeah, it looks VERY VERY HARD. Hopefully those are some of the later levels. I'm sure they'll ease you into each new tool/puzzle-type.

I kind of wish I hadn't seen the GlaDOS reveal before playing the game — but I can't help myself. Portal's one of my top 10 games of all-time, and this looks great.

Minarchist wrote:

Wow. Just...wow.

If those are some of the actual levels, they will take significantly longer to puzzle out than the original game. I was watching what they did to solve some of those thinking
"It would take me 45 minutes of trial-and-error to discover that method, and probably another 15 to execute it correctly."

...Not that a longer game is a bad thing, mind you.

From what I've heard, Gabe Newell said they're shooting for a full length game this time, plus a full length coop campaign.

Looks freaking sweet. I want to see what the co-op portion looks like.

The P2 singleplayer is meant to be twice as long as P1, and the P2 cooperative is equal in length to the singleplayer, with replayability.

Those videos look great. The game looks harder, but I wouldn't say that it looks "very hard." My concern is that some of the puzzles look like they're based as much on reaction time as they are on careful planning and execution. I don't like puzzles that work that way, and I felt the ones in Portal that were like that were the weakest in the game. Additionally, that kind of precision and speed can be more difficult on a console; the higher-level advanced puzzles in Portal simply got to be too fast for me on the 360.

Scratched wrote:

The P2 singleplayer is meant to be twice as long as P1, and the P2 cooperative is equal in length to the singleplayer, with replayability.

So what you're saying is that I'll only be seeing half of Portal 2 because other people are no fun?

ClockworkHouse wrote:

So what you're saying is that I'll only be seeing half of Portal 2 because other people are no fun? ;)

Pfft, when is co-op ever not fun? Co-op makes even bad games fun. I played all the way through Monster Madness just because it had co-op.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Those videos look great. The game looks harder, but I wouldn't say that it looks "very hard." My concern is that some of the puzzles look like they're based as much on reaction time as they are on careful planning and execution. I don't like puzzles that work that way, and I felt the ones in Portal that were like that were the weakest in the game. Additionally, that kind of precision and speed can be more difficult on a console; the higher-level advanced puzzles in Portal simply got to be too fast for me on the 360.

I'd say it's hard to judge. The P2 demonstrations were clearly just enough to show each mechanic they wanted to show, one room of each and no gentle introduction to each mechanic, quick and direct for a tradeshow and reporters short on time. Quite artificial compared to what I'd expect in the game.

I've sorta been avoiding in-depth coverage on this game other than watching the new trailer. Co-op?!? Sign me up for 100 hours please.

Couple of thoughts on the reaction time thing:

Some of the "action shots" after showing off various mechanics felt that way to me--but I think that was mainly for the "oo" factor, and "you haven't seen everything yet.

The mechanical demonstrations didn't. The "acceleration ooze", for example, feels fast, but it's all in what the ooze lets you do. Likewise, the bit where they're bouncing around off of plates and then fire a portal into the area in front of them, which a cube (and the player) fall through: there's a little bit of timing here, but after that it's basically "aim in front of you".

I strongly suspect it'll have similar attributes to the original portal: having extra-good hand-eye coordination and reaction speed lets you take some shortcuts, but everything is solvable by thinking it through, not just by forcing your way with brute strength. (Think about the one room in Portal with the annoying timed doors and stuff on both sides. If you were extra fast, you could *just* barely shave a little work out of the puzzle. Certainly, if you were extra slow it could be extra painful. But in either case, the middle ground was a solution where you used portal to make it easy, instead of doing it the hard way.)

On the complexity of the puzzles they showed: They looked pretty similar to Portal 1 to me. Remember that we're seeing them out of context in these videos. In context, you've got the support of levels that are teaching you how to use various techniques as you go. That should make certain things like "use acceleration ooze to get through the spikey plates of doom" easier to figure out, because you're already in the mindset of using that ooze to solve problems.

Valve is *very* good at subtly pointing people in the right direction.

Man the source engine is looking nice these days. And here people wanted them to release a new one.

Norfair wrote:

Man the source engine is looking nice these days. And here people wanted them to release a new one.

The difference between the way they iterate and the way other companies do it is pretty murky anyway. I'll bet you anything UE3 has some code that has been there since UE1. As they say, version ain't nothing but a number.

I've been replaying HL2 a bit here and a bit there as of late, and I'm still impressed with how the source engine looks from back then. I don't know what it is, but HL2 looks better than so many games that have come out recently. It probably has quite a bit to do with art design... gotta admit, though, that is one good engine.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

I've been replaying HL2 a bit here and a bit there as of late, and I'm still impressed with how the source engine looks from back then. I don't know what it is, but HL2 looks better than so many games that have come out recently. It probably has quite a bit to do with art design... gotta admit, though, that is one good engine.

It is kind of interesting where sometimes you need high detail bits and where you don't. L4D still has boxy flat sided buildings but no one cares because it's stuff you run straight past, but you can read the cereal box with the 10th class, because that's stuff you will notice.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Scratched wrote:

The P2 singleplayer is meant to be twice as long as P1, and the P2 cooperative is equal in length to the singleplayer, with replayability.

So what you're saying is that I'll only be seeing half of Portal 2 because other people are no fun? ;)

I was under the impression that the co-op was more like the challenge rooms in P1, not a full-blown campaign but a smaller set of stand-alone pieces.

ign wrote:

Two players can now work together to solve Portal's puzzles. There are custom co-op challenges designed to be tackled by two people that will likely be more complicated than the single-player stages. Portal fans know that the entrance and exit portals have their own colors. The second player will now have unique colors that signify which portals are theirs, and Valve is currently experimenting with possibilities. Players can hop through each others' portals. Co-op can be played locally in splitscreen or online. While playing online you can press a button to temporarily put the game in splitscreen so that you can see what your buddy sees -- could be helpful in certain situations.

I'm surely not thinking portal anymore, because those video demos barely made any physical sense to me.

It gave me a decent defrag vibe, maybe there'll be some trickjumping potential there

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T6IA...

I have the impression that P1 got part of it's feel from tricking, I'm not sure if valve ever said that on the record.

also:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com...

When asked about the cross-compatibility between Steam and Steamworks Johnson said, "The plan is you will be able to play between console and PC."

This has been done in the past. I forget the title, but it was an FPS with users from the PS3 (possibly?) and PCs. Apparently it did not go well for the PS3 users.

Shadowrun and Universe at war had play between 360 and PC. UT3 also was able to use mods specially cooked on PS3, but no cross platform multiplayer.

The more I watch that clip, the less I like the companion orb. He sounds like the Geico gecko.

I seem to remember it being carnage when PC users got onto the Quake 3 Dreamcast servers.

Queueball wrote:

This has been done in the past. I forget the title, but it was an FPS with users from the PS3 (possibly?) and PCs. Apparently it did not go well for the PS3 users.

My memory is really fuzzy on this but there was quake on the dreamcast I think. Modding the pc version let you log on to the dreamcast servers. It was apparently a slaughter. To the point where it became a ghost town on the servers.

I know on Shadowrun, they nerfed the PC gamers and amped the Xbox autoaim so it wouldn't be quite the massacre. Between that and the Vista only OS requirements, it wasn't a very popular game.