Forget the “Super Mario Galaxy” remote shake. Give the “Crackdown” building hop a silver or bronze. I now submit the M.O.T.Y.
That’s the Move of the Year. It’s in “Portal.”
During my appearance on the 1upyours podcast last week, I confessed that I would have paid full retail price for “Portal.”
My fellow podcast-people were a bit surprised and for good reason. It took me fewer than four hours to beat, and it currently is available on the Xbox 360 in a $60 package that also gets you “Half-Life 2“, “Half-Life 2: Episode One,” “Half-Life 2: Episode Two” and “Team Fortress 2.” (The game is also available on PC, through the developer Valve’s Steam service for $20.)
Why would I pay full price? Because it’s a bizarre first-person-shooter puzzle game that seems like the mutant offspring of Shigeru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima. But it’s not from those guys; it’s from a team that Valve plucked following completion of video design school. It’s a bunch of — relatively speaking — kids showing up their elders.
Did I mention I have yet to finish “Episode Two” but have already gone back for more “Portal”?
People should try this game for themselves. And, really, I’m only writing this to highlight a particular move in the game — the move that I think is the Move Of The Year.
“Portal” is a first-person puzzle game. The player is armed with a gun that shoots two portals. These portals can be applied to many flat surfaces in the game, but not all, which is part of the puzzle. The player is required to use the gun to escape a series of complex rooms. Shoot a portal on, say, a distant wall and another on the floor beneath your feet, and you’ll fall through the second portal and emerge from the first.
That’s it. It gets mind-bending.
So I want to praise this one move, the Move Of The Year. But first, let me elaborate on the Miyamoto and Kojima connections.
Why do I see Miyamoto in there? I think his best skill may be his method for teaching players his games. You don’t need to read the instruction manuals to play the titles he works on or oversees. Yet these games will slowly and surely make you capable of performing amazing feats. “Portal”’s got that. In fact, I think the last game that educated its players about its controls and gameplay maneuvers as steadily and as confidently as “Portal” — such that before they know it they are doing things they couldn’t have initially comprehended — may have been Miyamoto’s “Pikmin” or his very first “Zelda.” The stuff I did near the end of “Portal” amazed me. And I couldn’t even have imagined doing it when I started the game.
Where’s the Kojima influence? I can’t say without spoiling the game, so mum is the word.
What about The Move? It’s sort of displayed in the image at the top of this story, and it’s among the game’s most brilliant. There are some moves in the game that are a shade more clever, but they aren’t as broadly applicable. For example, I refer you to a sequence late in the game that requires you to shoot one portal on a raised floor and another on the ceiling of a very low crawl space. You have to duck under the crawl space to reach the second portal. When you get under that crawl-space portal you should then stand up. Once you do, the bottom half of your body is still standing in the crawl space. But the top half of your body now extends out of the portal you shot on the raised floor. You are in two places at once. It’s a cool move, but you only need it once.
This isn’t the case for The Move Of The Year. You can use it in a lot of places and should probably soon be using it in other games too, if developers are wise and rip it off. It’s a jump of the most extraordinary kind.
Time and again the game will put you in a room that has a very high ceiling. You’ll look up and see that there’s a ledge very high up, just below the ceiling, that you need to get to. How to reach it? You have no ladder. You can’t fly. And, by the way, the surface of the ledge is composed of a substance that is incompatible with your portals. They won’t form there. So you can’t just shoot a portal up there and below your feet and fall into place.
Instead you <i>do</i> put a portal beneath your feet, but only after you place your first portal high up on the wall opposite the ledge. Then you should walk over the portal you placed on the floor so that you fall into it. You will emerge from the portal high on the wall. With nothing beneath your feet, you will plummet back down to the floor. If you placed the floor portal properly, your descent will drop you back into your floor portal. And so you will emerge, once again, through the portal high on the wall. You’ve done a full loop and sped up along the way. The added momentum that drops you into the floor portal the second time — the speed you gained from dropping into it from high above — will launch you out of the portal high on the wall the second time you go through it. You’ll launch clear across the length of the room and land on the high ledge across from it.
Read that again if you got lost. Or just stare at that sketch, which almost shows it (it starts the player on a mid-level ledge, which isn’t exactly as cool as what I described).
The Move Of The Year is amazing. It’s a new way of moving through 3D space. When is the last time a game gave us that?
October 16th, 2007 at 8:53 am
What about - and I am going to try to spoiler this move as people should try their best to figure it out themselves - when you create a hole on a platform down below you and another hole on a platform across and parallel to you so you drop down and seesaw between the two holes, bouncing up and down with a good deal of vertical momentum, until you shoot the next platform above you, and the next, and the next, maintaining your vertical momentum the whole time?
In my opinion the need to conserve vertical momentum in that trick (and others that pop up in the challenge levels) was really counterintuitive until I tried it a few times and ‘got’ it.
October 16th, 2007 at 9:03 am
KingMob,
That’s an excellent one as well. In fact, I think that sequence was the hardest thing I had to do in the game. Took me quite a few tries. I kept replacing the wrong portal, which I’m sure you did at least once. Know what I mean, right?
October 16th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Portal didn’t give us a new way to move through space
http://www.nuclearmonkeysoftware.com/narbaculardrop.html
Narbacular Drop did, Portal is just a glossier version with lots of neat environmental art thrown in.
While I’m at it Halo wasn’t the first FPS to do anything, other than garner world wide praise for being as generic as a sci fi shooter can be
October 16th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Stephen, the move you’re describing is called ‘flinging’. Personally rather than fussing about where I place that portal in the ground, I find it really satisfying to just plonk it directly beneath me wherever I’m standing, tumble out of the high portal, then create a new entry one directly below me a fraction of a second before I hit the ground face-first. It means I never get it wrong, and yet it feels more dangerous and cool.
But yeah, the puzzle KingMob describes was probably my favourite in the game - when you twig the rhythm: left, right, left, right, it feels like flying, and you could do it forever. It really emphasises the impossible part of portals - that they don’t just conserve energy, they can actually be used to keep gaining it.
October 16th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
re: yays
Oooh, aren’t you the über-hip cynical one who knew about all the incredibly cool games, bands, books, whatever… before ANYONE else did. Therefore, because you’re so cool, and everyone (and definitely that stinkin’ media) who likes something that’s popular and/or widely commercially available, that even resembles that unknown gem even just superficially, have just gotta be idiots.
You know what? I never played Narbacular Drop. I don’t give a hoot about it at all. I’ve played Portal, though, and I can agree with the writer above. I’ve played Halo 3. I liked it. Had a good story line, and was fun to play. I don’t necessarily care that both were allegedly done better by someone else or someone else came up with something like it earlier. Seriously, who would care about it, and why? What differences does it make to my enjoyment of the current product? What should those questions even come up? They have absolutely no relevance.
You can claim that, “Reviewer X said that game Y was really revolutionary!”, when in reality, you know that game Y implemented something that game Z had done 5 years ago. Here’s a though: Reviewer X doesn’t know every single game ever made by every single developer on the planet. Really. I don’t expect him to, I don’t think anyone does. Usually, Reviewer X giving that opinion means that there’s a good chance a lot of other people would agree with him.
Sheesh. Just enjoy the game already.
October 16th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Shaggy:
Narbacular drop was made by the same guys that made Portal (Jeep Barnett, Dave Kircher, Garret Rickey, and Kim Swift with art from Scott Klintworth, Realm Lovejoy, Paul Graham). Narbacular Drop was indeed what caught the eye of Robin Walker, who then invited the whole team over to Valve to present their game. Gabe Newell then hired the whole team to make Portal. Narbacular Drop was the Tech Demo made by DigiPen students, whereas Portal was the short game.
It’s like a large studio picking up a small team from a film school to remake their short movie with a real budget.
October 16th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
yays…
Uh, you do realize that the devs of Portal are the same ones who made Narbacular Drop? And while ND is interesting in it’s own right, it is *far* inferior to Portal.
October 16th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
While the fling is indeed something completely new, the story along with the resulting voicework and the ending made this one of my most enjoyable gaming experiences in years. I have unsuccessfully been trying to convince all of my friends that they must play this game.
…still alive
October 17th, 2007 at 3:19 am
I played Narbacular Drop a few times through and thought it was a neat game idea hampered by not very good level design.
Portal, OTOH, has excellent level design *and* production values students could only dream of.
October 20th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
I have been waiting for Portal since I heard about it probably a year, year and a half ago. I absolutely love the moves you can pull off in it, it really makes you think.
Also: If you play through the developer commentary, they also talk about how they purposefully built in each level to ease you into learning a new aspect of the game. Especially flinging, since flinging was pretty much the most important thing in the game. When they first tried teaching their beta testers flinging, they really only had one challenge to “teach” it, and then the tester would forget about it and get stuck on some certain challenge. So they made several more to sort of imprint it in their memory so they would use it later.
I thought it had the greatest ending, storyline, and ending credits as well. Kim Swift said: “We’re still playing it by ear at this point, figuring out if we want to do multiplayer next, or Portal 2, or release map packs.” Personally I want Portal 2, because that’d basically be a big map pack with a storyline, heh.
October 21st, 2007 at 6:15 pm
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
October 23rd, 2007 at 4:52 am
I think that my favorite part of Portal was the challenge problems. I played Portal (on PC) at 2:01am, the minute it came out, then played it til #18, waited until the next night to prolong the greatness. I then proceeded to beat it, and witnessed the best credits of any game. Ever. But nothing can be more satisfying than, say, doing a problem that took you ~10 minutes the first time in, quite literally 10 seconds, or using only 2 portals, or whatever. The challenge problems peg another 6 hours of gameplay onto Portal (not counting playing it over, and over, and over :)) by making you think in a completely different way from the story. (SPOILER ALERT for the challenge problems) Realizing that you can bypass an entire level by just portal jumping straight onto the elevator is extremely satisfying, and is a great feeling the first time you think of it. I personally would hope for both bonus maps AND Portal 2 (though rumor has it that they’ve already planned on implementing the portal gun into HL2:Ep3), especially if they plan on taking a long time to get Portal 2 out. Besides, what could you do with Portal 2? You escaped, so unless you play as another character, there aren’t any more fun levels to go through, just the real world. And nobody likes that. So yeah, I’d vote for hundreds and hundreds of bonus levels, then add a few more.
October 26th, 2007 at 12:32 am
Commence development of sequel in the imediate future. Prolonged exposure to the portal video game simulation of portal instruction testing would be beneficial to all those who are in need of cake.
Orange Box is not suitable for human consumption side effects include: shortness of breath, fatigue and funny taste in mouth.
November 14th, 2007 at 3:45 am
First of all SPOILER!!
I agree your MOTY is pretty darn cool (like everything else about the game).
The variation on your MOTY to solve the end of Level 18 is the trippiest gameplay ever. I’d continually fall down/up a portal and just swing my mouse around… look at the sights…
Strange that the game isn’t from some Japanese studio They must feel like American basketball players in the current NBA (Still great, but…)
Brilliant game, brilliant move.
Your Vs. article was a great read too.
November 19th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
I don’t think the graphic is right, but the description is. It’s when you start off down on the floor, not up on a ledge like in the picture. The first time through the floor you go up but not out far from the wall. The second time through the portal you are going much faster to you go farther. The graphic only shows you jumping from a high ledge and going through the portal once, a simple “fling” maneuver.
When you play through “Portal” a second time (and you will), play with the developer commentary. This was an excellent idea, I loved hearing what the developers and the voice of the computer thought about. They just show chat bubble icons (a few per level) that you can hit ‘E’ to use and start playing a minute or two of developer commentary relevant to that point in the game.
I love that you mentioned the song too. The final credits are the best I’ve seen, I hope no one misses them. I found myself humming and singing that tune to myself several times
December 31st, 2007 at 6:25 am
The graphic is totally right. You can jump into the bottom portal and get flung out of the top one. I did it many times in some of the levels. You don’t always need to get a huge momentum to be able to fling yourself certain distances. Sometimes you only need drop momentum from a medium platform.
Such an amazing game though!