10 Minutes of Portal Prelude

Portal Prelude is a fan-based MOD created to tell the story of Aperture Science's testing facilities before the invention of the all-knowing and loving supercomputer Glados.

In the first 10 minutes of the game, Portal Prelude does two things wrong:
1) It stammers on itself by using unnecessary dialog to prolong play time.
The game starts out the exact same way as Portal does; you wake up in the isolation (relaxation) chamber, ready to go out and conquer this world of white. But Portal Prelude mars the introduction of its game for one reason: the lengthy dialog sequence.
Portal (not Prelude) introduces you to the game by having Glados provide you with a brief synopsis of your state and what you are supposed to do. If my memory serves correctly, this is done in less than a minute or so.
Portal Prelude however, decides to use two (European accented) scientists as your observers, and they yammer on endlessly about extraneous (and unfunny) material for what seems like an eternity before you are allowed to exit the test chamber. They ramble on about some kind of test procedure, your goals, and everything else, but none of it is really necessary--assuming you have played Portal (not Prelude!). They also continue to do this--unnecessarily--before every succeeding test chamber--which for the first ten minutes only counts as the next test chamber.
The general rule here, is you want to use the minimum amount of dialog as possible, in order to get the player playing the game, and not reading a book or watching a movie. Every line of dialog should contribute to some kind of story or atmosphere, and Portal Prelude fails to do this.
2) The game forces you to use a complex gameplay mechanic, and imposes death on the player much too early, allowing frustration to set in and perhaps cause some people to quit the game.
The game crawls along to the first test chamber and gives you the first version of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device which can only shoot orange portals, and leave you at the mercy of wherever the game desired to put the blue portal.
In the first test chamber, you are stuck in a square room, enclosed by glass walls, and required to jump out with an orange portal. The trick here is: the blue portal--which you cannot move--is situated in the center of four laser turrets, all of which can kill you. Thus, you are left as the player, to use the orange portal in only way one possible (because you have to shoot it on the wall next to you to exit the room) to get yourself killed because you can't move the blue portal.
Portal Prelude happily throws you into the first test chamber where the majority of players will frustratingly die about 5 times before figuring out the puzzle which requires you to use a gameplay mechanic only introduced in the second half of Portal (NOT PRELUDE).

It would be understandable to take a slightly different course than that of Portal (not the prelude), but starting the first test chamber on such a high ramp of difficulty is not engaging or fun--just frustrating if you don't "get it."

Games that I played in 2007

It would be impossible for me to compile a list of the best games of 2007, considering I have only played about 1/15 of the major contenders. I will however, compile a list of the best games I played in 2007 (some of which are about 5 years old), which was actually a pretty good year for good games.
Starting off:

# 7 - Trauma Center: Second Opinion :: I probably have more fun in Trauma Center than Crysis, but for something's sake, it has the number seven spot.
# 6 - Crysis :: Crysis - a fun, buggy, clunky experience that tries to imitate Halo and Half-Life and succeeds in most respects.
# 5 - Halo: Combat Evolved :: Yes, I played Halo 1 for the first time this year. It is a very good and fun game, though not on the same level as Half-Life.
# 4 - Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess :: A standalone game, this is one of the finest masterpieces you can ever play. As a continuation of the Zelda series, it's a boring, repetitive cycle of an overused formula beaten into game form yet again.
# 3 - Half-Life²: Episode Two :: Episode two contains the very best of the half-life formula to date, despite that fact that it's a 3 year old formula and only a small segment of a larger story.
# 2 - Resident Evil 4 :: Despite its problems, RE4 is a very, very fun game although it gets dragged on for too long.
# 1 - Portal :: Portal is just fantastic and the best thing I have played in a long, long time.

All of these games were actually pretty good. To sum up:

Portal > Re4 > HL²:Ep.2 > LoZ:TP > Halo > Crysis > Trauma Center

Portal

SPOILERS BELOW:

Portal summed up in two words:
Fantabulously amazing.

This game is fantastic, and unlike Episode Two, it is a whole, complete, satisfying game. From the opening scene, to the puzzling tests, and the hilarious commentary by the computer in between, this game is great.
The difficulty curve is just right, first introducing you to the mechanics, then allowing you to get comfortable, and then throwing cryptic challenges at you when you have motivation even when you're stumped.
The humor is spot-on and excellent, and a great incentive just to complete each puzzling task.
The portal gameplay-mechanic is fresh and well executed.
The story is revealed in just the right manner and ends at the right time.
The absence of any human characters and the striking white design of the corridors maintains the lonesome atmosphere and enhances your anticipation when you reach for escape.

This is by far the best game out of the Orange Box, and the best Valve game since Half-Life².

Portal
9.7 Cakes/10 Cakes

Half-Life²: Episode Two

I have just finished playing Half-Life²: Episode Two. Thoughts:

The Good:

- New enviroments: These include outdoor forests, mountains, underground caverns, and a rebel base.

- New gameplay situations: Teaming up with rebels against antlions, running around with a vortigaunt ally. Thse new gameplay situations refresh the old combat in new ways.

- The physics puzzles actually make sense and don't feel tacked on.

- New graphical features (motion blurs, dynamic flashlight shadows) add a nice touch to old graphics.

- Some of the new AI is very impressive. The combine are smarter than before (I think) and some of the cave enemies are very intelligent and elusive.

The Bad:

- Some minor, reoccuring graphical glitches.

- The WOW factor of seeing real-time enviroments and characters interact has died down since 2004. If Half-Life is going to continue, they need to upgrade the gameplay and not rely on the "frosting" to get gamers through. Right now the gameplay is somewhat shallow, acting only as a constant "problem solver" to every barrier in the story. This is not bad in theory, yet Half-Life is feeling more like an interactive movie with pauses of mundane combat to keep the interaction.

- Due to the episodic content, the story suffers from a lack of completeness as a whole, and thus is less satisfying.

- Every time you must do an inane old-school FPS jumping sequence, Alyx still leaves the room.

- Some sequences felt predictable and had a sense of deja-vu. It seemed like the game was redoing the same sequences from older games in slightly different ways.

The Best part in the game:

Driving through the forest, you make a pit stop and search an abandoned hotel for supplies. You get in your car to continue yet a surprise forcefield activates, blocking you in. The Combine have sprung a trap on you. You retreat back into the hotel with Alyx and take out multiple Combine troopers and several Hunters in an epic battle of two versus fifty.

Overall, Half-Life²: Episode Two is on par, or better than Half-Life² and certainly much better than Episode One. However, the repeating combat system, recycled graphics and short story arc keeps this from being a completely enjoyable experience.

Half-Life²: Episode Two

9.1/10.0

Team Fortress 2 BETA

Comments:
- The spy class is amazingly fun. It's exactly how I dreamed of playing the perfect spy in an online game.
- Each class has it's own strengths and play styles, and it's consistenly fun to play each.
- The achievement points, stats, and personal goals are a great addition to the gameplay. They make you want to play the other classes and be the best you can be. It would be nice however if it better detailed how much and what you needed to reach each individual achievement.
- The simplicity of the interface and having each classes skills limited to the same keys (1-4 keys and mouse) make learning new classes easy. I hate all those other games that have specific keys that you have to learn when you try out new classes or guns. Everything in TF2 runs on the same keys, no matter what class you use.
- 2 Classes seem less useful: Pyro and the Demo-man. Pyro just seems like a worse version of Heavy weapons, except the Pyro is only effective within 10 feet. And Demo-man can only set up bombs, which the engineer can also kind of do in a better way (with turrets), or the pyro can shoot grenades, which the soldier seems better at by shooting rockets. I've yet to find any overwhelming strengths that make me want to use these characters, but they aren't that bad.
EDIT: I've found the Demo-man useful, but pyro is still sucky.
- The rocket jump for the soldier seems mostly useless (it's too small!), and the health loss for using it is too great to warrant the vertical gain.
- More gameplay modes than just CTF (Capture the Flag) and CP (Control Point) would be nice. It seems like you could develop all sorts of strategies with these classes for other game modes, like Bomb Defusal, Hostages, VIPs, etc.
- It seems like this game MUST be played with lots of teamwork and communication. Playing in silence is no fun at all.

Overall, it's great fun and a refreshing change from normal shooters that have only one gameplay mode.

Team Fortress 2 (BETA)

9.0/10.0