(By the way, if you're wondering what happened in that video: the player put the blue portal on the ceiling, then walked into the orange portal on the floor in such a way that he fell into the orange portal again. (My favorite to illustrate this is the amazing solution to test chamber 7, though there are countless other fascinating discoveries, especially if you count some of the glitches.) Watching some of the solutions people found for speed runs is fascinating - there are some blasted clever ways of doing many of the puzzles. And this is what gave Portal 1 as much replay value as it has. Though each puzzle clearly had a 'right way' to solve it, the environment was malleable enough that many times we could devise our own solutions to the problems.Ībsolutely. A game worth playing, at least to try it out. That alone made Portal a fascinating game. The headings are from the original article. I'll also acknowledge that a lot of the enjoyment from the first game originally came from getting used to the mechanics of the portal gun, and so starting out knowing those mechanics puts Portal 2 at a disadvantage right from the start. I agree with him that it's not as good as the original, but disagree on many specific points and thus on how big the difference is. What follows is my reaction to the Ars Technical article by Peter Bright, Thinking on rails: why Portal 2 isn't as good as the original. Why Portal 2 isn't as good as the original but isn't as bad as you think Why Portal 2 isn't as good as the original but isn't as bad as you think

Portal 2 orange gel