Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: gaming, portal, reviews, rob is great, steam, you have to burn the rope
I played two games today. Through an exercise of extraordinary gaming prowess I also finished both of them in enough time to do a quick review of each. So here are my thoughts on ‘You have to burn the rope,’ and ‘Portal.’
This is a classic game from the top game studio mazapan.se. The mechanics of the game are fairly intuitive – the title screen, for example is fairly self-explanatory:
…and it doesn’t get much more complicated after that. You’ll find that once you load the game, most keys are bound to either ‘jump’ or ‘throw axe.’ The movement keys work in a similar way to the smash bros system with up being ‘jump.’
One of the more challenging elements of the game is the end boss, the Grinning Colossus:
This boss is impervious to your weapons and grins evilly knowing exactly how weak your are against it, and exactly how big it is. It is indeed big. One might even say gargantuan, titanic or mcdonalds. Fortunately there is a way to get through its near-invincible veneer of amicability.
I’ll leave finding the answer up to you, but just to show that it can be done, here’s my killshot:
The other game I played was the ever-famous PORTAL.
This game has been reviewed to death with many a cake joke, and many a reference to Jonathan Coulton’s song “still alive.” It has received near perfect praise from any reviewer who came off their drug high long enough to sit down for 5 minutes and write a few words. Even the notorious Yahtzee gave it a big thumbs up.
It’s not difficult to see why. The learning curve is forgiving, introducing you slowly to the new game mechanics, as a sadist might slowly lower a lobster into a boiling pot. There are two things, I suppose that really stand out in this game. Firstly there is a nice sardonic sense of humour at work throughout the game. In general this comes through the ever-present voice-overs, although there are other touches, such as warning signs or impressively designed cubes that draw you into the darkly humourous world of portal.
The other sticking point of the game is that I have never come across game mechanics like this before. Certainly there have been games that allowed teleportation of one sort or another. There have been plenty of problem solving games too, but none really meshed so perfectly, or relied on one another so profusely as this does.
All in all I’d say both games are worth playing. The price is only one afternoon of effort, which for me at least, is a very reasonable effort.
