are you still there?
The only thing awkward about playing Portal on the 360 is that my muscle memory is convinced I can rewind time by pressing (X), bad thumb! Last week I started playing some of Portal: Still Alive, a standalone version of the game headed for Xbox Live Arcade. For the most part, it’s still the same great Portal but they’ve added a little something extra this time around: Challenge Maps. The Challenge Maps are a set of user generated maps that started life as 2D maps from the Flash version of Portal and were later ported to the PC game. These new maps add some gameplay (thought?) mechanics and are definitely challenging but, they lack the same refinement as the original maps. It seems clear to me that the makers of this additional content do not hold the same tenets of design that Valve and the Portal team used for the original game. But, no one is buying Still Alive for the bonus content, right?
Slightly more specific criticism: The new maps do not have the same intuitive design that Valve implemented in the normal portal maps. The process of iteration and play-testing was crucial to portal’s success and absent from the new maps.
Chris Remo Blog [a website similar to mine by a real writer (but I'm better at websites)]
>> they lack the same refinement as the original maps.
>> It seems clear to me that the makers of this additional
>> content did not follow the same rigorous design tenants
>> that Valve and the Portal team used for the original game.
Suggestion, be specific about your criticism. You’re saying the new Portal content is of a lower quality, but don’t follow it up with specific details or examples. It is like saying the “the cake wasn’t very good and should have been better”. How?
Take Care
Posted by Neal on September 2nd, 2008.
I bought Portal: Still Alive, and I thought the challenge maps were cool; they were harder than the original Portal campaign maps, and they also included some new objects like moving celings/walls that crush you, electric chambers, laser walls, etc. They were quite fun to play through!
Posted by New 001 on October 25th, 2008.
>> It is like saying the “the cake wasn’t very good and should
>> have been better”. How?
The cake is a lie.
I think the intuition these levels are missing stems from the fact that they were originally written for a 2D flash game. That said, you could see the entire level when it was 2D, and now have a more limited view being first-person in 3D.
I don’t know that this is a real problem, though, because I liked the additional challenge.
Good writeup, though.
Posted by Ben Brightwell on December 2nd, 2008.
More annoying than anything else is the blog author’s misuse / misspelling of the word “tenets”.
Posted by Ross Presser on December 24th, 2008.