Portal Part Deux

This week, I have thought a lot about why I have fun playing Monaco, but I can’t stand Portal.  The most significant points I could come up with are that Monaco uses a 1-dimensional birds-eye-view while Portal is first person and is more spatially challenging for me.  In addition, Monaco has obvious tasks (it lays out the game-plan so you enter each stage, knowing what the objective is,) while Portal has a more you’ll figure it out approach.  Even more importantly, I do not like the theme of Portal where the player is a test subject, and being surveilled continuously is unnerving.  Since I find this dissatisfying, now when I enter rooms in Portal I shoot every video camera (hanging from the ceiling typically,) with my portal blaster or indiscriminately blast other test equipment.  I have found that this brings me joy while playing.  We’ll see how round two goes.

I managed to re-launch Portal last night.  I use managed because I have been dreading playing it again.  I completed levels 5-7 which are a series of levels with slightly harder puzzles to figure out.  The game sometimes gives users a colored mapping of paths (located on the floor, a sort of ‘yellow brick road’,) which provide help to show users paths and colored connections between the objects and tasks to complete.  Maneuvering was much easier the second time playing the game.  In addition, levels are a bit more obvious in their scope, or the task that needs to be completed.  Simply put, the techniques a user will have to (exasperatingly in my case,) learn in the first few levels make the following levels significantly less challenging than the first few.

Having played numerous levels, it is easier to see that each level has a specific task that the game demands that you achieve before moving to the next level.  Levels appear to alternate in the scope of the task, for example one may be more difficult spatially (requiring more use of the portal blaster,) while the next may require more patience, timing, or calculation of angles.  Levels build on the skills the player has learned when accomplishing previous levels and their challenges.

This game has gotten a little easier the more time I have on it.  It is not what I would deem fun but the last 3 levels were more tolerable than the first 4 levels.