All I can say is: WOW! This game really is quite fun!! I just wish it was longer :sad: But man oh man, Did I love it! A++ in my book!

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Oh yea, it's release-day! :o

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Why snark works.

Both Portal and EP2 = amazing.

I don't know if it is because I don't play many other FPS and puzzle games but Valve just blows me away.

You took the words right out of my mouth Dr. G. E2 blew me away. Just the amount of art animation time put into this chapter was well worth the ~2 year wait. I can't wait to see the final 3rd part of the trilogy...or maybe its not even the last part, idk, nor do I really care. Valve will just keep on making great games and they'll keep topping themselves every time. E1 I was hesitant towards... to me it was more of an expansion on HL2, but E2...god...just blew me away...

/My hats off to valve

[spoilers]
Damn aperture science corp in BOTH portals AND HL2 E2....frikn' awesome. Great job, I can't wait to see whats being cooked up behind their doors.
[/spoilers]

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Posting And You

Haven't played Ep2 yet.. trying to save it for the weekend.

Just finished Portal.... OMG! That has to be one of the funniest, smartest, most clever games I've ever played. Despite its simplicity, it had more character than most full blown games do. The puzzles ramped up perfectly.... just awesome!

Both great games! Haven't quite finished either yet.

Portal is really cool, on the second last test now (then onto the challenges :eek: ) just awesome.

[spoiler]
there is no cake...
[/spoiler]

Ep2, wow.
On the last level, its quite hard, love the effects and how its filled out a whole lot more of the HL story.

[spoiler]
Love the bridge collapse at the start, the side of the bridge coming off when you get the car an the bouldings blowing up at the end
[/spoiler]

Also if you want to collect the achievements, dont use cheats, they get disabled when you cheat. (No I didnt cheat, just saw that on another forum and thought I'd pass it on :smile: )

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SourDough2.0 - With Strawberry Jam

I have two questions -- though they are probably redundant and probably have already been answered elsewhere:

1. Portal comes in the Orange box, yes?

2. The Orange Box, as in, the actual physical thing you can hold in your hands, has been released, yes?

I held off from buying anything Orange Box related over steam -- primarily because I'm turning into a bit of a nut with locating all of my games, and keeping them in the same spot :smile: Either way, Portal sounds like a winner, and if I can buy a hard copy of it, I'll definitely be buying it this weekend.

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Breaking the laws of mapping since 2003 and doing a damn fine job at it

G.Ballblue said:
1. Portal comes in the Orange box, yes?

Yes.

G.Ballblue said:
2. The Orange Box, as in, the actual physical thing you can hold in your hands, has been released, yes?

It has in North America, other regions was later (17th maybe??).

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SourDough2.0 - With Strawberry Jam

G.Ballblue said:
if I can buy a hard copy of it, I'll definitely be buying it this weekend.

I don't know if it's the same with all steam games, but when I installed from a hard copy of Red Orchestra, Stean decided that it still had to download it again anyway. Something to bear in mind, maybe.

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i eat paint

I bought my copy form a store. Besides the games being incredible i was a little disappointed in my purchase. They give you 2 dvd's and no little book. Just a piece of paper activation code on it. They install it under your steam folder, which is convenient, but YOU CAN'T RUN THE GAMES WITH OUT STEAM ON. Witch is why i waited in the first place. Unless you have a 56k net connection, buy if from steam. You wont have to pay sales tax and all the money goes directly to Valve instead of the store you bought it form.

I like the new hud in EP2. Slightly more pleasing to the eye.
Anyone els find the password painted on the wall in Portals?

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Reality has become a commodity.

You wont have to pay sales tax..

I had to pay a $12 tax, is this because I'm from Denmark?
It was a bit of a letdown because I'm semi-broke at the moment, but I just couldn't wait to play those games any longer, installing them as I type.

YOU CAN'T RUN THE GAMES WITH OUT STEAM ON.

O.o I thought that was clear to everyone by now... You HAVE to have steam running to play any game that comes on steam.

Anyways I think gball...like a few others....dont have electronic methods of paying for the game online and have to resort to buying the hard copy of the game. (Or those on a 56k connection as well).

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Posting And You

Episodes 1 and 2 (first time playing 1) have completely restored my faith in fps gaming.

And portal was hilariously awesome.

Welp, I already played Portal twice and watched my friend play it all the way through, the second with the developer commentary, and now on to the second playing of EP:2 with commentary! I can't wait!!! Valve just blows my mind! I can't get over how good of a job they did! I absolutely love the story for EP: 2

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Wow, amazing games all of them, I've yet to try out TF2 though.
I really like the way valve managed to twist the games together in ep2, loved it, I really hope we get to see some aperture technology in ep 3.

Oh yea, if anyone doesn't own hl2 I have one of those gift things, just send me a pm or something if you're interested.

Holy crap Portal was good.

It wasn't bad for the hour or so that it lasted, but I was expecting a lot more. I'd be very disappointed if I'd paid for it as a standalone.

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i eat paint

Well, I've heard that they're planning to add more to it. Such as more bonus maps and even work on a sequel of some sort! Have you played through it with commentary yet?

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

IMO they can make the portal name last 10 times longer if they 'release' the portal SDK. Then the community can make some more content for them. Yes I know you can set up the SDK to get it working and stuff, but im lazy ;P.

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Posting And You

No, I didn't play it with the commentary. The portal thing got old too quickly for me, and left me with little desire to play it over. Maybe it would have helped if there had been some enemies, or some challenging puzzles. But, as it is, it all seems to be the same gimmick being repeated over and over.

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i eat paint

Yes, the one thing the entire game is based upon and has a bunch of different uses is a gimmick. Shooting guns in Doom is a gimmick too. :rolleyes:

I just played through Ep1 and Ep2 and some way through Portal and I must say that Orange Box gives content for the money. Only thing I've found disappointing so far was the length of Ep1. I got only a bit over 4 hours of fun out of it and that was with playing Urban Flight twice because my saves from that chapter got corrupted for some odd reason. Ep2 on the other hand was very satisfying experience, I just hope we'll get Ep3 before 2012... Episodic content isn't quite working with Valve and their release-when-it's-ready-and-then-a-bit-later-way, I hope they'll get back to making singleplayer games that actually last more than 6 hours.

I have no problem with waiting for a game for a long long time, if it delivers "enough" game time, but waiting a long time for a short sprint in storyline you're aching to complete isn't my idea of fun.

I always buy my games from retail, since it gives me something concrete to own, so I wasn't aware of this extra tax thing with games bought from Steam... And knowing the eagerness of my government to tax people I'm prone to think that it might actually cost me more to buy games from Steam than from retail. :biggrin:

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''Everyone wades in s**t until they're competent enough to walk on it. Jesus style.''
Dystopia - Empires

Ep1 was a considerable improvement over Half-Life 2. Running around City 17 with alyx made the game considerably more interesting that playing by yourself, and some of the scripted sequences were just brutal. I got snagged on a few puzzles in the car park area, however. Trying to turn those orange wheels while being pounded by Ant Lions ain't easy. (I have since come to the conclusion that I was supposed to block the Ant Lion spawns up with cars, something that had not occured to me while I was in the various car parks.)

Episode 2 was even better -- the stuff involving the car was fantastic, the improved HUD was nice, (it was nice not having the flash light drain your auxiliary power) and ultimately left me wanting episode three. :smile:

Portal was worth its money, the only problem I had with it was its length. Personally, I think they could have made the game a bit harder -- the advanced maps are a much more noteworthy challenge over the default ones, and the game is ultimately something that I see myself playing a lot more of in the future. Let's just hope valve gets around to hooking up Hammer to work with Portal :/

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Breaking the laws of mapping since 2003 and doing a damn fine job at it

Overall, I think Ep2 is the best yet in the series, the antlion chapter was totally frickin awesome, the hunters are a blast to fight, and the car chapters are delicious to the fun center of my brain (despite the car being so overpowered).

From my viewpoint though, it seems like the pacing of Ep2 was slowed down a bit, or at least more punctuated than the previous chapters. I think it's due largely to the extended dialog sequences where you can do little but stand around while the characters flap their gums, and the fact that you have to wait for them to finish before they'll open the door and you can get back to killing things. This might just be me being a fidgety impatient twitch gamer, but in Ep1 there was very little of that, there was a sense that there's no time to stop and chat. Ep2 conveys this sense too, what with the Combine hunting you down relentlessly for the transmission packet, and the looming superportal that promises to crush any hope of resistance, but the long-winded characters don't really reflect it.

I also find flirty game characters slightly disconcerting, at least in this context, it would make better sense for a shooter in the vein of Duke Nukem, or a dating sim game, but I play shooters to shoot things, not make googly eyes with the facial animation system and eyeball shader.

When the NPCs weren't wasting good shooting time, the gameplay was a lot of fun and I can't recall a single area in the game that didn't have an outstanding level of polish. As always there's a good sense of great distance travelled, and a feeling of grander scale to the world just beyond what you can see. It's further proof that the designers and artists at Valve are some of the best in the industry.

Can't wait to get the SDK update :biggrin:

Has anyone played the 360 version of Orange Box?

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o

I just gotta say, Valve's singleplayer level design is unparalleled. I think that's both impressive and a sad commentary on current gaming industry, considering the last 'new' fps I've played, Resistance Fall of Man, is mainly just big empty areas with a truckload of identical props dumped in the way...the equivalent of a newbie HL1 mapper just discovering prefabs, and this is a professional company who's game is considered one of the 'best' on the PS3. If it wasn't for Valve we would have completely reverted to near-Quake1 levels of complexity by now :/

Infinity Ward is damn close, if not better. But, both have varied design tactics.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I feel that Valve designed the pacing of the game for people like me. Fun gun fights with nice cool down periods and the voice acting is top notch. The whole series is very involved and pulls me in. As a mapper I find that that 90% of games I play break apart and become WAY to easy and predictable.

I'm also impressed with the graphics. It seems like every next-gen game that comes out looks like someone rubbed petroleum jelly all over every surface while the character animation and faces look like rubbish. I blame the gamer web sites that call these games as "best ever" even when they have glaring problems.

Like "Gears of War" that game was half ass, I felt like a bunch of large forheaded jocks circle jerked that one out. Who puts an auto save right before a long cinematic that you can't skip?!

uuhhhgg... I just hope that the cost of creating great games drops so independent designers can make some content that is worth while.

i am currently purchasing the orange box by way of steam, excited to see what it can do

Enter "meatloaf" in console (without quotes) and it will cook you dinner.

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o

I want to buy Portal from Steam. How much will I have to download?

A little over 1.1GB at the least, possibly more if you need engine updates.

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o

Thanks BvS. I installed and I got the "Partygoer" achievement. So far in my opinion: AWESOME!!. I liked how the turrets could shoot you through the portal systems and how the lasers could pass through too. I'm impressed.

I like the cake.

I bought Orange Box on 360. Identical from what I can tell to the computer, except quciekr to start playing since its a console put you have to use a controller to aim :sad: . Goddam 360 is burning a hole the size of Canberra in my pocket.

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Reckless disregard for childrens well being, women and nothing but utter contempt for other cultures.