Portal 2 & the Joy of Mechanics

The main reason I don't like or play many indie games is because they're focused far more on having one unique aspect of either the control or the mechanics be the selling point than they are on delivering a complete 'package.' I'm too old and busy to waste time on something that isn't going to whisk me away to another life and allow me to propel myself through a compelling story.

It's nothing against indie games. Now that I am where I am in my life, I've traded constraints. When I had all that free time, I lacked dollars for games. Now that the dollars are a bit more plentiful, time has become the gaming inhibitor. If I stopped buying games today, I could probably last five years before playing through everything I own, and that's no joke (just don't tell my wife.)

See, I need a reason that I'm hitting a ball against a wall, or guiding mutant sperm around a flowing map while eating lesser sperm. I'm not okay with running and jumping unless there's a vastly important reason that I'm doing it.

So, imagine how exploded my brain was when I started playing Portal 2 the other day and a) I was far more interested in just fucking around with the portal gun than I was anything else, and b) I realized I actually played through the whole first game with a controller.

Portal 2 gets right what so many indie games get wrong.

Interestingly, the portal concept started out with the student project, Narbacular Drop. The same basic principles were in play, and Gabe Newell knows talent when he sees it, so the student team signed on with Valve, and made Portal.

While we're on the subject, maybe you can help me with something. Kim Swift was the lead on ND and the first Portal, though she left Valve before the second game was completed. I was always puzzled by my attraction to her. I mean, she is hot, right?

 (photo credit to Seana Lyn Mickols)

Good-lookin' gal, though, right? I dunno ... anyways ...

I'm just very surprised that I'm THAT into the Portal series,given its 'light' story.

I also wonder why more games don't copy the success of the Portal series. The main mechanic is killer, the writing is really funny, the story is light without being completely pointless, and the puzzles are simultaneously challenging, fun, and exhilarating in their completion.

Indie games, please be more like Portal 2.

- Blaine

PS - three weeks 'til the Witcher 2. Be cool like me and play through the first one. You'll be glad you did.