Stop to Enjoy Some Cake
At long, long last, I got around to playing Portal, the wildly praised spinoff from the Half-Life series. I won’t review it here because I don’t have anything to add to the unanimous opinion of reviews everywhere. The game deserves all the praise it gets for combining a signature teleportation-gate projector that makes toying with the physics engine a joy, puzzles designed to exploit the gun’s promise to its maximum, and some of the richest black humor I’ve seen since West End Games printed Paranoia. ‘Nuff said.
No, after a week’s absence spent in training for substitute teaching, chasing my college application, and prepping my parents’ visit next week, I’m going to talk about me, me, me…in the context of Half-Life. Specifically, about the time spent. Many reviews, desperate to find an excuse to ding Portal, so as to appear impartial, cite its short play time, though many hasten to add that the short play time is just about right, especially since the alternative might by some of the cheesy padding techniques employed by other games. It is a short game, but I have a hard time with the consensus opinion that it might take four to six hours. Yahtzee, that bottomless wellspring of bile, calls it a two-to-three hour game.
Two or three hours? I spent roughly eight hours on it yesterday, stretching from just after lunch to a point where I had to go quit because it was past my bedtime, minus a break to make and eat dinner. At the time, it seemed the end was nowhere in sight, but I learned at lunch today that I was, in fact, almost at the end sequence. I failed to get past the final showdown with GlaDos, but I can confidently estimate I’ll spend a total of twelve hours on getting through the whole game on the first run, if I can get past the final scene at all. (I may go back to experiment and take a stab at the achievement list, but that doesn’t count.)
Twelve hours, give or take. I’ve had some trouble with handling the game because I’m slow and clumsy, which may have contributed…oh, two hours of that. Three, tops. Speed and coordination play a part in the game, but not a large one; usually, figuring out what to do is sufficient, and executing the game plan is a doddle. With hardly any Nintendo experience, I missed a few platform jumps, and spent ten or fifteen seconds trying again. I probably dragged out some of the turret scenes; a few accidents taught me I could absorb a heck of a lot of damage from those little bastards, and could have been a lot more aggressive while taking them out…call it another half hour. Maybe another half hour looking at the thematic “color,” which could be safely ignored by a player driven to reach every exit as quickly as possible I had trouble shooting the portal gun while bobbing around in flight, but not that much…call it another half hour that a more dexterous player would have taken. So that’s a minimum of eight hours actually spent puzzling, probably more.
I’m not stupid. I’m good at puzzles. Admittedly, I’ve had long, frustrating bouts with certain point-and-click adventures, but such bouts usually prove to be the problems that everyone else finds obscure and frustrating, too: find-the-pixel hunts, tuba-and-ostrich mismatches, stuff that seems impossible to solve even after looking up the answer. I have a passable sense of geometry. Still, most of the time I spent puzzling through Portal was spent puzzling, and almost all of that making progress of some sort, as opposed to numbly staring and being stuck.
For a player to clear the whole game within four hours would mean never being stuck, never—or hardly ever—overlooking some of the barely-visible patches of wall which mark the next leg of your journey, never—or hardly ever—pursuing blind alleys, never getting something almost right and trying again in futility in the mistaken belief that failure was just a matter of poor reflexes and bad aim. How do they do it? Just charge through the whole maze, blindly firing the gun every three meters, hoping to stumble into the exit? Dive headlong into every obstacle, confident in the power of brute force to solve every game? Turning to online walkthroughs the moment they have to pause to think things through?
Either way, it says something about the attention spans of gamers today, as would the robotic refusal to stop and examine some of the amusing graffiti tucked into cubby-holes where earlier subjects found momentary solace. Or something about my own plodding nature. Puzzles—good puzzles—are meant to be savored and examined from many angles, not dashed past as quickly as possible without pausing to appreciate the design.