My to-do list got interrupted this weekend by Portal. I’d heard a lot of good things, but also that it’s really short, so waited until it hit $10 on steam (altho that might have been a special offer).

The short form is, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Really novel gameplay concept. What’s especially fun is when you drop a long distance into a floor portal, to send yourself flying sideways out of another on a wall. Or setting up an endless fall between two horizontal portals.

Also bizarrely, it puts me in a position of using the words “gun turret” and “impossibly cute” in the same sentence. No, really, they call out in singsong voices then reassure you that they forgive you when you knock one over. Of course the game has spawned a whole load of in-jokes and memes across geek circles so I’m not even going to mention the most famous ones. But it definitely has a character of its own.

It IS short though, and over half of it feels like tutorial. I took about 4 hours, and I consider myself fairly slow and plodding. Actually the whole thing comes across as some sort of side-project which Valve hit on, that they didn’t have the resources or confidence to make into a full-sized game. But at this price I’m not complaining.

on a tech note, been having some problems with Technorati not indexing our posts properly, am taking steps to hopefully fix it.