Portal 2

while we know the team on these games did enough research to make nods to science, the very premise of the entire series is built on a house of scientific absurdities. You can't take reality for granted when it comes to Portal. If something's fun, like using a Portal gun to outrun a nuclear explosion, I have no doubt Valve's teams WILL say "Sorry physics, you're taking the back seat on this one" and will give us whatever fun they can.

They've probably avoided that last one so far because they don't want to go the Crysis route and give us a final battle that'll bring even a high speed gaming rig to its knees. The final battle in Crysis was the worst part on computer performance by far. The rig I had it on had no trouble at all playing the game on middle settings, but I kept getting CT Ds throughout that entire battle because there was so much shit going on in the background that it brought the game to a crawl.

Valve knows fun, and they know that constant crashes don't make it. That's probably why we don't have more absurdities so far.

I want to see what happens in the spatial paradox of moving one portal through another. Their oval shape is conducive to that, so they'd better address that in Portal 3 or something. Maybe as a way of defeating the final boss.

Valve understands Gameplay and Story Segregation. A Final Boss fight needs to be challenging to the player but can't be so complicated that it takes you five retries just to figure out the mechanics. It should use skills and concepts that have already been developed in gameplay. Important character and plot exposition should happen in the pre-battle speech or during scripted interludes, not while you're fighting.

A typical human has a limited number of 'registers' for short-term memory. Overwhelming the player with trivial details and background goings-on sabotages their ability to focus on the battle itself. Overwhelming the player with complexity means they get frustrated.

edited 9th Apr '14 11:34:38 AM by Fighteer

Looping Portals through themselves does sound a bit like the Ghostbusters crossing the streams. "Hey, you remember the thing I told you not to do like five times? Let's do that thing."

Spatial paradox?

Game mechanics prevent you from intersecting portals. The question of what would happen if you tried is somewhat intriguing.

Game mechanics can be bent. Normally a portal on a surface that's moving relative to the Earth will terminate, but there are a few levels where that's what you need to do.

Yeah, it would be a sort of "crossing the streams" thing.

You'd just have to remove the "portals disappear if the surface they're on moves" mechanic for that particular instance.

That's not breaking game mechanics; that's changing the internal rules of the game.

I'd imagine the portals would fizzle out on contact with each other, discharging a big burst of blue-and-orange electricity. Or something more spectacular, perhaps.

Maybe they cause some sort of explosion and that can be used to do stuff such as break the environment to continue? I could imagine the 'explosion' being a massive puff of Blue/Orange Particles rather than something... Hollywood.

I figure it should just be a last resort similar to portaling to the moon, rather than a gameplay mechanic used throughout the game. You're basically creating a space paradox.

Idle thought: why is the Oracle Turret different? It's not defective; the crap turrets are black and speak with an obnoxious dudebro voice rather than the soft little girl voice that the regular turrets have. One can infer that the Oracle Turret CAN shoot you, but it chooses not to, instead imparting wisdom it's learned from its time in the facility.

I was reading the trope page for Portal 2 and an idea struck me. The rudimentary AI that runs the facility while G La DOS is dead at one point mentions that all lethal military androids have been taught to read and given a copy of the Three Laws of Robotics to share.

Maybe the Oracle Turret is the one that actually received and read the Three Laws?

Doesn't explain the ability to see the Future and the Past, but that is a fascinating idea!

Maybe that copy of the Three Laws was written on the back of a book of Nostradamus's predictions.

Headcanon Accepted.

I finally installed this game on my computer, and you know what I noticed? In the beginning, when Wheatley wakes you up, the painting on the wall's completely different. It was a nice calm mountain scene in Spring, but when you get up the second time and everything's dark, it's a full moon night scene during Winter. How sweet is that?

It amuses me greatly to think that someone changed the painting during the months/years you were asleep.

And it amuses ME greatly to think that "painting" was an advanced Lite Brite screen with an AI in it whose only form of communication was altering that picture. As the place went to Hell the picture got darker and scarier to reflect the AI's own fears. Obviously it doesn't know English.

Oh, and @Tobias: The answer to the Oracle Turret, like everything else, is Rule of Funny, but it's hardly impossible to imagine that it's just a different kind of defective turret. There's no reason why the production lines would only cause defects in one particular way.

The first several times I played through the Turret Factory, I just left the Oracle Turret at the first surface past the conveyor belt. Or dropped it into the abyss or set it right back down on the conveyor, because it's a turret, who cares? I only listened to it after Cracked reported on what it says.

And then one of the times I listened to its entire thing, I walked it through the fizzler to see if the game would allow that kind of cruelty.

edited 17th Apr '14 9:49:34 AM by TParadox

Aaah! Found a new little thing in the game. In the level where Wheatley realizes there's no exit and he decides to "make an exit" (level 15, with funnel and speed gel), I always have a hard time remembering to watch that happen, but this time I noticed that when the chamber breaks open, you can see P-Body get startled by the destruction and dash through the exit.

I'm at the part where G La DOS tells you about having a birthday present, or, rather, birthday medical experiment planned for you. Wouldn't it be funny if Chel's exposure to all the stuff in the lab actually DID make her immortal already? Not unkillable, mind you, just unaging. That'd be a pretty nifty way for her to explore the Half Life world, don't you think? New Headcanon accepted.

How'd you mean? Chell's centuries into the future after Gordon Freeman. What does being ageless have to do with seeing the Half-Life world?

We don't know exactly how far in the future it is. The game goes out of its way to leave it ambiguous.