Discussion VideoGame / Portal

I raised this issue on the Tech forum. The color tags are still there, but the administration has axed them entirely.

I would advocate removing the joke entirely.

Just because it's threadmoded doesn't make it conversation in the main page.

True. What makes it conversation in the main page is that it's a chatty remark with more rhetorical flourishes than actual content, that belongs in a forum thread, not in a list of trope examples, and doesn't actually say anything about the "Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory" trope.

Except we're not supposed to have Thread Modes in the main page regardless.

Was it already removed? If not, remove it out.

The walkthrough I saw had you attempt it in Test Chamber 7: Advanced Aerial Faith Plates, in which the only way to get it on the Faith Plate without yourself also getting on there is to let go of it and fall into the water, dying. If there are other places to get the achievement, it's not valid and it can be removed.

It's possible even in that chamber without dying, you just have to backtrack a little. It should be removed.

Also, prior planning is necessary, which is all I can say without going into Walkthrough Mode.

For the record, a much easier place to attempt it would probably be Chamber 15. That's where I got it, at any rate.

Editing my first comment because it was lengthy and basically an achievement walkthrough. Basically, you can very easily do this in Chapter 2, Chamber 6, and you are able to drop things onto the plates. That should sum it up.

That's a good question. It's mainly because I completely forgot about that line from the game and thought someone was just making something up to sound like GLaDOS, which is starting to bother me more and more. Now that I've remembered, I've stopped caring, except that I think it makes a little more sense to have the stinger be something from the end of the game, rather than the middle. But I'm pretty sure that's just me.

I think this would be a good place to discuss all of the self-demonstraty...ness that's permeating both pages, especially on Portal 2. As I said, making up dialogue to sound like GLaDOS is starting to really grate on me, and Cave Johnson is no exception. (Not to mention that the formatting on the first paragraph looks really awkward.)

I removed the Cave Johnson "speech" and the silly portal formatting gag from Portal 2. Seriously, they are dumb, not to mention being made up. We have no need or intention to make this a Self-Demonstrating Article.

Someone should put the end of the "brick joke" back on the Portal page, when it's not checked out.

Aaaaaand now it's back.

I agree. I tried to cut it before and it got put back very quickly.

As the one who put it back, I'll be fine with someone getting rid of it if enough people want it gone.

I do quite like it though. It's that kind of daft-ness that makes this site more fun than wikipedia.

I like it. It's a clever and unique use of the text formatting system.

Frankly, I like it. It kind of bugs me that the portal isn't the O in Portal, as it looks pretty much like it's shown in the logo (which is why I changed it before Silent Dave put it back again).

Is it possible to put stuff after the index listing? It'd be a nice Brick Joke, and we can have it and the "thank you for participating..." footer at the same time. Also, agree w/ Black Wolfe in that it really should be the O in Portal that is the, well, the portal.

The joke is not funny and it is getting tiresome constantly restoring it back to the original version. I'm right on the verge of deleting it and banning people.

Is this the same Headscratchers page that is linked to twice from the main Portal page?

Yes.

It's not technically a Fan Nickname but I added a note explaining that it's from the commentary, and hopefully that should settle it.

It might apply to Does This Remind You of Anything?. Not sure.

It's any gesture using both bots, as they explicitly make them "look human." The Power of Friendship sounds the best, though.

I don't see how simply having the trope there is a spoiler. Seeing the Earth from space doesn't inherently give anything important away.

Well, technically it could be a spoiler that you go to space at some point during the game, given that the facility was explicitly a terrestrial one. However, I've tried to put the trope title into the spoiler box as an experiment, but it never appears that way on the actual page.

Look, at a certain point, anyone reading this article who hasn't played the game is going to run into something spoilerish. That's a risk you take by reading this site. We can't spoiler tag every single plot reference or the article will be unreadable.

I second the motion.

It's 313K characters in the source. That's only a short way from getting auto-locked for size (it happens at 400K). So it is probably time. But someone's gotta go through and update all the wicks.

Okay, I made the Videogame.Portal 2 page, but Portal 2 seems to only want to link to the main Portal page. Is that a problem? (And if no one else wants to, I'll do the wick check at about noon PST.)

I fixed the redirect from Portal 2. You're going to have to also hard split all the subpages. I can't "split" a discussion page so the new article will have to absorb ongoing discussions from the old one.

I will whack on reviews in a moment.

Edit: The review mover is acting up. I've asked Eddie for help.

Should all the subpages be hard-split? Also, I've been curious about this for a while now - should the giant block of spoilers in the Portal2 quotes still be there? Because to me, that seems to be missing the point of the Quotes page, but maybe I'm just wrong.

Why have the articles been moved to the videogame namespace? They don't conflict with each other, which is the reason we have namespaces. Since the main namespace redirects to the videogame pages, please consider moving them back to the main namespace. Nothing personal, I just hate seeing articles on Main. that redirect to the same article in a namespace.

EDIT: Nevermind. It just seemed weird to me. Didn't realize it was a wiki-wide thing.

Well, I suppose you could make the subpage links in Portal 2 redirect to their Portal counterparts. I already saw some of those. You need to do one or the other, of course, so people don't start adding new ones in the wrong place.

Regarding the Quotes page? I have no idea — there's so much redundancy there between Quotes, Funny, Awesome Moments, etc., that it's going to take a heroic effort to maintain them all. People are ridiculously spoiler-happy with this game, both in adding them and in using spoiler tags.

Here's my off-the-cuff judgement. Cut any quotes that can't be used at all without being spoilers. For the rest, spoiler-tag the characters who say them but not the quotes themselves.

^ VmKid, per the Namespace policy, all works pages are supposed to be on a namespace. That's a rule we're trying to establish across the wiki.

Care to elaborate?

A bit too many links to that article as seen from "View source".

You Could Always Edit It Yourself.

Yes. The page is to catch inadvertent bluelinks, not to wick every example of GLaDOS like we're fapping over some kind of nerdy in-joke. I tried to have it cut repeatedly, actually.

They are probably both accurate. Use whichever you feel like. I use Core myself.

I'm just wondering what should be their title on the character page. They're called spheres on the character page but cores on the quotes page.

What do the credits call them?

"Defective Cores", IIRC

I think that, since the sound files in question were removed, we can safely consider them non-canon.

Well they're still on Youtube.

The game itself contradicts that timeline. The walls of the old facility are painted with the years they were contructed and some you can see stuff dating from the 50's and 60's. The newspaper clippings in the lobby back up this version of the timeline. Further, Cave Johnson did not record all his messages at the same time. The Propulsion Gel test chambers and corresponding recordings were made in the 70's, and the moon dust/Conversion Gel chambers were made in the 80's.

But the earliest test environments were designed in the early 60's and require a portal gun to solve. There's even a poster showing a guy running around with a huge backpack-sized version.

Edit: I can get the exact dates tonight when I play through that area again.

Confirmed: The date on the wall at the start of the condemned testing facility is 1952. His Shower Curtain Salesman award is 1942. He has DOD Contractor of the Year Runner Up awards from 1952 and 1954.

The Propulsion Gel facility is painted 1971. The end of it is 1978, and the start of the Conversion Gel facility is 1982.

Here's a neat anachronism. The "Condemned" sign posted on the walls as you're leaving the old facility to go back into the upper labs is dated 6/15/1961, despite the final chambers clearly being built in 1982. Ooooooookay...

Yes, the "Different" turret says "Her name is Caroline. Remember that!" It says a lot of things that could be considered spoilers, but don't make sense unless you've actually gotten farther in the game. "The answer is beneath us." "Prometheus was punished by the gods for bringing knowledge to humans. He was cast into the bowels of the earth and pecked by birds." "Get mad. Don't make lemonade."

The in game commentaries outright states they wanted the chambers to look like something from a first time map maker though.

Ah, I didn't know that. In that case the example is fine of course :)

Both. Fair enough to list it both times.

I was thinking something along the lines of that, but with a separate section for the backstory in addition to general gameplay tropes, because at this point the backstory is quite extensive.

Thirded; I'm finding it hard to navigate the sequel tropes with the orignal's tropes.

I am going to do a soft split when I get the chance.

I agree. The game will be coming out soon anyway: better do it early before this page gets 20 times bigger because of the sequel.

I'm going to do a soft split when I get the chance.

What? Sequels typically share a page with the original. If there's enough of a rift, we can add a new section for stuff exclusive to 2. But making an entirely new page is unnecessary.

Really, really, really popular pages that include more than one work tend to get divided into multiple pages, e.g. Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2, which used to be the same page. Since the popularity of Portal can probably be measured in Gigasheps, we can safely assume that Portal 2 will get its own page, if not immediately then soon.

I support the notion of creating a new page. I'm finding it impossible at this point to read through the Portal page and not find a spoiler for Portal 2 (doesn't help almost all of the Portal 2 information is spoiler'd), so to read any of it you need to highlight it. And spoil the game for yourself.

What I would suggest if a new page isn't warranted is dividing the page chronologically depending on the timeline: pre-Portal, Portal, and Portal 2. Ditto with the other pages like YMMV, Crowning Moment/Music of Awesome/Heartwarming/Funny/etc.

There seems to be a decent amount of retconning in Portal 2 wrt the pre-Portal stuff, so that might not work that well.

I'm planning to soft split it shortly, when I get the time.

I do think it's too WMG-ish, yeah - I could go off on a paragraph or two about how that theory in fact makes no sense and is contradicted by evidence in the game *ahem* but then somebody who believes it would come along and make a rebuttal, and we really, really don't want that kind of natter cluttering up the main page, do we?

It's not a Scrappy Level, so don't name it that.

Also, it's Stylistic Suck, not Stuck— and yes, I think that fits.

It's a first person puzzler, which did not actually have a genre until Portal came out, so it's fairly unique. Still, it's constructed on an FPS engine so it's one for all intents and purposes.

Well, somewhere between a FP-Puzzler and FP-Shooter, since you "shoot" portals and everyone calls the device a portal-gun, pretty much.

it's a FPS slash Puzzle game, not to complicated. Halo is FPS/Driving, multiple genre games are common now.

A first person puzzler... wait, like Myst?

It isn't made clear during the actual games, but it's all there in the manual. It happened on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day and that gets lampshaded in Portal 2.

Let's hold onto it until we at least hear it more than once.

Alright, that's what I thought. Thanks for the help.

Uhm.

Given that it already has a few entries on this page, I'd say yes?

There's no need for a separate page, I think. Just adding a link to the body of the article would be enough, if there isn't one already.

High Octane Nightmare Fuel and Nightmare Fuel Unleaded are the same thing.

WE GET IT. THERE IS A LOT OF COVERSATION IN THE MAIN PAGE.

Good God, you don't need to be Captain Obvious, if there's conversation then remove it. And half of those aren't conversation, especially this one.

The wiki is not your private forum to talk about stuff. The main page should be kept as informative and non-talky as is reasonably possible. Discussion pages, WMG, JBM, forums — go crazy.

stickmeister0, experience suggests that if I had just removed all the conversations, somebody would have complained about that. Preserving the conversations on the discussion page reduces the chances that somebody will be upset that I deleted their beautiful argument. Also, if they want to continue their beautiful argument, they can do it, right here on the discussion page where discussions belong.

It's a better idea to remove the useless natter, while keeping the portions relevant to the trope. Several of the examples you deleted could be salvaged.

This goes on WMG if you want to expound about it. Believe me, you aren't the first.

The things on her feet were probably part of her tests. They stop any sort of fall damage.

And there's nothing wrong with her head unless you're talking about her Portal 2 design.

Why not an image from the game itself? It's not like the page is about the concept of portals.

Is this picture◊ the one you're talking about?

Heh. Cute picture. But I agree with anon — the best page image would be one from the actual game.

huh, Guess what? i just spent the last day and a half coding and noclipping to get a perfect screenshot of the energy ball, the upgrader portal gun, and both portal in a natural screenshot to replace garry's Mod shot. and now it changed. Crap

Your image is broken with brackets, so copy and paste the url without the brackets. The wiki won't allow hot linking, after all.

It's...not a good image actually. And I don't think I totally like the current image.

How about we use an image from the box art?