History Headscratchers / Portal

** The New "Lab Rat" Comic by valve confirms alot of YMMV, Just Bugs Me, and WMG things: Rattman *HAS* the cube with him WHILE Glados Is destroyed by Chell. (SHe says this beacuse the cube is in fact still alive and Glados is insecure

* So you have a game where you play as a female, vaguely Asian protagonist who must platform in unusual ways in a shiny world where everything looks like an iPod (until you go under the surface to see dingy, abandoned workspaces, that is) and must evade enemies shooting at her, despite not starting with any weapons of her own, to overthrow a controlling system with cameras everywhere. What do you do? End it with a song called [[MirrorsEdge "Still Alive."]] Thank you and goodnight.
** TheAristocrats!
** I'm confused. What exactly bugs you about this? Also, your post seems to imply that Portal is ripping off Mirror's Edge... which was released a year after Portal. If you mean that Mirror's Edge is ripping off Portal, shouldn't that question belong to the Mirror's Edge page? Or are you implying Mirror's Edge is a sequel or otherwise related to Portal? But then, it'd be a WildMassGuessing rather than Just Bugs Me. Now ''I'' am bugged!
** I thought she was Latin[[strike:o]]a.
*** The person who was the model for Chell had some Brazillian and Japanese ancestry, so I guess she's about as Asian as Faith "vaguely Asian-looking but with an obviously European surname gotten from somewhere" Conners is.

*** I dunno. It seems kind of dumb to me. I mean, to start off, Portal ''isn't'' a First-Person Shooter game. It's a First-Person ''Puzzle'' game, which happens to be made on a game engine originally designed for making FPS games. That invalidates the thesis right there. ''Then'' you get into all this Freudian bullcrap about guns being "phallic symbols" and all that rot. By that logic, just about ''anything'' that incorporates a cylinder into its design is a "phallic symbol". For example, how about a table leg? Or a can of mace? or, hell, a fire extinguisher? My table lamp has a cylindrical neck; does that make it a symbol of a society dominated by men? No! It just makes it a practical, simply-designed table lamp. Cylinders are pervasive in all manner of objects we encounter in daily life, and that's because it's a shape that, geometrically speaking, is very dependable and has a wide range of versatility. Chell's gender doesn't matter. She has no lines, anyway, and no personality except for what the player decides she has. "Chell" is, simply, just a placeholder for the player themselves; the game is in the first person because third-person games are more detached from the player, but the plot of Portal is meant to be felt personally, viscerally. Would killing the Companion Cube have been so heart-wrenching if it was done from a third-person perspective? No. It wouldn't. (... In addition, the first-person viewpoint probably comes from the fact that that is, you know, what the engine is made and best-equipped for. No need to complicate things with external cameras when you're already abusing your physics engine in a million other ways.)

*** Also, his essay is factually incorrect; he states that the turrets have "clearly male" voices, despite them sounding like genderless 10-year-olds, he says that [=GlaDOS=] encourages Chell to form an emotional connection to the Companion Cube when she in fact tells her outright NOT to do this, and he basically implies that Chell incinerates the Companion Cube despite what [=GlaDOS=] says, when [=GlaDOS=] in fact requires the player to incinerate the damn thing just to progress to the next level! Also, guns are not penises! Let's take a look at what he's saying here: Guns, weapons created in order to be able kill a person from a distance is somehow the same thing as the male reproductive organ, which is an important part in creating new life? Am I the only one who sees the obvious, glaring flaw in his logic?

*** She's put you into dangerous situations in the interest of "testing". Presumably the morality core has... ''loopholes''.

* Wat really bugs me about the game is that it doesn't really try to hide the fact that the second part (in the "factory" style) is just an obstacle course too. Most of it is filled with lots of [[CowTools GNDN]] pistons and, apart from a few cube transporting tubes and some offices, there is nothing that even suggests that it was built for a reason other than test your skills and the neat gun. Take for instance the huge room where you're suddenly surrounded by ten turrets, and you have to do a triple fling to reach the next area. Or the shaft where you're at the bottom and there are numerous pistons doing ''nothing'' but going back and forth above your head. Or the room with the six pistons which when you walk over them drop you into a room with three turrets. Why do people even think this wasn't intended by the Enrichment Center designers?

*** So, yeah, "annoying" rather than "fun". Also, I have no idea what Glados "seems to be" either.

* Portal fans, specifically ones that quote the game constantly. There are so many quotes said on the internet and it gets really annoying. When someone starts saying every tiny thing said by Glados in the game, I might as well just play through the game again, because it's not that long to beat. Also, "The cake is a lie" is not the funniest thing in the game, it's not even told directly to the player unless you find it in a hidden room.

** On the other hand, ''this'' female player can happily jump through portals all day and is usually quite fine. Which is ironic, because SuperMarioGalaxy plays ping-pong with my brain.

* I. Don't. Get. It. And that bugs me.

Actually, the spheres probably AREN'T core modules. More likely they're addons that alter [=GLADoS=]'s personality. The ending song states that [=GLaDOS=] is thrilled at what you've done, which can only mean that she WANTED you to destroy the spheres.

* Why the heck does everyone seem to like making GLaDOS {{Moe}}? I just don't get it. She's a [[GoshdangItToHeck goshdarn]] creepy insane computer, who previously killed everyone in the complex by flooding it with neurotoxins, lies to you the entire way through the game, tries to kill you repeatedly, and then flips out when you escape, before going into a complete {{Villainous Breakdown}}. And yet it seems everywhere I look there's some variation of an anthropamorphised doe-eyed GLaDOS demurely offing cake. It's just really getting on my wick, is all.

** Are you female, or an older male? They both seem a bit more susceptible to that sort of thing.;