In addition to completing Super Mario Galaxy this weekend, Chris and I also finished Portal in one sitting. One completely and genuinely enjoyable sitting. I absolutely loved portal. It is the best game that I have played in a long time. It isn’t 50 hours long, it isn’t packed with detailed cut-scenes, and it was really only supposed to be a freebie bonus that came with the rest of the Orange Box titles. It still managed to be phenomenally excellent despite all of those things. In fact, I am 99% sure that I enjoyed portal more than I will enjoy the other OB games.

Even though Portal was only about 5 hours long, I liked it enough that I would easily have bought it on its own for the price of a regular PC game. It was really that good. Come to think of it, I don’t even remember Chris complaining about the camera. If you’ve never gamed with Chris, let me tell you that’s nothing short of a miracle.

First things first, the gameplay was very well done. Basically, you have a cool gun that you can use to shoot holes, or “portals” in walls, floors, ceilings, etc. You decide the location of both the entrance and the exit portal. Go in one, come out the other. At first this is a bit difficult to get your mind around, when you’re standing in front of a portal, and through it you can see yourself facing another direction, but you adapt pretty quickly. Within no time you’re falling out of the ceiling while shooting portals in walls as you drop. Each level is a sort of puzzle that you have to figure out how to solve with your portal gun. This, in itself, would have been enough for me to give the game a big thumbs up, but it wasn’t even the best part.

The thing that really made me love this game was the writing. Story and dialogue are always really important to me in any game. Portal actually didn’t have much of a story, but the dialogue made up for it about a zillion times. It was the best writing in a game that I have seen in a long time, possibly ever. It’s hard to describe without ruining what story there is, but I’d like to let it be known that this game actually made me laugh. Out loud. I LOLd. The lines were so funny that after we were done playing, I was looking them up on WikiQuote. Add to that the ending credits song, which has since taken up residence on my iPod, and this game deserves some kind of writing award. So I officially hereby declare that Portal wins the first ever Completionist.com award for best writing.

I’m sure if they knew, they would be honoured.

The only time this game dipped below the level of super-awesome-fun was when Chris and I were stupid and didn’t realize there was a button for opening doors. The things that we came up with to try to open that door became increasingly ridiculous, though highly imaginative. We finally had to look at an FAQ, and when we read that the next step was to “open the door with E”, we felt like total losers. This was no fault of Portal, though. Just us. We are dumb.

If you’re really not interested in playing any of the other Orange Box titles, Portal is coming out as a stand-alone game, and you would be doing yourself a favour if you picked it up. Considering a lot of people named it Game of the Year for 2007 (including me, even though I was too late to do so), it’s done pretty well for something that was originally an afterthought.

Julie did a great job of summing up just how refreshing Portal is, as well as pointing out my general disdain for most game cameras. This game had a lot of hype to live up to and did not disappoint. Hopefully, the game’s end song, Still Alive, will live up to the massive amount of hype I am building up for it in my own mind when it shows up in Rock Band sometime in the near future.

It’s hard for me to decide whether I prefer the writing in Mass Effect, with its all-encompassing depth, Bioshock, with its twists and turns, or Portal, for its comedic value. I would have a little more difficulty handing out the first ever completionist.com award for writing, but since Julie already gave it away…congratulations Portal!