The cake is a lie!

I finished up Portal a couple of weeks ago Unbelievably awesome! It has a great gameplay hook (umm... portals), great dialog, excellent production values, and it's short enough that it doesn't become repetitive. And holy shit the song from the ending credits has been stuck in my head for a week. (<-- SPOILERS) It's also a genuinely funny game in a sea of super serious squad based first person shooters. Hooray comedy! I really hope that this game helps bring about shorter, more innovative AAA titles. This is exactly the kind of game that should be available in stand-alone form on XBox Live Arcade. Maybe Valve is the only kind of company that can make a game like Portal. They already have a great in-house engine that they don't have to pay any licensing fees for, and they have the cash flow from Half Life and Steam to pretty much do whatever they want to. The sky's the limit over there. But I've heard rumors of "budget" licensing of the Unreal engine, so maybe it's not too much to hope for. EA kind of squished my hopes and dreams for a middleware revolution a when they bought out Criterion in 2004... but maybe they just delayed the inevitable for a few years. If small studios full of talented people can license next-gen technology on the cheap and produce a short AAA title in the downloadable space then I'm going to be very excited about the future. And oh look... we already had RoboBlitz that used Unreal3... maybe the future's not too far away after all. :D

Hang on... this post was supposed to be about Portal. Portal is badass. And I've been told that ex-Double Finer Erik Wolpaw wrote a lot of the dialog. He's pretty awesome... and if you didn't think Portal was funny at all then I'm coming over to your house with a shiv. Actually... come to think of it... if you don't buy Portal right now I'm coming over to your house with a shiv. Remember the Detroit face-cutting thing? Yeah... it's real.

-Brad!