And once I got it home, I made a beeline for Portal. Having heard so much about this I had very high hopes for it and was keen to see how it would hold up.
And what did I think of it?
To be honest I'm not entirely sure.
To begin with, lets get what we know out of the way: When Portal came out in 2007, it was a completely new title that came packaged with two well-established brothers (Half Life and Team Fortress). In the time since then, Portal has scooped up plenty of praise, awards and spawned a whole lot of memes. And it's into this environment I step into.
Maybe I'm an interesting candidate to assess Portal: Unlike everyone who first played it back in 2007, I know exactly what to expect, I have an understanding that this is a highly regarded game and I have become familiar with both the phrase 'The Cake is a Lie' (although more through accident than design) and the song Still Alive (to the point I have downloaded for use in Rock Band).
But that's the thing: Through many words being written about Portal and the prevalence of the Cake is a Lie meme, a lot of the mystique about the game is gone. Anyone playing Portal now is going to go through a completely different experience then those playing it for the first time in 2007 had.
That's not to say that I didn't enjoy Portal: Far from it. I liked the black humour, I liked the challenge of the puzzles and the final confrontation with GLaDOS was intense - yet bizarrely counter-balanced with her witty insults.
But for me the popularity of Portal has more or less killed the subtle nature of the game itself. With Portal being a huge hit and inspiring more than a few catchphrases, there are no surprises left. Sure seeing 'The Cake is a Lie' scribbled on the wall may be a surprise but it's not when you've heard many times elsewhere. And I found the promise of Cake isn't really featured that many times in the game itself - which left me wondering why that aspect of the game got more attention than it did. There were some great ideas being put to work in Portal but it a shame that many of them got lost in GLaDOS' witticisms and endless youtube clips of Still Alive. And I find the reaction to the heart-cube puzzling - and indeed the presence of the heart cube plushy's seem more of an undermining of the point Valve were trying to convey (although personally if you're going to invoke feelings of remorse towards the player you may as well not bother becuase Shadow of the Colossus has already been made).
I guess humour is really hard to pull off in a game: If it's not funny then the game looks silly. But if it's really funny then it ends up being repeated endlessly in chatrooms and e-mails everywhere and it gradually loses it's impact.
And that's what bothers me about Portal: There were some great ideas at work but they seemed to have been lost in a tidal of wave of fandom. Imagine if someone wrote a novelization about Ico and gave their own interpretation on the characters and events in the game. Wouldn't it suck to have all that mystery taken away? Wouldn't it suck to have your own ideas squashed by someone else's? Wouldn't it ruin your own perception of the game?
But then again, Valve have made more games and more fans then that of Team Ico so maybe the adulation should come as no surprise.
Mind you, one consistent theme in this blog is how I've been discovering games in my own time and how I've come out better for it. Indeed this is not the first time I've been intimidated by a game through reputation alone. But in the case Portal, it has made such an impact within such a small space of time - is it any wonder why someone like me would be intimidated?
I don't know: Maybe I should've left it for a few more years.....
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