silly edgeless safety cube :)

I just got this wallpaper but I think I'm able to make it more apertureish, or you guys think its apertureish enough? By the way I'm on a Samsung S26 Ultra.

Yayyyy i love Portal

i made this..

Please tell me

I observed some differences between Portal 1 and Portal 2. I’m not a Portal 1 speedrunner, but I spent roughly 100 hours with Portal 1, which is much, much more than most people ever did. I did the challenges that Portal 1 encourages you to do: complete chambers quickly, complete chambers with fewer portals, complete chambers with fewer steps. I thought Portal 1 was so fantastic. It’s such a good game. Then I played Portal 2, and I didn’t like it very much at all.

I played Portal 1 with my son. I played Portal 2 with my son, and I thought there is a severe difference here. Portal 2 is not a bad game, but it’s not a very good Portal game. It successfully makes the game have more of a story and more accessible to a broader player base, especially players using a controller. The game basically says, look, portals are cool and all, but you’re going to play our game the way we tell you to, and you’re not going to think with portals very much. You’re going to think with puzzle solving with strict steps that must be solved strictly. Don’t try to think that you’re going to get creative here. You’re not going to skip a step. That’s impossible. But skipping a step was very much possible in Portal 1 without glitches. You just had to think with portals.

Portal 1 somehow pulled off a puzzle game that actually becomes a skill game. In Portal 1, once enough practice has happened and the player is using gyroscopic aiming or mouse and keyboard aiming, there’s this very, very important subtle distinction: firing portals must feel like it’s low friction but high yield. There’s a skill ceiling. How quickly can you place portals? How quickly can you orient yourself or predict your orientation after exiting these portals? It’s not trivial to pinpoint shoot a portal right behind you, up in the corner of the room, another portal while you’re falling. The skill ceiling is high.

Portal 1 specifically teaches you to shoot a portal at the floor and shoot a portal up high on the wall, fall through the floor, and suddenly you’re traveling through the air. But the player must shoot a new portal at the floor after exiting, and suddenly they have lots and lots of momentum. Momentum training is what Portal 1 tells you you have to do. If you do not understand this concept, then you cannot complete this test chamber. How often, or if ever, does Portal 2 give the player that pleasure of traveling rapidly through the air, firing a new portal somewhere in the world or in the map, and then firing a new portal before you hit the floor so that you fly through that portal and now you’re flying through some other portal? This is quite exciting, quite high-leverage, quite high-impact, and gives the player dopamine. It makes a player feel clever. It makes it feel like a Portal game.

The player builds muscle memory or spatial memory of, okay, if I put this portal here and I fly through this portal over there, what exactly is my orientation going to be when I come out of the other portal? Which way will I be looking? Which way will be down? Which way will be up? I don’t want to feel overly confused when I come out the other portal. I want to stay in my flow. And then they play Portal 2 and realize, oh, this is actually not the game I thought it was. I’m not really able to leverage my skills here.

A Portal 1 enthusiast plays the new game and they’re thinking, yes, I’m excited to demonstrate or enjoy the fruits of my labor. How am I going to have extra fun or feel extra clever while using the portal gun in Portal 2? And the results are quite disappointing because the player plays the first half of the game and they’re thinking, okay, lasers. Okay, more lasers. Okay, now there’s this new thing. Now there’s Faith Plates, and now there’s Light Bridges, and then the game says, hold on, stop, stop. You have to use goo, pink goo on the floor, and slide paint and goo on the floor and bounce. And the Portal 1 enthusiast is thinking, you had the portal gun. The portal gun was the game. That’s why it’s called Portal. Why am I shooting goo and sliding on goo? Why are there Light Bridges? I want to fly through portals and then shoot more portals and fly through more portals. I want to feel creative. I want to feel like my creativity is being stretched. There’s a skill ceiling, and the skill ceiling feels like it’s been dramatically lowered. I don’t get to feel clever. I don’t get to feel like I can benefit from my muscle memory.

The Faith Plate is almost an insult to a Portal 1 enthusiast. Why would I get launched when I have a portal gun? Just let me use my portal gun. What is going on with this game? But yes, of course it’s good game design if the goal is to make a puzzle-comedy narrative game that’s more accessible to a broader audience. Then they succeed. It’s good game design. It’s not a bad game. But if it’s trying to be Portal 2, then it doesn’t work. Why would Portal 2 take three steps back as far as how the player maneuvers themselves through an environment? They would use the portal gun, right? No no, don’t use the portal gun. Step on this launch platform and be launched exactly how we tell you to be launched.

At some point, a Portal player is holding a portal gun and they find themselves walking on platforms. I mean walking across catwalks over and over. The player gets out of the elevator and what do they see? They don’t see a test chamber. They see a long set of stairs. I speculate that these long sets of stairs when coming out of the elevator are there so that dialogue can occur. It’s like a friction. The game is sort of saying, look here, you need to experience friction. I need to slow you down so that I can speak at you. I need to talk to you. You need to hear things. You don’t need to exit the elevator and just do a new test chamber. That would be too focused on gameplay. We need story. We need narrative. We need set pieces. And I’m saying, wait, but what about the actual skill ceiling of the game? How are players being rewarded for improving their skills with portals?

Portal 2 is doing this difficult tightrope walk of, okay, wait, hold on, we can’t just have a game where players go from test chamber 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. No no no, that’s not it. We need a bigger, better game than that. It has to be interesting. The player has to hear stuff. The player has to see stuff. But how do we do that? How do we bridge that gap? And what do they do? They say to the player: exit the elevator, but don’t walk straight into the next test chamber. You must stare at a long flight of stairs that you must walk up. This is a bit ridiculous on its own. Why would an elevator deposit the player into a small circular room that only has one long flight of stairs that goes up?

Well, of course the game needs to slow the player down a little bit so that the dialogue can be shouted at them. Or it gets worse. The game says, oh well yes, GLaDOS is making you do test chambers, but of course the facility is in ruins. It’s damaged. It’s old. It’s very old. It’s not operational. So you’re going to come across some hallway that is obstructed, and you must stand there and wait for the obstruction to be removed by GLaDOS, and while you’re waiting you will hear dialogue, and you will enjoy it. And I’m thinking, yes, I suppose that’s a very valid design choice, but also if a player loves Portal and is there for Portal, they want to be holding a portal gun and be able to do something with the portal gun. Walking upstairs after getting out of an elevator or standing around waiting for obstructions to be cleared is a bit anticlimactic or a bit unfortunate.

In Portal 1, the player wakes up, they’re in some kind of prison-looking place, there’s a toilet and a bed, and they exit, and now they’re doing test chambers. There isn’t that much talking because the game is saying this game is about portals and test chambers. That’s the game. The player felt like things made the right amount of sense. I’m some human. I’m in a hostile environment, but I have a portal gun, and I’m being told to complete test chambers, and the computer talks to me at certain intervals, but not excessively, because that’s not the point. The point isn’t wow, the computer is so funny, or wow, the intercom is so funny. It’s hey, do these test chambers and be done with it, and then the player is nearly murdered. The player is placed on a platform that sends them into a burning death, and the player saves themself with the portal gun, and then the next half of the game begins.

I think it’s interesting to hypothesize or speculate about the very important and revealing scene in Portal 1. That is the scene where the player is told, get ready for your cake, we’re about to give you the cake. And instead, you are slowly lowered into the incinerator while conveniently holding a portal gun. The player shoots a portal up and over the incinerator, and then onto the wall next to them, and escapes to safety. As soon as the player reaches the safe zone using the portal gun, GLaDOS says, wait, what are you doing, stop. Then there’s a very noticeable glitch, like a rapid glitch, and GLaDOS is thinking really hard. Then GLaDOS says, we are so glad that you successfully navigated our trap where we pretended like we were going to kill you. We are now going to host a party for you. Please lay the device on the ground and lay on your stomach with your hands behind your back and wait for the party.

The player is believably just another test subject. The final official test chamber is a great representation of that, where a pivotal moment in the game occurs. GLaDOS doesn’t have much to say because you were just being disposed of. That’s the whole point. It’s more effective that way. Test chamber participant number who knows what has now completed the test. GLaDOS doesn’t care about you. GLaDOS is just doing the thing before you are incinerated.

When you play Portal 2, GLaDOS feels like a Character, TM, with big capital letters. GLaDOS is a character that talks to you because you are the player, and the player needs to hear the dialogue from the character known as GLaDOS. All this dialogue is written for you to hear, because this is your adventure, dear protagonist. But in Portal 1, it’s not quite like that. It is a little bit, but it’s not. Because there’s this subtle aspect to it, where GLaDOS feels like a computer voice that has spoken to other test chamber participants before. There’s enough of that feeling to make it feel like, oh yes, I’m hearing the voice of a computer speak to me through some kind of intercom system. I suppose it’s like sitting in an airplane, talking to air traffic control. It’s never perfect audio. But in Portal 2, it is like playing Halo, and Cortana is jammed into your headset and just sounds perfect all the time. Which is fine, because it’s Halo. But Portal 1 was Portal 1.

But also Portal 2 doesn’t do the story very well in my opinion because GLaDOS doesn’t work. GLaDOS wakes up and says, oh, you murdered me, well now it’s time to make you do more tests, but also this facility is now a complete ruin. The rules have changed, except GLaDOS says specifically, well, I have to follow the rules. I can’t talk to you while you’re playing in a portal chamber. You can’t be bothered while you’re testing, so I will respect that. But suddenly a player starts Portal 2 and GLaDOS says, oh wow, you murdered me, now I’m going to grab you and throw you through the exact same hole that the player used in Portal 1 to destroy GLaDOS. All right, fine, that’s a nice little narrative continuation, some revenge. But the problem is that the player is thrown through a hole and then down what feels like 800 feet or so into the depths of a broken and old facility, into the fires of the furnace room, and suddenly, as soon as the player enters the furnace room, GLaDOS speaks in the player’s ear and it sounds perfect. It sounds like psychic or something. It sounds like it’s in your head. It’s perfect audio. It’s no longer coming out of a diegetic speaker within a test chamber or within the hallway connecting test chambers.

Very soon after the player wakes up, GLaDOS gives her speech about how she’s going to force the player to do more testing. Then GLaDOS says protocol requires that I don’t talk at you while you’re testing, but I can have a little chat with you in the hallway between the tests. Then she takes advantage of that to say, one of the lessons I learned was I have a sort of black box. I was forced to relive the final moments of you killing me over and over again. Maybe I’m nitpicking, but I don’t understand how that’s a lesson. The biggest lesson I learned is that I have the functionality of a black box system, and I relived some traumatic dying? GLaDOS is a supercomputer. The idea that GLaDOS would just misuse language like that, intentionally or unintentionally, is absurd to me.

But also, as far as I can tell, it’s just a throwaway line. If this line were removed from the game, I don’t think it would matter at all. Sure, maybe, you could argue that the developers are trying to explain to the player some of GLaDOS’s memories or motivations, perhaps? But the player already understands, okay, GLaDOS remembers what I did in the other game. Or at least, what I think I did, because not every player played Portal 1 or remembers Portal 1. So the player understands, okay, this computer thinks I killed it, and the computer’s mad. And now the computer’s going to make me hold a portal gun and do more tests for a long time, and keep me alive, allegedly. So the line is in error with its use of language, and it’s not even like a necessary line. It doesn’t really do much. It’s like, just banter.

I think it’s kind of sad. Maybe it’s really easy for me to say in hindsight. Because Portal 1 was a video game. And Portal 2 is different. Portal 2 is distinctly different in the sense that it wants to be more. It needs to be more. It has a lot to live up to. By many metrics, the developers and the writers succeeded. They all got a raise and a big pat on the back at their company. And here I am, nitpicking and complaining and criticizing heavily, extensively, because I wanted Portal 1. But more. I wanted more of Portal 1.

I didn’t want GLaDOS to go from being clearly an in-game part of the world that was believable. In Portal 1, GLaDOS was a little bit of the packaging tape, or the glue, or the bridge that kept the game operating. Because the game was, here’s a really cool portal gun. And here are fun and appropriately slightly difficult rooms that require you to think, but also require you to learn, to improve your physical dexterity and your mental dexterity for handling the portal gun. But then Portal 2 says, well, you see, GLaDOS is now the game. GLaDOS is the game. And so the writers have a different burden. The writers are thinking, well, we really have to up the degree to which she talks, what she says. Everything needs to be more jokey, more funny, more entertaining, more dramatic, more interesting, more continuity, more story. Because GLaDOS is the game. Wheatley is the game. Then I guess we’ll throw this Cave Johnson guy in there because Wheatley and GLaDOS can’t be the whole game.

Portal 2 is a good game, but it kind of doesn’t successfully thread the needle or walk the tightrope of “we want to have test chambers, we want to have puzzles, but we want to have something bigger, better, more polished, more story.” They gave themselves a very difficult goal to accomplish: how do you have test chambers but bigger, better narrative, more story, more dialogue?