Flutterby™! : The cake is a lie!

Yesterday we bundled up the trampoline and dropped it on Forest, and while we were there he showed me Portal, and I got to see what people are raving about. You wake up in the Aperture Science Center, where a voice informs you that you are to be tested. You're given a device with two triggers which creates portals where you point it (subject to various limitations on surfaces), go into one portal, come out the other portal, maintaining speed. This plays all sorts of great mind-games with the standard first person in a maze sort of thinking.

But while playing with your 3d reasoning skills, it's also presenting a hilarious storyline, riffing on all the bureaucracy and idiocy that you'd imagine accompanies the creation of standardized tests, along with some witty digs at various computer game genres. I may have to get it just so I can find out what happens after level 18. And any game in which the gun turrets have a cutesy female voice wins just based on that.

I also clearly now need to go see the original game from which this was derived, Narbacular Drop.

Portal is one of those games that I want to grab people and show because it demonstrates that games don't have to be about killing things (well, except for your... no, that'd be a spoiler), that they can stretch our thinking in interesting ways, and that they can be witty satire.