It’s been a long time since Valve released a product of entertainment I actually want to play from start to finish, but thanks to the release of Portal 2 now they have. Brilliant. To celebrate this momentous occasion I’ve taken the chance to use my Nintendo 3DS and deployed it for Mii making duties. The fruits of this adventure are these two charmingly charming specimens. In case you can’t recognise them the one of the left is a Gabe Newell Mii, and the one on the right is a Doug Lombardi Mii (whoever he is).
When Doug Lombardi’s friend Gabe Newell entered Sony’s Announcement Party (press conference) at the Electronic Entertainment Expo Expo (E3 Expo) and announced Steam integration for the PS3 version of Portal 2 it has always been the platform on which I have been most curious to see the game, yet I would never want to sacrifice the PC version for that. In the end everything worked out perfectly, thanks to the PS3 copy being bundled with a Steam code for the version I actually wanted.
Sony managed to completely balls up my plans to test out Steam integration by failing to keep PSN up long enough for me to play the single player campaign beyond that part near the start where Stephen Merchant talks a lot. Clearly Sony should have used more potatoes, or whatever the flip that meme Portal 2 has unleashed upon us is going to be.
On the plus side, before the whole of PlayStation collapsed my friend ran towards a real life video game store and bought his very own copy of Portal 2, enabling us some co-operative play. Because I didn’t want to wait several years for the 10 jiggabytes of data to download from Steam I opted to play the PS3 version.
I found the whole console to PC cross platform play highly fascinating yet my partner failed to respond to my passing comments about how insanely exciting I found the situation to be, so he probably didn’t give a toss. He’s Scottish though, it’s impossible to get excited about anything with the shrill of bagpipes constantly streaming into your ears. Trust me, I’ve been north before. Once.
With neither of us willing to deliver aural stimulation to each other a hilariously convoluted system was devised to enable text communication. Logged into Steam on a laptop I typed messages to my companion using an array of scissor switch keys, upon pressing enter he would have Steam’s chat window overlay pop-up and display short, concise messages of encouragement.
Instead of opening the Steam overlay and interrupting the game Clifford (I’ve decided giving Drew a name make this tale much easier than coming up with large amounts of words to describe co-op buddy) would then respond in the typical fashion of hitting T and typing his message of admiration, which would display on my screen as if I were playing the PC game. I don’t know why, but despite my best efforts I could not get a USB keyboard to function with the game to enable the same chat options. Bloody consoles.
Our chat solution was probably the most challenging part of the game, and retelling the tale doesn’t make it sound anywhere near as exotic as I had first hoped. Oh well.
Shortly after confirming communication was possible we began playing the game. Surprisingly, despite the fudging of text based chat systems, puzzles never offered too much of a challenge beyond minor clerical errors probably induced by the ever darkening outsidey bits of my house.
The whole co-op campaign probably ended up taking around six hours, and that includes various robot based interactions and accidental murderings. It’s probably also worth noting that, as I was on a PlayStation 3, I ended up playing the whole game with analog sticks, meanwhile Clifford was using the exceptional input devices of mouse and keyboard. I never felt outpaced by his twitchy mouse enabled movement, but I’d imagine that was balanced out thanks to my vastly superior brain cleverness.
You may have noticed I forgot to talk about gameplay and story elements from Portal 2. That doesn’t matter, it would probably just end up spoiling something.
Dank u, dank u te helpen de zeer leuk onderwerp te vertellen
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