I sat down in front of my outline last night for about 5 minutes before realising I was too tired to think straight. Instead I caved in and bought the Valve Orange Box over Steam.

I’ve been very good - I haven’t actually played any games for, oh, quite a while now. At least a month if not more. But this is more Half Life and Portal - a new puzzle game that everyone is talking about. I mentioned it last year and it’s taken that long to get polished, finished and released.

Worth the wait?

Oh god yes! Portal is brilliant! The downside is that it’s over very, very quickly. Well, I say that - I haven’t actually finished it yet but I am on level 16 of 19 or something.

The idea is simple - navigate through a room using an in-portal and an out-portal which can be placed on most walls, ceilings and floors. Along the way you will need to use other objects to help you (blocks on pressure pads to keep doors open etc.) and will have various obstacles hindering your path (water, forcefields, gun turrets and so on) that you need to navigate past.

During the first half of the game, your portal gun (or “Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device”) only fires one type of portal and the other is already situated for you but later you get an upgrade which allows you to fire both. This can be used to very good effect and has some amusing possibilities (as illustrated by this Penny Arcade comic)

But most of the beauty of Portal lies not in the puzzles nor in the type of game but in the world. The game is played from a first person view using the Source engine. But rather than just mindlessly go to a new room each time without any purpose, Valve have added some context and a (limited) story. Throughout the game you are given instructions by GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) - not just telling you what to do but just generally speaking to you and congratulating you and offering you “cake and grief counselling” should you complete the tests.

It’s very, very funny.

There are some cracking one liners - a favourite of mine (and lots of other players it would seem) is on being told how a portal can be used to gain distance and height:

“Momentum, a function of mass and velocity, is conserved between portals. In layman’s terms, ‘Speedy thing go in, speedy thing comes out’. “

. The gun turrets, which feature in the later levels, have obviously been inspired by too much Douglas Adams; as one turned to fire at me I distinctly heard it say “No hard feelings!” in an ingratiatingly friendly manner.

I’ve only just been given my “Weighted Companion Cube” though - I gather that a lot of people are already obssessed by it.

I haven’t played HL2: Episode 2 yet or Team Fortress 2 for that matter. I want to save those for a while until I’m ready (and while I’m atrocious at multiplayer games, I’d like to have a crack at TF2, sheerly because of the gorgeous graphics and very amusing trailer videos for it). I’m well aware that these can become a distraction from various tasks in hand. On the other hand, it’s nice to have a reward for myself for getting things (i.e. writing) done.

Tonight is more “research”: I get to watch Warner Herzog’s “Even Dwarfs Started Small”.