Valve Opens The Portal

Via Joystiq, an IGN story giving some background on the Portal project, the interesting FPS/Puzzler that Valve has planned to go out with Half-Life 2: Episode 2. The article interviews the team behind the technology, and gives some insight on what it must be like to have the best senior year of college ever: "Along with the other members of the Portal team, we were students at DigiPen Institute of Technology located in Redmond, WA, next to the Nintendo of America campus. During our senior year, the seven of us created a game called Narbacular Drop, which was an early test of our ideas about portal-based gameplay. Every year, DigiPen puts on an expo for graduating seniors to show their game projects to prospective employers. A couple of Valve people attended, and they asked us to come to the Valve offices and show it to Gabe Newell. Gabe watched our demo and basically hired us on the spot. It was kind of shocking. We stood around in the parking lot afterwards gibbering to ourselves for about 20 minutes."

Re:In Related News PC Gaming Continues To Die...

[Anonymous Coward]

PC gaming has been in a steady decline for over five years, but the one area it continues to shine is MMORPGs like WoW or Everquest. Until/unless consoles allow players to easily type/chat with other players the PC will continue to be the platform of choice for games like WoW.

The fact that x86 chips have fallen so far behind in performance that they need something like the AEGIA 200 to 300 dollar addon board should be a pretty clear indication that Intel/AMD chips will increasingly become the gimped part of x86 gaming machines.

The gaming world has moved on from caring about FPSes and RTSes. PC game makers need to find new genres if they want to stay competitive in the future.

Re:Wow!

[Sage Gaspar]

User-created portals with one of the first games to have a pretty good physics engine. It's not the abstract idea of portal, it's the possibilities that this implementation opens up.

Re:Wow!

[SirTalon42]

I have to agree, from the video it looks like it would be pretty fun (hopefully it won't be crippled in multiplayer). It would be interesting to fight someone with only the teleporter gun (it could become very interesting if done right). I'm not sure if this counts as 'innovation', but its definitely going to make things much more interesting, FPS have been growing stale.

How do I own a copy?

[eison]

Ok, so I think this 'portal' game looks neat, and would like to try it.
But 'episodic gameplay' sounds suspiciously like 'recurring monthly charge' or whatnot.
Can I walk into a store and buy a copy? How do I get and play just this 'portal' game?

I don't have half life 2, or valve or steam or whatever. And I'm not willing to sign up for any sort of we'll-give-you-a-new-game-every-month-try-it-you'l l-like-it sort of system. Can I still play?