Yesterday I decided to pull a game out of the unplayed pile… the virtual unplayed pile, since Steam is the prime holder of unplayed games for me thanks to their Summer sale. Why did I buy all those games?
Anyway, I picked one that has not only been talked to death, but has had a sequel that has also been just about talked out. So now at least I am not as far behind the curve as before.
Oh, I see where this line came from now
You see, I hadn’t actually played Portal up until yesterday. Valve was giving it away for free on Steam a while back, so I grabbed it. But it has just sat on my hard drive ever since.
In an odd twist, the reason I started the game was because my daughter brought it up while we were driving around yesterday. Somebody in her class has been playing it recently and talking about it, so she started asking me about it. So I broke it out and we played through some of it together.
One of the amusing asides is that, despite not playing Portal before, I was already familiar with the GLaDOS AI personality as she also appears in some of the DLC levels for Defense Grid: The Awakening. (Still my favorite tower defense game.)
The game itself is good simple fun. My daughter found GLaDOS a bit creepy, especially when it was announced that once testing was over, we would be “minced.”
We played through until it was time for her to get ready for bed. And then I stopped when I reached a level that required more manual dexterity than I was able to muster at the end of the day. But we got fairly far into the game. I think we will be able to finish it up, especially since when you die, you just go back to your last save point.
Though we had better finish it up tonight. Tomorrow I will be playing something else.
And since I am now part of the “club,” I feel fully justified throwing in my two cents worth of repetition.
Take that, internet!
I am only about five years behind.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
If your daughter catches the portal bug then I stongly reccommend investing in Portal 2. Not only is it an all singing all dancing extension of the first game but the PC version has a “hidden” split screen co-op mode. With a bit of geeky fiddling you and your daughter can play co-op together. I managed some serious father daughter bonding with this: http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.com/2011/12/portal-2-two-screen-coop-on-one-pc.html
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Oh I nearly forgot the obligatory XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/606/ (You are months too early it seems).
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Five years behind the internets but still ahead of me – I too grabbed it when Valve was giving it away for free on Steam, and it has just sat on my hard drive ever since!
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The small things that happen slight off camera or with a little investigating made Portal enjoyable for me.
Plus the Portal tie-in expansion worked so well thanks to DG being a solidly good game.
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I’m almost 100% certain that she says “missed” rather than “minced”. the humour is designed to be subtly dark, not overtly malicious :-) I would also highly recommend Portal II, which only falls short of being absolutely amazingly awesome by virtue of the fact that it is a sequel to portal one.
Also by the way – I’m really happy to see you blogging about 0.0 space :-) it’s nice to see someone else getting into it as enthusiastically as I used to blog. may see you in space some time now that you’re flying around with the big alliances o/
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@evemonkey – I dunno… I heard “minced” and my daughter turned to me and asked, “What does ‘minced’ mean?” before I could say anything about it. But it was a garbled bit meant to sound different at the end of the sentence, so it might have been tweaked to make it ambiguous. Googling it seems to support deliberate ambiguity.
Null sec has been a lot of fun. The war let me see a lot of new stuff up close. We shall see what the peace brings to Deklein.
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