Portal 2

I'm playing this right now and thoroughly enjoying it. If you aren't familiar with these games, they are a cross between a FPS , a platformer and a puzzle game. The controls and interface are those of a FPS, and you even have a gun. However, your gun doesn't shoot bullets, but rather opens portals in walls, allowing you to move from one section of a room to another by walking through the portals. The object is to navigate to the exit point of each room. This requires a combination of puzzle-solving and (in some rooms) timing and dexterity.

I'm not big on platformers and I HATE FPS games (and suck at them) but I liked the first Portal quite a bit and am enjoying the sequel even more. Check out the Portal: First Slice demo on Steam and give it a try.

Hmm, here I was thinking that shooting portals in walls didn't sound too hard and might be fun, but then I kept reading and came to these ominous words: "timing and dexterity" would sometimes be needed. That stops me cold, I lost interest lickety-split.

mindysue wrote:

Hmm, here I was thinking that shooting portals in walls didn't sound too hard and might be fun, but then I kept reading and came to these ominous words: "timing and dexterity" would sometimes be needed. That stops me cold, I lost interest lickety-split.

Yes, there is some "twitch" gaming required, though far less so than in the original Portal. (At least so far.) At heart, these are puzzle games wrapped inside the skin of a FPS. Most of the time, the puzzling predominates, and even the worst FPS nOOb can get through just fine. Put there are places in both games (near the end, in the one I'm p-laying now) that require a fair degree of timing and dexterity as you jump onto moving platforms to avoid lasers or falling into acid.... all while trying to find the right place to shoot holes in walls or even shooting while jumping and falling.

I remember in the first game there was a particularly nasty room of this type at about the halfway point. I don't know how I eventually made it through, but I did. I thought it was poor design to have a "game-stopper" level at the midpoint of the game. In the sequel, I have only just recently encountered real dexterity challenges, and I appear to be at or near the end of the game. At least that's what the robot that is helping guide me out of the wreckage tells me.

Oh my, this now sounds way much harder than I was picturing it! I've only played maybe 15, 20 minutes at the most of FPS games when my husband, Tom, played them years ago and I recall moving down corridors and around corners shooting at whatever came your way that was shooting at you. So I figured it would be a lot easier to shoot at a wall, a bigger target plus it wouldn't be shooting back, and fun to see what the portal opened. As for platformers, I tried playing them a few times, but never managed to get very far, maybe finished one level or two. I managed to fool myself into thinking that maybe I could do better now, but it never occurred to me that one would have to shoot while "jumping and falling" ... yikes, that totally freaks me out!