You can buy just the game Portal for $19.95, or you can buy the whole Orange Box, which includes Portal, Half-life 2, Half-life 2 : The Lost Coast, Half-life 2 : Episode One, Half-life 2 : Episode Two, and Team Fortress 2, for $49.95.
I suggest getting the whole pack, because while Portal is great, it's pretty short, and you might feel a little ripped off paying $20 for it, when for only 75% more, you get all the rest.
Team Fortress 2 looks like a lot of fun, but it's been years since I played any sort of Quake-style shoot-em-up online, and it's a little daunting. I should probably just accept that I'll get my ass handed to me for a long time.
DSF: I don't like disabling (lojack type) features in digital media distribution systems. At the most superficial level I don't like having to be online just to play a game. It's not just that I black hole my home network so applications that phone home end up talking to my interior firewall and I have to figure out what they want through packet traces. I just don't think it's right that I am literally asking permission each time I start the program up. It's a modern version of key-disking and that just pisses me off
At a deeper level, I'm very suspicious about Steam's future years from now. Will they still be running their servers? Will the Steam version 2018 even support Portal if I decide I want to play it on my wireless virtual XP console? What if Microsoft sells Valve to Ubisoft? Would Ubi keep Steam going?
Last Summer, on a lark (and to win a bet), I got Ancient Art of War working in DOS emulation. Amazingly my 5.25" floppy disks were still readable and I made an image of them and used a crack, quite possibly downloaded from elder crunchland, I found on my 105MB Micropolis drive. This is a DOS game from 1984 and its hideous CGA glory was fully playable in an emulation window on Linux.
So where's Broderbund (AAW's publisher) now? Actually, they're still around peddling Oregon Trail and whatnot. But if the 24 year old(!) keyed floppy disk was defective I seriously doubt they would replace it for me. If they had a DRM system like Steam, my guess is that it would not even remotely resemble its modern implementation or even acknowledge they ever published Anicent Art of War.
I'm a fan of old games and every so often I still play Mail Order Monsters, SimCity, Doom II, SMAC, the original Pirates! Gold, Ultima III and IV, and so forth. I liken this to being of a certain age pulling down the vinyl and throwing it on the turntable when the kids aren't around. I don't like the idea that I'm now a perpetual renter/licensor of a specific medium and in 10 years my "license" to play something awesomely cool like Portal may not be valid.
This went a bit long, sorry. And maybe I'm kicking against the inevitable and being Chicken Little. But hardcore baseball fans got royally screwed by DRM last year arstechnica and I don't think that's the last time we hear of that happening.
posted January 09 2008 07:15 AM
I remember that game -- 24 years, yikes.
As for Steam and phoning home ... well... it's a copy protection scheme I can live with. DRM is a tricky debate. And I've only recently vowed to try to be on the straight and narrow when it comes to paying for all my software -- more accurately, I've only recently been rich enough to pay for all of my software. I can see both sides of the coin. Software publishers need the money to keep publishing software, so they'll be around in 10 years.
And while I can intellectually sympathize with your feelings about wanting to run the game 10 years from now, from a practical point of view, the chances of that happening with me are literally zero. I'll rely on the cadre of hackers like you to keep the good stuff alive and available in some form of emulation, free of the impediments and entanglements that would prevent me from playing it then, if I choose to.
posted January 10 2008 10:14 PM
If you have an Nvidia based board in your PC, and you don't have Po's qualms about Steam, you can download an extended demo of Portal here.
posted January 31 2008 04:44 PM
That's got to be the result of console tweaking, because I don't think, out of the box, the game would let you put a portal in mid-air, let alone, one on top of another.
posted February 01 2008 02:07 PM
If you bought the Orange Box, or are thinking about (re)playing some Half-Life 2, you should definitely check out something called Fakefactory, which is a mod that adds hi-res textures to all the human characters, and some of the objects and landscapes in the game, and it's as easy to install as unzipping a folder.
Wired Game Blog is reporting sketchy details of a sequel to Portal.
It's a dead cert that Portal 2 is happening, but we don't know anything else about it yet. But the rumors are flying about a casting call that hints at what we might be able to expect from the sequel.
The call, as reported by Kotaku, appeared on industry-only site Breakdown Express, and is to cast the antagonist -- although he starts off as a sidekick -- of Valve's sequel (or prequel) to its much loved first-person action puzzler.
The voice actor would take on the role of Cave Johnson, an "eccentric dead billionaire," and founder/CEO of an applied science company, which we all know to be Aperture, of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device -- that's the thing that makes all those cool portal holes in the game.
What is rumored to be dialogue from the script was also passed on to Kotaku, revealing that the character is indeed dead and somehow suspended in what is described as an "inky purgatorium."
All of this sounds deliciously dark, comical, and a little bit out there, which is what I think we all want from a proper sequel to a game so many of us loved to bits.
posted January 07 2008 12:40 AM
