Portal: Still Alive Review

Could the Portal experience have gotten any better?

Portal was first released in 2007 as a part of The Orange Box, but I missed out on it because the entire bundle really didn’t appeal to me. That year Portal won many innovation awards and at E3 2008 Microsoft announced a new Portal game, Still Alive, would be released on XBLA.

This game is essentially the first Portal with 14 additional levels; nothing else has been updated or implemented, which is actually a good thing. You start off as a “lab rat” named “Chell” forced to solve puzzles as part of an experiment. The goal: reach the end of the experiment, which currently no one has ever done. The concept behind the puzzles range from simple to complex, ensuring that your brain will get one hell of a work out. Portal seems to borrow from 2001: A Space Odysseyin the sense that a deranged voice, known to the player only as a computer named GLaDOS essentially terrorizes you during the experiment. 

The graphics are simply amazing and the game accordingly weighs in at a whopping 629MB; it seems like very little compression was done to the textures. Surprisingly, their are a ton of load screens, done in Valves usual fashion, but seemingly out of place for a game installed to the hard drive. The frame rate is smooth and the effects are cool, especially when you enter a portal the wrong way and watch as things go crazy.