My apathy may be due to my preoccupation with Valve this week. I usually think about Valve and Steam a lot anyway, and not always good thoughts. Sometimes I envision a future where Valve goes public and starts making Actiavellian decisions, such as developing Counter-Strike 2 as an Xbox 360 lead, charging $10 for the Engineer update, or releasing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 as three separate games. All of these belong to a future I don’t want to live in.

But this week Valve updated Portal with a cryptic achievement and change log that prompted a community investigation. After doing a bunch of things which I won’t pretend to understand, the forum sleuths uncovered a bunch of other things which I also don’t understand. Morse code, a BBS — ASCII art of turrets and Gabe Newell? I decided to just assume it was leading to a Portal 2 announcement.

And then Valve updated Portal to change the ending. I read the headlines and my heart skipped a beat. Back from the E.R. and to the article, I found yet more that I didn’t understand. But it seemed that an Episode 3 announcement was near.

We already knew Episode 3 and Portal 2 were on the way, though. Why are we so excited? Because it isn’t hollow; it’s not just a press release. Valve’s pre-announcement takes advantage of the one thing we gamers are sure to appreciate: interactivity. And although Valve makes games out of the same stuff everyone else does, only they could have put on such a performance, prodding that part of our psyche from which zealous devotion and unthinking admiration flows. The performance took not only creative marketing ideas and the will to take a risk, but autonomy — something Valve has spent the better part of a decade building for themselves in Steam. This week, they reaped the benefits. This week, everyone who makes games wishes they were Valve. Again.

Also Valve announced Steam for Mac OS X.

Portal: Prelude is a full, lengthy campaign, set before the events in Portal. It was developed mostly by a small team of three living in Europe. It came as quite a surprise when it was announced shortly before its release, something very unusual in the mod community. The intent was to create a much more challenging Portal experience while retaining the atmosphere. This differs from other map packs in that those focus purely on the puzzles.

Story

A defining feature of Portal was the presentation of its story. Portal: Prelude attempts to match the humor and drama, but its success varies. Given that its a prequel, the original scientists are still running the test chambers. However, GLaDOS must have gotten some of her sadistic nature from her creators because these “old” chambers are just as, if not more cruel and difficult than the ones in Portal. The dialog in this game ranges from satisfactory to poor, with bad grammar and stilted TTS voice “acting”. The story, while introducing some interesting sets, is not its strength.

Gameplay

The meat of the game is the challenge of the puzzles. They’ve introduced new obstacles and remixed some old ones. The diversity is nice, even if some of the new obstacles are non-canon.

This is where it gets prohibitive, though. The difficulty of solving and performing some these challenges is much higher than Portal and perhaps even its advanced chamber bonus maps. Even the first level left me dead the first several times I attempted it. I was simply solving it wrong and there were four turrets aiming at the exit of the first portal. With the recent patch (1.1.0) they’ve made a few of the unecessarily difficult parts a little easier. (including the difficulty of the first chamber, only a few days after I had already beat it) But, it’s still hard, make no mistake. Unfortunately, sometimes it seemed they just threw more turrets and other obstacles in your way in lieu of interesting puzzles.

The first 17 chambers took me three hours to complete. Chambers 18 & 19 took an additional hour and a half. (they added better hints in the patch for those) I finished the whole game at five and a half hours, almost twice as long as it took me to finish Portal. Not only that, but this mod has bonus maps, including advanced chambers and challenge maps. If you had a desire to play through again, you can even take advantage of the developer commentary. This mod will keep you busy

Gameplay Video

Since I can’t exactly show me solving the non-obvious puzzles, I went with a more artistic approach with this gameplay video. Maybe it’ll get you hyped to play it. The song featured is from the actual soundtrack in the game, 09 GHOSTS I by NIN.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Where To Get It

Some may be asking why I’m recommending a game I seem to dislike. Despite some of my earlier remarks, I did ultimately enjoy the mod. There are many fun and challenging puzzles and a few suprises along the way. So, it’s not for everyone, but if you like challenging Portal maps, this is a great mod for you. Portal: Prelude can be downloaded at their official website. It’s 843MB and once installed it should appear in your Steam games list the next time you start it up.

This weeks’ episode is 40 minutes of a dinner meeting between Mark MacDonald (Editor: EGM), Erik Wolpaw (Writer: Portal), Dylan Cuthbert (President: Q Games) and Jonathan Mak (Creator: Everyday Shooter). This video is utterly fascinating. If you’ve never thought of game designers as artists, or of games as art, and these discussions don’t make you think twice about your stance, I can’t help you. The designers give insights into their varrying creative processes, talk of their past projects and even their gaming habits and what it’s like to play a game as a designer. Please, do yourself a favor and give this a watch. Also, feel free to comment with your thoughts and if I should keep posting things like this or not.