Breaking radio silence briefly to shout a bit about Portal, the new game from Valve. It’s essentially a puzzle game where you can link to points in space by way of a portal thing, and you use this to get past obstacles. Because the portals can be on any orientation of surface and your momentum is preserved when going through, you end up with some brain-bending physics problems to contend with. Which is great, and would be fun on its own, but Valve have gone one step further and combined this with one of their best – and certainly their funniest – stories ever. To say too much would spoil it, but suffice to say that your guide through the game, “GlaDOS”, is one of the funniest and best written characters you’ll ever encounter in a videogame.
It’s a little short, at around 4 hours, but after completing the main game you unlock two extra challenge modes, and Valve have promised downloadable content. Also, it comes in the Orange Box, which is basically the best value gaming package in the history of everything ever so there’s no reason to feel cheated, value wise – the only shame is that the experience is over so quickly.