The fan-made (but reportedly very professional) prequel to Portal I mentioned last month has been released! Thought you guys might want it, Portal fans as you are. Download it here, it’s about 775MB(!). Torrent here (meg a second, woo-hoo).
Yeah, you can probably get through an hour or so before you have to meet your better half for date night. Just don’t mention how good your reflexes are at dinner. You dog you!
My wife is out I go turbo broadband I’m on it looks hot
thanks
forgot to reinstall portal before this came out! So now I am torrenting and redownloading in steam.
Just forget it. The mod sucks big time. Yes it’s challenging, but for the wrong reasons. It’s not a brain teaser like portal,
it’s more like “i know where and how, i just need to try that jump 50 times before i make it just right”. That’s not fun, it’s work.
“Just forget it. The mod sucks big time. Yes it’s challenging, but for the wrong reasons. It’s not a brain teaser like portal,
it’s more like “i know where and how, i just need to try that jump 50 times before i make it just right”. That’s not fun, it’s work.”
Only the first 2 or 3 Rooms are like that. To make sure you know how to crouch while you jump to go further.
You obviously haven’t played the game because this thing wrecked my brain to shreds. Way more challenging than the original game. I agree at first it seems bad but keep playing and be amazed.
Portal: Prelude is absolutely terrible.
After having hyped up a storyline and new puzzles for months, what one encounters is a series of puzzles which are not riddles, like in the original, where you could think about a puzzle long enough and the answer would come out, nice and essentially simple.
Portal: Prelude is sadistic and loves it. A megalomaniac complex which does the player little good. Dead ends in levels, tricky solutions which involve absolutely no wit or intelligence at all. Completing a puzzle in Portal left you with a sense of admiration for yourself, for having made it, and for the level designers, much as a good puzzle writer would leave his audience.
Portal: Prelude is aimed at an audience which doesn’t love Portal, it obsesses about it, stalks it in its own back yard and exploits every glitch in the game. Solutions are not simple, they’re not elegant, they’re quirky, backstabbing, complicated and ultimately, almost glitches in themselves.
The storyline is terrible, thought out in a single afternoon. The premise – Aperture Science before GladOS – is interesting enough, but by the second room the team have already shown all of their cards with quirky, badly translated dialog, rendered by text-to-speech engines that ultimately sound empty and soulless (it took me a while to understand that neither of them were machines like GladOS).
You might think you could hardly complain, since the makers are releasing it for free (and there does seem to be an enormous effort put into it), but you would be excused to criticise them freely, for the level of hype built up doesn’t correspond this broken game. And the straw that breaks the camel’s back is that the admins, the team who built it, lurk on the forums and exercise a complete lack of connection with their audience. They can’t take criticism. The condescension directed at reasonable and potentially constructive critique is scathing and does no justice to anyone. It feels like the forum is managed by 13 year olds.
If you live in your parent’s basement, you have cocaine fueled reflexes and you love CounterStrike, you will feel at home.
Portal: Prelude is Portal for the CS:S crowd and, like its ultimate influence, it makes no aspiration to accommodate people who would otherwise be interested.
Don’t bother downloading.
I agree completely.
Maybe I’m not the target audience for Portal Prelude.
I’m not a big time computer game player, but I got turned on to the original Portal by a friend of mine, and I loved the wicked sense of humour of the original game. I also loved the element of problem solving using the concept of portals, and I completed the original game without resorting to any cheats, loved every minute of it, and was looking forward to more.
Unfortunately, Portal Prelude, while based on the original, has a totally different flavour. The first major challenge was something I found two possible solutions for in a matter of seconds — and then spent half an hour trying to actually make the jumps, without success. I then went to the walkthrough on the download site and even having seen their version of how to do the jump, I still couldn’t do it. I assume that portals have to be placed absolutely perfectly, and you have to jump *just* right, or you won’t make it. And there’s nothing else entertaining going on while you repeatly try to do this seemingly impossible jump for thirty minutes. Eventually, I used cheats to get past that obstacle, only to find another, and another, etc. Eventually, I just gave up — I play games to be entertained, not tormented.
To my mind, the big challenge in Portal classic was finding out how to do things. Usually, once you had figured out how to do something, it was relatively easy to actually make it happen. Conversely, in Portal Prelude, the solutions are easy to work out, but executing them is nearly impossible. (Remember that I was able to solve the original without using cheats once…).
Yes, the game is a free download, and I’m sure that an enormous amount of work went into it. And I’m sure that people who live and breathe Portal (particularly the advanced levels) will love it. But it doesn’t have the same playability as the original for a non-gaming fanatic. Based on the comments in the forum at the Portal Prelude site, this mod appears to be very polarizing – you either love it, or you hate it. And sadly, I’m in the hate category.
In some ways the challenges are sadistically hard, but it’s important to understand that there’s not many ways to make the game harder. Yea, it relies a lot on difficult jumps at the start, and the last couple rooms can send you running in circles before you realize that you completely missed something, but the middle of the game provides a fun challenge. Considering that it costs nothing I would suggest at least giving it a try if you liked the first portal and found it to be too easy.
I disagree completely with almost everything the haters usually say.
If you want to hate, then at least do a little bit of research first. Maybe it’s not so bad after all.
This is a complete list of chambers where I’ve found no way to ease up the action significantly:
2 — and it isn’t even that hard if you think about trajectories.
9 — unavoidable part of the maneuver, puzzle is awesome enough to forgive it.
15 — the electric room.
16 — the fling at the start.
18 — basically, everything.
19 — moving platforms.
It’s usually one part in each room even!
If you’re taking your time to think, that’s what feels like hard action AFTER playing ONCE through Portal and then playing Prelude.
Now let’s look at the original Portal and what feels like hard action BACK THEN:
15 — the energyball timed puzzle.
16 — I still think this chamber is ten times more frustrating than any of Prelude’s turret encounters.
18 — the timed fling in the turret room. Also, the timed energy ball puzzle. I only beat it after beating Prelude, in fact. Before then, I “cheated” by abusing Valve’s “antistuck” to leave the door open forever.
19 — everything up until the fire pit, then both turret encounters, then the rocket turret section.
See, Prelude has a bit more action. Just as the advanced chambers have a bit more action.
With the listed six exceptions, every single chamber in Prelude has an elegant solution that’s simple to execute. You just need to THINK. And that’s the beautiful dilemma Prelude provides.
The dilemma is: do you want to think or to run? Unlike most games, Prelude allows you to succeed with both approaches in almost every level. (the six listed have challenges that force you to run)
For example, I often see people rushing the second jump in chamber 8. But the crushing ceiling has a crack that allows you to wait and shoot a portal through. Nuff said.
Or chamber 13’s acid jump. People must be blind to not notice that ledge sticking out of the wall. It’s that easy.
Fuck you.
The game is supposed to be a puzzle, not a fucking action game (we have Half-Life for action you fucktard).
What i ended up doing was trying to complete a jump and manipulate a glitch that had PROBABLY been removed by the time i got around to this PoS, wasting nearly a half-hour before i found the reviews from YEARS ago that had the same fucking impossible problems offered all the insight i needed to realize i wasted my time and bandwidth downloading this complete Piece of fucking shit.
For any of you fucktards that think this game is supposed to be EXTREMELY challenging (for no fucking reason) or exciting or actiony: go to hell. I hate this game, I’m never coming back to post here, this is the only review I’m leaving anywhere and please for the love of god:
DOWNLOAD THIS!
Just so you can offer me some fucking support on how much of a waste of time this was for you.
PS: for any cocksucker who thinks i used too many bad words, FUCK OFF! I’m pissed to the point of shaking and yes i have anger management issues, i shake with rage over stupid things: like this.
PSS: YEA I ONLY MADE IT TO LIKE LEVEL THREE! BUT AFTER THIS POINT I WAS SO BORED OF DOING THESE LEVELS [nearly 50 tries total] THAT I DIDN’T GIVE A SHIT IF THE REST OF THE GAME HELD THE SECRET TO THE FUCKING UNIVERSE!
It looks like there are not too many intelligent people in the world anymore to where a puzzle game has to be easy enough for a newbie to finish flawlessly in under 45 minutes. This game has my brain melting and I love it. If you don’t like this, get out your DS and play Brain Age…..work that “muscle” in your head. It seems like it needs the exercise. This game is amazing, no matter how long it takes to beat it. This turned Portal into a puzzle game, whereas portal was a cross between puzzle and FPS from the beginning. This one is officially PUZZLE. That word alone is supposed to mean “THIS GAME IS DIFFICULT!!!”. That’s a word from the wise. Some people can’t do what others can. Obviously the majority who commented on this review does not like this game because of the immense difficulty level. That makes me laugh! For example, do you want to see a game that had my brain jumping out of my skull……BRAID. That game makes Portal Prelude look like child’s play.