Cake!!

Approximately 1.4 hours playing time since the previous blog post where I was stuck at the air duct, and I finish the game.  I'll try to be careful what I say here, don't want to spoil this for anybody.  6.6 hours past two weeks.

I think it took about 7 to 8 hours.  But wow, the ending was good.

So after I get out of the air duct I land in the room of turrets.  They were fun.  I run around and end up at this Aparture Science section with various offices and meeting rooms.  Oh and GLaDOSes core.  Wasn't that a treat!  Highlight to read.Many taunts and sarcasm, and plenty of neurotoxin!  The first time I tried this bit I did it all too slowly, and the neurotoxin went to my head.   So the second time around I dropped the cores on the floor in front of the incinerator, and portaled myself to the button, and portaled the core in the hole, much like they intended.  Then I had enough time for the last core, stuck on the air.

And then I get the nice ending sequence and ... the Still Alive song.  Such a cool song that.

More further

So I got up to where I was supposed to get up to after a couple of attempts of jumping into new portals. More jumping and GLaDOS taunts later I arrive in this area:

  Also, note the external hard drives in a nearby office:

GLaDOS (I'm starting to hate this psychotic thing) says something along the lines of "If you don't stop now, I will kill you.  You don't even care"

This next bit, getting past the rocket launcher was actually kind of fun.  Until I got stuck at the air duct.  Should be 50 minutes after the previous posting.  Which means approximately 5.5 hours total so far.

Will continue later. 

Oh oh oh, I found this plush toy of the Weighted Companion Cube in the VAVLe store... It looked really nice, except it's USD30! Which makes it $45 Aussie dollars.  It's relatively detailed though.

Edit: I must add: What's really interesting about this section of the game, after all the actual test chambers, is that I have no real idea how long this lasts. To explain, during the test chambers 1-19 I mostly knew how long they each would last.  Generally they were about two - four rooms before you got to the exit elevator.  Some were easier than others, the harder ones having more involved triggers required to active the doors, and/or more involved processes to get to the door.  Importantly though, you knew how many test chambers you had left:  your main goal (finishing the test chambers) could be broken up into much shorter goals: finish this chamber, ok X more to go.

But now that there's still a reasonable amount of game left and no test chambers to indicate the progress, it's much more difficult to tell how far along the player is to finishing/the character is from escaping.  This is a very interesting game design technique, because if you were doing the game in real life (Heaven help you) you actually wouldn't know how far along you are and would be incredibly unnerved. It's interesting because it's in contrast to the beginning of the game, with clear, structured goals.

I'm thinking with Portals

[brrup brrup, jump fall jump

boing, boing, boing Vaaapoorised...

Think....]

repeat. several times...

"Target acquired.." "Scanning" "Ouch" "Critical Error"

3.2 hours over a few days...

Then.. Test Chamber 18 came along...

Oh no, timed sequences!

 

Updates will come...