Portal.....in my opinion is THE reason to buy the Orange Box, HL2: ep 1, ep2, are great but when it comes to inventive, challenging and just plain fun, portal is where it's at.
Well enough of that and on to the review.....
Portal is a puzzle in game in which you play as an apature "guinea pig" if you will, testing a radical portal device, hence the name.
As you start off, you are greeted by the lovely glaDOS, who is an A.I robot(or android) whos soul purpose is to make your life miserable.
At first you are given a seemingly easy amount of challenges, which is great considering that there are a few games that crank up the difficulty right from the start.
The conrols basically are like your typical FPS in where you use the analog sticks to move, and the coresponding triggers to fire off your different portals. These controls are done very well, in the soul reason that they are not oversimplified, or too complex. The camera hitches at times but it's not that frequent and rarely disrupts your gameplay experience.
As you get used to the controls, and the gameplay, glaDOS will then test you with a series of challenges that will have you shaking your fist in the air, and throwing your controller. Thankfully, as you try and try to complete the assigned challenges the exceptional vioce acting is thrown at you (glaDOS). i can honestly say that the dialog in this game is incredible, and almost every line that glaDOS says is (from X-ply)"quote worthy".
The middle part of the game, which i must admit, is THE most challenging part of the game. Thankfully it gets easier as it was in the middle of the game, where you learn all the tips, and skills, to help you through the rest of the game. Learning how to use physics, and momentum will greatly help your efforts to reach the end.....
Once you master those asects of the game, you will be face with one of the most gripping hours in gaming. The first time i got to this point, i did not know what to expect, and with glaDOS plotting against you, and being surprisingly open about it, i had no idea what i was in for.
*SPOILER ALERT*
the big kahuna, head honcho, mighty taco, all is glaDOS.
the final level of the *story part*, you face glaDOS herself, or itself......
this battle is the worst part of the game, for the reason that it is waaaay to easy.
They build you up with an intense last few levels only to bring you to a weaksauce, ultra, mega pwnfest.
glaDOS is no challenge whatsoever, all you have to do is knock one of her 3 eyes off, and put it in a furnace.
Very lackluster, very lacluster indeed....
Hwever with all that said, this game is a must have, the graphics on the gun are amazing, though the actual environments and people(youll know what i mean) could have been better.
The vioce-acting is superb, and th gameplay is an entirely new experience.
But best of all the ending is what makes this game shine, i wont ruin it for you but once you see it, it makes the whole thing worth it.
So all in all, this game is a gem, that all games should own, and will be rememberd as one of the most innovative game experiences of all-time
A gameplay demo of the cancelled Portal prequel F-Stop using recreated assets features no portals, and a unique camera that duplicates items.
RTX Remix is a tool that will make it easier for modders to remaster any game without too many worries. It could mark the end of shoddy remasters that are nothing more than a cash grab.
No.
RTX is cool, but it's also not the easiest to implement on games that dont already use physically base lighting (which portal does not) you basically have to rebuild the lighting from scratch to use RTX. Plus it's just lighting, a very small aspect of what makes a remake, you can toss RTX on the GTA trilogy, wouldn't make it any less of a piece of half a$$ed garbage
"This tool is capable of recognizing the game’s textures, geometry, camera, and lighting. This is all thanks to artificial intelligence, NVIDIA’s Ray Tracing, and the new DLSS 3, which will rescale and smooth textures, create objects with greater definition, and add Ray Tracing automatically."
From the article it appears to be automatic, not that it will bring great results to all older games. Plus there maybe a lot of user/creator work to get "proper" results.
Yeah, automatic AI upscaling of textures up to 4x the quality based on a neural network trained exclusively on game textures, also capable of generating a physically-based material for the texture.
That ~6:30 long video they posted was very cool and while it's framed around RTX illumination, overall, it is not about the lighting but the capabilities of the entire toolset.
Yeah it was like 1am after work and i did not read the article very well, my comment is dumb 😅
I doubt it. And we shouldn't need to rely on the modding community to overcome the issue of developers putting out cheap & nasty cash grab remasters.
If it's easy enough to mod into older games, it can breath new life into them and making remasters less desirable. Although I'm probably going to want some AI upscaling for textures and higher resolution, but look at the AI upscaling mods for Final Fantasy 7/8/9, those look pretty good (actually better than the lazy FF8 remaster effort SE put out).
BLG writes: "Some things are better together like french fries and ketchup and of course peanut butter and jam. But this isn’t Masterchef. We talk about games here and recently, we’ve been thinking specifically about games that like to mix things up, specifically, multi-genre games."
Ive only played portal once and i was enriched with happiness and endulged into the game for a semi-hour. The game was addictive but at the same time, time consuming, every dying minute seemed i was getting sucked in by a black hole where time had its own time. Overall the game was great and worth every penny if i had bought it.