Portal (kind of) Free!

So you've probably heard that Valve has ported Steam to the Mac. And to celebrate the release, they have released the hugely popular game Portal free of charge until May 24th. There is some dispute whether Steam will actually delete the game after this time, but if you ask me, I think the wording is pretty clear that it is yours to keep. Nevertheless, this confusion alone shows just what kind of power Steam has over the installed games. And unfortunately the bad experiences do not end there. Read on to find out what you are getting yourself into, and whether Portal is worth the download.

So here are the cold hard facts: Portal is a roughly 3.5 GB download, that will probably fail a few times due to a busy server before you can get a download slot. What you'll then get is a few hours of gameplay before you have beaten the game. Even a non-gamer like me beat the game during two sessions over two days. Needless to say, even "free" may not sound like good value in this case.

But even getting to the download is frustrating as you have to install Steam, browse through their clunky UI and find the download. No matter what I did, I always ended up on a blank page. Regardless, Portal did show up in my library, with a button "Install". Hitting that for a few days until I got a slot initiated the large download, which took a few hours to complete. And even after that was done, Portal just did not really want to work correctly without showing major graphical glitches. Luckily, Steam was updating their software almost constantly, which at one point made me delete the Steam app, as I was sick of constantly downloading update after update (which by the way, happened automatically without my confirmation after booting). After a while I decided to give it another chance, and reinstalled Steam (but removing it from my startup items). An update then did get released which fixed the graphical issues. Still their is much room for improvement, especially regarding the frame-rate.

So after all this hassle, would I say was it worth it? Well, I would have to admit "Yes", and I would have missed out on a great game had I not downloaded it. That said, I was not a stranger to the game. In fact, I find that it is a game hard to ignore with all the Portal jokes, brain-teasers and the famous Portal instructional symbols floating all around the web. Naturally, I had always been somewhat curious about this award-winning game. And though I had known the basic concept of Portals, I never did understand why it gained such a huge following. Well, now that I have played the game, I understand.

And that is why you should play the game as well. Not only the concept, but the whole atmosphere and story-telling techniques are very unique. Valve manages to establish their own style, which stretches and twists through the game. The puzzles are just difficult enough that you'll feel proud when you have solved them. And when you are done playing, you'll feel as if you have just experienced something quite incredible - similar to when you have just watched a great movie. Given that it costs nothing more than some patience, it's a great deal you shouldn't miss out on.

That said, if you are not into 3-D games at all or get easily dizzy playing these, you may want to pass. To all others: Go and get the cake! (You'll understand…)