I don't think I'm breaking any new ground here, but damn, what a great game, huh?
story, gameplay, humor, atmosphere, GLaDOS!!! it's just so damn original and awesome.
just finished single player. great ending. haven't played multiplayer yet, but will soon.
also, i think where the idea came from is a great indie success story:
Portal is Valve's spiritual successor to the freeware game Narbacular Drop, the 2005 independent game released by students of the DigiPen Institute of Technology; the original Narbacular Drop team is now employed at Valve. Valve had become interested in Narbacular Drop after seeing the game at DigiPen's annual career fair; Robin Walker, one of Valve's developers, saw the game at the fair, and later contacted the team, providing them with advice and offering them to show their game at Valve's offices. After their presentation, Valve's president Gabe Newell quickly offered the entire team jobs at Valve to develop the game further. Newell later commented that he was impressed with the Digipen team as "they had actually carried the concept through", already having included the interaction between portals and physics, completing most of the work that Valve would have had to commit on their own.
The gel mechanic comes from Tag Team's Tag: The Power of Paint, a DigiPen student-developed game that won the 2009 Independent Games Festival Student Competition prize. Valve's vice president of marketing, Doug Lombardi, said that upon viewing the student game "the decision to combine their tech with Portal 2 came naturally".Wolpaw recalled that they had already considered the nature of surfaces in Portal in a binary fashion, whether or not it would allow for a portal to be created on it, and the ability to modify surface properties in the manner that Tag did was an obvious extension of that. Tag Team was subsequently hired by Valve, though initially their work was to "develop Tag in an interesting way" according to Wolpaw, only some time later being brought into the Portal 2 team.
the wikipedia articles for both games are great reads if you're really into portal.
oh yeah, and last thing if you're going to discuss plot or new game mechanics please do it like this:
> do it like this[/color]/code:1f40lshk]
, so it'll look like this:
do it like this
and you can highlight the text if you want to read it