Games of the decade: Portal

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Portal

(2007, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC)

The Orange Box was a whole lotta game, including as it did a brand-new Half-Life 2 episode, the long-awaited Team Fortress 2, and complimentary copies of Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2 Episode One, but it was the quirky puzzler/platformer/dystopian-nightmare Portal that made the biggest impact. I was tempted just now to describe Portal as something nobody saw coming, but it's not really true. It looked spectacular in previews, and I'm probably not the only person who fired it up first after putting the disc in the drive.

Still, I don't think anybody expected just how good this game would end up being. The possibilities of teleporting all over the place with a portal gun was sufficient to stoke my interest, and on this count Portal is plenty successful. Most puzzles can be solved with the same basic trick, in which you build up your momentum by falling from floor to ceiling a couple of times in one smooth motion, but there are plenty of surprises. One segment in particular, where you bounce up and down between floating platforms, opening a new portal at each successively higher one, was the closest I've come to getting motion sick from a game. That's intended as high praise.

The deft storytelling was something I don't think anybody anticipated, particularly via the hilarious and menacing dialogue of your robotic overseer, GLaDOS. So much ink has been spilled in praise of the writing team that I almost hesitate to add to it, but let's be honest here: this is genius-level stuff. For awhile you might not even pay much attention to what GLaDOS is saying, between her boring instructions and your sterile environment. When she starts slipping subtle threats and sarcastic asides into her speeches, you may wonder if you've heard her right. By the time you encounter the weighted companion cube, you start to realize what you're dealing with. No doubt Portal would have been fun even without the story, but would anybody still be talking about it today?

Portal is important for another reason, which is that it proves that a game doesn't have to be 40 hours long to be complete and satisfying. It takes no more than 3-4 hours to beat it, and probably less if you're good at it. Yet it's hard to imagine how it could possibly have been improved. This was a triumph, indeed.

More on Portal:

• A New Taxonomy of Gamers: Case Study: The Orange Box
• Prey

A New Taxonomy of Gamers: Case Study: The Orange Box

This is the ninth in an 11-part series. To start from the beginning, read part one: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Games." Or read the previous post, "Supply and Demand."

On the back of The Orange Box is a quote from IGN.com declaring it "the best deal in videogame history." They may not be wrong, but I'm not sure if they're right for the reasons they think. They're calling it a value because The Orange Box contains five games. The reason it is a value is because those five games have something to offer to Wholesale Players and Premium Players. If they offered only a low dollar-to-hour ratio, then it might be the best deal in game history for Wholesale Players, but Premium Players would get almost nothing for their money.

Any game with a multiplayer component could theoretically be said to offer unlimited playing time, making its dollar per hour value infinitesimal. Even a game like Disgaea isn't technically endless, but completing every aspect of it would probably cost fractions of a penny per hour. For the Wholesale Player, that's unbeatable.

By that standard, four-fifths of the contents of The Orange Box are essentially useless to the Wholesale Player. Portal is about three hours. Each of the Half-Life episodes takes four to six hours to complete. Half-Life 2 is a little longer, clocking in somewhere in the teens. Each game on its own represents a poor investment for the Wholesale Player, but together you could be talking about 30 hours or more for a $60 game. That's not bad, and we haven't even mentioned Team Fortress 2 yet -- the one game in The Orange Box that theoretically provides so much play time, it's almost free.

Because The Orange Box is split into those five separate chunks, it also provides an easier point of entry for the Premium Player. Take Portal: at three hours, it would make anybody feel like a Wholesale Player if it cost full price. Nevertheless, the Premium Player is likely to be the one to respond more positively to the game, because it better suits his natural instincts. "It was only three hours long" ceases to be a criticism, and becomes an accolade. It means Portal was short enough to beat! That's the litmus test for any Premium Player.

Just as a skillfully designed game such as Guitar Hero can appeal equally to Skill Players and Tourists, so too can it provide adequate value to Wholesale Players and Premium Players (in fact, I'd argue that Guitar Hero does this as well). Nowhere in The Orange Box is this more apparent than with Team Fortress 2. We've already discussed its value to the Wholesale Player: because the game doesn't really end in the traditional sense, as long as the Wholesale Player likes it he can get infinite value from it.

For the Premium Player, the match-based gameplay provides the appropriate value because each play session is broken into easily digestible chunks. There's are no cutscenes to slog through, or far-flung save points preventing him from quitting at his leisure. He can log in for a couple of rounds and have gotten a full, satisfying game session. A Wholesale Player might need to play for six hours to get his fix, but in both cases the players get what they want from the game -- and thus, what they paid for. That's the ultimate test of a game's value.

We can't pinpoint a specific dollar value as the line of demarcation between a Wholesale Player and a Premium Player, nor do we need to. It's probably different for everyone. What matters is understanding the opposing philosophies. Value can mean either spending as little money as possible per hour of gameplay, or getting the most bang for your buck. What matters is being able to identify Wholesale or Premium tendencies in a game, in other gamers, and in yourself.

Next: Tying It All Together

The Year in Review: Year-End Superlatives

All this week, we've been recapping the year that was. Today: year-end superlatives.

To finish up our look back at 2007, we're handing out accolades to the games, systems, and people who made the year so interesting.

Noble Failure of the Year: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords

Every year there's at least one game that should be great, and that I still kind of like in spite of itself. This year, it was Puzzle Quest. The premise -- a fantasy role-playing game in which battles take the form of a gem-swapping puzzle game -- is truly inspired. Thoughts of what the game could have been kept me playing long after it was clear that the game mechanics weren't nearly tuned enough, and my computer opponents were plainly cheating. I never went back to this after I filed my review, but I haven't had the heart to trade it in, either.

PR Knucklehead of the Year: Jack Tretton, Sony

The fine folks at Activision made a late run for this award with their monumental pettiness regarding guitartroller interoperability, but nothing beat Jack Tretton's bizarre, continued pronouncements from Bizarro World about the earth-shattering success of the PlayStation 3. His opus came in February, when he declared: "If you can find a PS3 anywhere in North America that's been on shelves for more than five minutes, I'll give you 1,200 bucks for it." Now that's chutzpah!

The Donut Hole Award: Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin

If I had played it in time, Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin would have been a lock for my top-10 list of 2006. It may even have had a shot to place on this year's list if it had been eligible. So consider this my formal apology to a fantastic game, and a strong recommendation for a worthy addition to any Nintendo DS owner's library.

Game Blog of the Year: Dubious Quality

It is a cruel irony that the best video game writer I know of isn't really a video game writer at all -- which is to say that Bill Harris doesn't write about games for a living, and if he does any freelance work he doesn't mention it in his blog. He doesn't even run ads on Dubious Quality. The pearls he continually hands down are proffered free of charge, whether that means crunching the NPD numbers so we don't have to, or delving more deeply into the black heart of EA Sports than any mainstream publication would ever dare. No matter the subject, Dubious Quality is essential reading.

Publisher of the Year: 2K Games

With most publishers piling onto the mini-game bandwagon like it's the last helicopter out of Saigon, 2K Games this year was the paragon of where I'd like to see games headed. Both The Darkness and BioShock were thought-provoking, complex adventures that questioned the very nature of playing games (The Darkness did so implicitly, BioShock explicitly). Both games have stuck with me months after finishing them. Seeing that pitiful Duke Nukem Forever teaser only drove home how much more subtle and complex games have become, and nobody demonstrated that better in 2007 than 2K Games.

Developer of the Year: Valve

Valve had a shot at being the Publisher of the Year, too, but ultimately I decided to focus on their astonishing efforts on the development front (plus, I never use Steam for anything). Valve doesn't just develop games -- they develop talent. No game this year was more inventive than Portal, and Gabe Newell and his band of merry men deserve credit for identifying and nurturing the Portal team, which began as a group of ambitious students at DigiPen. Kudos to them also for taking the time to get Team Fortress 2 right, and for orchestrating one of the most thrilling battle sequences in history at the end of Half-Life 2 Episode Two.

Console of the Year: Xbox 360

Really, what other choice was there? The Wii had its moments, but many of its signature games fell short (Wario Ware, Metroid Prime 3). As for the PlayStation 3, it rebounded quite nicely toward the end of the year with price cuts and some strong first-party titles, but that wasn't enough to make up for all that had come before. No other system could boast the quantity and quality of software that graced the 360.

Publishers churned out fantastic games all year, from Crackdown in February, to Guitar Hero II in April, to The Darkness in June, to BioShock in August -- all traditionally dead times on the release schedule. Even with the apparently catastrophic hardware failure rate of the 360 (mine's still going strong -- knock on wood), it'd be hard to suggest another system to somebody who's looking to buy only one.

The Year in Review: Best Games of 2007

All this week, we'll be recapping the year that was. Today: the best games of 2007.

My picks for the best games of 2007 are up now at thephoenix.com. You'll have to click through to read the blurbs for each, but here's the list:

1. BioShock
2. Portal
3. Rock Band
4. The Darkness
5. Crackdown
6. God of War II
7. Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
8. Half-Life 2 Episode Two
9. Super Mario Galaxy
10. Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure

There are a few possible contenders that I missed and thus weren't up for consideration, including Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass, Assassin's Creed, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, and Call of Duty 4. Even so, this is an unbelievably strong year-end list. I didn't even need to agree with the consensus on games like Halo 3 and Mass Effect to build it out.

Last year's was much tougher -- I ran out of gas after about number six. This year, I feel comfortable saying those are ten fantastic games that are well worth anybody's time.

Tomorrow: 2007 honorable mentions.