As a way of celebrating my completion of LOTR, I played Portal this weekend and finished it on Sunday. for those of you who aren’t in the video game know, Portal is a sort of bonus game that was bundled with the release of Half-Life 2 and it’s two expansions. It’s received a lot critical acclaim, and I agree that it was fun for the most part. The portal guns were innovative and fun to use. The game had a great and somewhat twisted sense of humor to it. And the puzzles were, for the most part, challenging but not so much so that they were frustrating. That is until the end. I really got turned off by the last level. I think it was mostly because you got used to these relatively short little levels and then there’s this long, complicated level that take about half an hour to complete. I know it made sense in terms of the story behind the game, but I found it a bit frustrating. Then again, maybe I was just in too much of a hurry to finish. I was also a little turned off by the final boss fight. There were times where even though you knew what you were supposed to do, it wasn’t clear exactly how to do it. I guess you could call it old school in that respect–it brought back a lot of the memories of the frustrating Nintendo games of my youth.

But the best part of the game, in my opinion, was the Jonathan Coulton song in the credits. I love Jonathan Coulton’s songs and it warms my hear to know that there are video game developers out there who love him too.