We are pleased to announce great news for our ambitious project: The development of the games first chapter is reaching its end; the remaining content (models, textures, etc) has been finished, combat system fully functional with only cut scene scripting and some coding to be left. To shorten the time till release, we prepared 4 new insights into the game, we hope you enjoy:
Inspired by SNES classics, Team Monkey develops this fantasy adventure/RPG for PC. Return to Mana - Legacy of the eight elements, brings an innovative fresh setting to the platform and a full 3 player cooperative playing experience. Fight together with 2 friends to prevent the Empire from rising again and restore peace to the world of Mana.
Also, we are considering the possibility of releasing a standalone built, but no decision has been made. Although SOURCE mods are now basically “free to play” (by downloading the SDK and TF2), a standalone version would be much nicer. Also we currently face the situation that less than 5% of our bare server costs could have been gained by donations; although this is a non commercial title, but to get back some of our minimum costs would be quite appreciated by us.
If you want to give back some love, please tell your friends or help us by donating on our website. http://www.returntomana.org
You awaken in a strange place, with no idea how you got there. An automated voice gives you instructions, and you wait for further information, trapped in your little room. Before long, you’re guided by a computer to whatever objective it has in mind for you. You’re trapped, caught in the machine’s machine, and the only way to gain your freedom is to follow its orders.
The above is the start of Portal 2, as well as its predecessor. Though years have passed since Valve first gave us a surprising foray through the Aperture Science Enrichment Center and its Quantum Tunneling Portal Device experiments, the beginning moments of both these games are eerily similar. Portal is an incredible and beloved game and much of its power and originality is because of this eeriness it invokes. You’re forced through a series of scientific tests of increasing difficulty and danger, all at the whim of a disembodied voice and apparent scientific observers.
Portal 2 fights to re-engage the creepiness, but in a different way. In the opening minutes, you awaken in the Aperture Science Laboratories, a test subject in suspended animation for so long that the facility has fallen into horrific disrepair, and who knows what the world has become in your absence. A friendly robot with a British accent called Wheatley on a rail professes to help guide you to freedom, and you’re off through the destroyed facility, following his lead.
We all know what’s coming — if you’ve seen or heard anything about Portal 2 up to now, you know what’s in store. GlaDOS, the psychotic and homicidal AI controller of the Enrichment Center, has been destroyed at your hand, but it won’t stay dead for long (the last game ended with a song called “Still Alive,” after all). And it will be back to put you through its insane scientific experiments, in which your primary tool is a gun that shoots an orange portal and a blue portal. Anything passing through the orange portal comes out the blue portal, and vice versa, leading to some brilliant puzzle-solving and forcing players to rethink their approaches to reality and physics.
That’s as far into the story as I’ll go, because like the original Portal, it is filled with humor and some unexpected humanity, expanding on the Aperture Science universe and the characters (now tripled, more or less) found within. Portal 2 is in many ways the exact game experience we’ve all hoped would follow up the phenomenal, unexpected incredibleness that was the original — more portals, more GLaDOS, more humor, and a cooperative mode. All things awesome.
The reality of Portal 2 is nearly as good as the conception. Portal is among my favorite games of all time — perhaps my favorite — so following that act is no easy feat for Valve or Portal 2. The sequel comes extremely close to matching its predecessor. It’s good in its own right, but not quite the pinnacle of robotic and hilarious perfection the hype would have us believe.
I’ll try to remain vague to avoid spoiling the game, but the one big flaw of the single-player campaign, which is big and meaty and will last around eight hours, is how uneven it is. The first half of the game is much, much weaker than the second half. In fact, it’s so weak that for much of it, I was wondering if this was really the Portal sequel for which I had been waiting so patiently, or if the cake was, indeed, a lie. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
But then Chapter 5 happened, and Chapter 6, and Chapter 7 and 8, and then Chapter 9, and oh, man — Chapter 10. Quite simply, Portal 2 gets amazing in its latter portions. It’s fun and really, really funny, more than matching the trademark hilarity found in the original (the game’s opening discussion of brain damage and jumping is absolutely brilliant). It’s painful how weak the opening chapters are by comparison. The game softballs you, holding your hand by providing a funny but bossy guide to stick with you for much of your tenure and then switching you off into more of the same old Portal tests. Except while the tests in the original Portal quickly ramped in difficulty, the opening ventures through the test chambers are simple and often single-step affairs, so much so that it feels like treading water until you’re allowed to run free.
It’s disappointing how much talking goes into the game early on, and how much Valve treats you like a child and holds your hand. Much of the original’s greatness is in the fact that you’re left to your own devices, forced to rely on nothing but your own wits. The first half of Portal 2, on the other hand, largely removes this go-it-alone individualistic quality, and I have to say, it dragged the experience down for me.
I know I’m making a big deal of this one thing, but I’m doing so for two reason: 1. It’s the entire first half of the game that felt weak, and 2. it’s just about the only problem I had with Portal 2. Yes, other than the choice to make much of the Portal 2 experience feel like every other first-person game on the market right now by making it linear and demanding, Portal 2 is often a transcendent and beautiful thing to behold. It’s huge and does a great job of pushing the envelope of “thinking with portals,” introducing new techniques and mechanics without straying too far out of the bounds of familiar gameplay.
Valve’s puzzles now often involve things like Hard Light Bridges that can be moved by portals, lasers that can be redirected by cubes, and various gels that need to be sprayed all over the place to make new places to shoot portals or affect the way you run and jump. When they start working together, the game absolutely sings, causing you to draw on all your resources to find ways of avoiding becoming another failed experiment.
With a phenomenal sense of scale, great production values and a wealth of great ideas and characters, the single-player portion of Portal 2 really does become spectacular once it hits its stride. It’s just unfortunate that it takes so long to get there.
Here’s another nitpicking gripe, though: Gone are the many challenge levels that adorned Portal, as well as the game’s super-hard Achievements and Trophies. In their place is a co-op mode, and with that I have no problems — Valve has done an awesome job creating lots of two-player-specific puzzles that are challenging as well as fun, and also very funny. The co-op mode and all its adornments, which I’ll get to shortly, are great.
The trouble is, Portal 2 isn’t nearly as challenging a game as the original Portal, at least in many respects. The difficulty ramps up on co-op, but it’s left fairly lacking in the single-player realm. The puzzles are often a touch on the mind-bending side, but even the ones that look highly complex often aren’t really, and a few times you’ll find yourself sailing to the end of a long section wondering if you missed doing something important because it seemed to go so simply. Valve has done away with much of what provided Portal’s staying power in its sequel, and its replay value suffers because of it.
But there is that co-op mode, which supports both split-screen and online play, and is as much fun and carries as much heart as the single-player romp does. Playing as either “Orange” or “Blue,” a pair of GLaDOS’ robots, you and a friend get to work through five sets of Enrichment Center portal tests, all while being mocked and chided by the sarcastic AI along the way. There are a bunch of achievements tied to the co-op mode that encourage you to both work together and mess with your teammates, which is great on Valve’s part, and the co-op puzzles are really a shining point in the game’s design. Amazingly, PS3 players also get compatibility with Valve’s Steam PC network, allowing for cross-platform co-op and mod-sharing, as well as cloud saves. You’ll want to grab a friend to take these on, at least once or twice.
Once I got through Portal 2, I loved it — but I had to learn to love it, and it took a while for me to really commit to it. The original Portal really was a video game that was so much more than just a game, reaching beyond the barriers of narrative or video game conventions to become something no one expected. Much of Portal 2 can’t make the same boast: the game’s opening levels feel too elementary and run-of-the-mill for it to achieve perfection.
But it’s pretty damn close.
Pros:
Hilarious, engaging narrative and characters
Massive scope
Beautiful visuals
A whole lot of engaging puzzle-solving gameplay
Great cooperative mode
Steam compatibility functions on Playstation 3 (cloud saving, friends list sharing, cross-platform co-op) are truly awesome
A large amount of content, much of which is exactly what made the original Portal so great
Cons:
Weak first half
No single-player challenge levels or tough achievements; not nearly as much replay value as its predecessor
Portal 2 Panels Trailer - Portal News Posted by: Danny on 03-29-2011 @ 16:36
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Portal News
Gamefront News: Portal 2 Panels Trailer
This new Portal 2 video showcases one of the many lucrative products in development at the applied sciences company. Narrated by Aperture CEO and founder Cave Johnson, it offers a fascinating glimpse at the future of test environment construction.
Last Round of Testing for Precursor - Apply now! - Mod News Posted by: Skyrider on 02-19-2011 @ 08:20 - Source: Precursor (ModDB)
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Half-Life 2 News
Hey ModDBers! We have received some great feedback from the previous round of testing. Our tester list now contains around thirty new names! We have made a lot of changes to the mod and are ready for some new testers. This will probably be the final round of open testing. Send an e-mail to precursormod@gmail.com if you're interested! We appreciate your help and support.
Second Portal 2 Co-op Trailer Shows off the Creation - Portal News Posted by: Danny on 12-20-2010 @ 02:29
This News Item has been viewed 156256 times!
Portal News
Gamefront News: Second Portal 2 Co-op Trailer Shows off the Creation
Every day, we’re drawing closer to the release of Portal 2, and that’s a good thing! In an effort to whet our ravenous appetites for info on the upcoming first-person puzzler, Valve has rolled out a new video that once again highlights the cooperative portion of the game.
This trailer shows off the creation of Atlas and P-body, the Aperture science (droids? Robots? Turrets? Whatever…) that you and your co-op partner will play as. If you wondered where they came from, this should clue you in.
During the GameIS 2010 event last night we won two awards for We Create Stuff’s latest releases. I had my camera with me so I took a shot of the cool statues they made:
About GameIs: “GameIS is a non profit voluntary organisation that help Israeli companies and individuals to connect and create business in the video games market. We cover technology , services and game production over mobile, web, pc and consoles” – So thank you guys so much. It was a fun, informative and a communicative event.
If you liked Nightmare House 2, you’ll be happy to know Hen will post something related to it soon.
