With Steam now available for Mac, I’ve finally come to 2007 and played Portal. Now I finally have a context for the internet memes that we all know and love.

As a game, it was fantastic - some of the puzzles are pretty challenging, but the mark of a good game is that it builds you up to make you better. Each of the test chambers develops a few critical skills or techniques, and these situations can be recognized by type later on and solved analogously. By the end, you’ve developed a complete skillset for solving much more complicated puzzles than at the beginning. It’s an important difference - a game that develops you and a game that simply gets harder.

One of the things that makes it really enjoyable to play is the quirky commentary provided by GLaDOS. It is peppered through out with phrases like, “at this point you’ve realized that our last statement was of course a complete fabrication,” and “did you know that you can donate any of your vital organs to the Aperature Science self-esteem program for girls?”

I enjoyed it immensely and look forward to playing other titles from Steam, like Half-Life 2 and so forth. For those of you who missed it, I’m Still Alive: