Oh, hey, I finished Portal

Failing to possess the willpower to wait the full cycle, I played Portal about a year after it came out, sometime after being shown its full glory.

I didn't finish it because the final only boss battle had me pressing a button to open up a furnace hatch halfway across a room, then failing to pick up a little ball and drop it into the furnace before the hatch closed again. I returned to it recently when Yahtzee got me interested in Bastion and Painkiller and I downloaded Steam again.

I played through it from the beginning and it was still a lot of fun. My steel-sieve of a memory let me rediscover all of the puzzles again from the start (except for one part of room eighteen which I had to look up the first time and still remembered), which was awesome. When I got to the final showdown, I didn't know how I was going to beat it. I mean, I couldn't beat it the first time and it's not like my reflexes are getting any better with time, right?

Especially after playing Bastion and VVVVVV, I wasn't up for more incredibly frustrating gameplay, but hey, it's all part of the adventure, right? Yeah, it turns out I can just make little portals to drop the balls into the furnace. It's right in the name. In Portal, you can press buttons and make portals, and by the time I opened the furnace, I was all out of buttons.

Anyway, it's still a great game and as a bonus it has...well, bonus maps. They're regular maps with additional difficulties (one of which required me to advance from quicksave to quicksave merely because I am a mortal and have mortal failings!). They were great. 

My favorite involved a level full of cheerfully-voiced murder-turrets. In the regular game, you act as a portal-armed monster, stalking and destroying mischievously tipping them one-by-one. In the bonus map, they're each protected with a cage that keeps you from portaling, lifting, dropping heavy things on, or *gasp* tipping them. It changes how the entire level is played and it's incredibly fun because it presents more challenges.

Anyway, if you played Portal, this is redundant because you already know how great it is. If you haven't, I'm automatically somehow better than you now because I took two weeks to beat a game that came out five years ago.

None of this keeps me from hearing the little portal-making sounds all day though.