What I Played Today: May 3

Persona 3 Portable, Portal: Still Alive

I tried a little bit of Persona 3, got bored. There’s just so much that has built up to this point and not enough to do to really engage me. The fact that I’ve completed nearly every social link I can at this point (and will be unable to pursue the others effectively), and have over 7 million yen in my bank, it just sucks the challenge out of it. Three weeks to kill, man. Three weeks. Maybe I’ll just keep a clean save at this point, rush it to the end, and if it turns out too difficult, I’ll go back and level up proper. But I also remember that the final boss takes an hour to fight...

I also played through the Developer Commentary of Portal: Still Alive, because I want to do that in the sequel and realized I hadn’t heard the original yet. Half of the stuff was super-boring, talking about anti-aliasing (I don’t know what that means!), and the nearly incomprehensible banter from the voice actor of GLaDOS, who seems to be pretty sardonic to the whole affair. For some reason the commentary is at a lower volume than the background noise, making it hard to hear, and nearly impossible to understand during the final battle where GLaDOS will not shut up for ten seconds. I’m trying to hear about the design philosophy, lady!

It was interesting to hear how rock stupid all the playtesters were (seriously, only one note even acknowledges that the playtesters had any sense of creativity), and the various design decisions they made. Of course, there were some things I really wanted to know about that they provided no insight on, like what was up with that hidden room in Test Chamber 18. That room is the first legitimately hard room, and they have nothing to say. There was also one point where they said they were trying force the player to look up in a room full of giant pistons rising from the ground so they put in…a ladder that I never noticed before. I thought the giant pistons were a good sign, but there I go again.