Saturday, April 26, 2008

Now I'm gaming... And Portal still rules

I just breezed through Portal again... This time on the PC.

It still holds up as a great game. This time I listened to all of the director's commentary, which was a nice addition. It's nice to hear about game developers talking so much about their play testing learnings and how they incorporated those learnings into guiding principles (e.g., "how do we correct for the fact that players don't usually look up?") in addition to specific fixes (e.g., "how do we calibrate this level for the first time player?").

Of course, what I'm really looking forward to this time through is the community content. Unfortunately, even though this is a huge selling point of the game *and* Steam has added a bunch of community features (and a community tab to their client), there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way for me to access this content from within the game.

I'll dig around and see what's up. Note that folks who bought the game and *don't* already know that there is community content might never even think about this possibility unless they navigated past the included bonus materials to an empty subdirectory that hints (abstractly) that you could have more content if you found it and placed it in the correct place.

This stuff really excites me -- and I can't wait to see next revs of the game and Steam client to hopefully make grabbing high quality community content much easier for gamers.

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