Your Cure For The Portal’s Done Blues
By Syd Bolton - March 3rd, 2008
If you’ve played through Portal and still want more, there are some fixes out there for you. You may have heard that Portal was developed by a team of students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology. But before that, they had actually developed a finished game called Narbacular Drop, which was essentially the proving ground and test for what became Portal.
Narbacular Drop is a free PC download and clocks in at only 26 megs. It’s an enjoyable game and it’s fun to compare it with the more polished Portal. There’s also a really cool unofficial Flash version of Portal that gives you an idea of what the game might have been like if it wasn’t played from a first-person perspective. It’s arguable that Portal is not a first-person shooter, but rather a first-person puzzler. Thinking about all that can really start to make your brain hurt, especially when you realize there might have been cake after all. So instead, sit back and enjoy the game that inspired Portal and a game inspired by it.
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3 responses so far:It’s good to know that despite there being no cure for the summertime blues, there’s something that can be done about withdrawal pangs from finishing Portal one too many times .
I vote for 2d-Flash portal. It’s cute, and fun :)
I gave Narbacular drop a go after Portal came out and “Wow”, it’s quite the departure (to put it nicely ;) ). Admittedly it’s impressive that it was a student project, but by god are the graphics terrible and the controls primitive. After playing portal, it’s really just not fair to play this game ;) I’d liken it to reading someone’s first novel and then going back to read one of their 1st grade short stories.
Portal is just so good, so polish, that I couldn’t bear more than 20 minutes of Narbacular drop. So player beware, you definitely can see the potential, but not much else :)
The Flash Portal is really fun. I played it for a good half hour yesterday over my lunch break. Some of the levels were pretty complicated, I gotta say.