Portal

In 2008 a video game was released as an attachment to a larger, high-budget video game.  It was an extra, so to speak.   But over time it’s eclipsed the game it was bundled with.   In fact, I don’t even remember what game it accompanied.   The game was called Portal.

In the story, you wake up in a cell and a computer named GLADOS talks to you, telling you you’ve been selected to perform tests on some new technology.    The game in essence is a series of puzzles.   You walk around and have to figure out how to get to the exit door.   But the twist was you had two special “guns”.    

The blue gun opened one side of a door while the orange gun opened the other.   These “doors” were oval shaped and were called portals because they literally ported you from one to the other.   So let’s say you were on one side of a large cavern and you needed to get across.   You open a blue portal on the wall behind you and shoot way across the divide to the far side to open an orange portal there.   Then you simply walk through the blue portal and walk out the orange one, crossing the cavern in a single stride.

But it gets more fun.   What if you put one portal in a wall and the other portal in the ceiling?  You step through with gravity in one direction and exit with it in another.   There are different twists to each level but the concept is the same, simple one in all of them—use your portals to get to the exit.

My son has heard about Portal for some time because there were references to it in some of the other games he’s played what with Portal becoming the unexpected cult classic that it now is.   My son asked if we could play the game today so my husband downloaded it onto the Xbox and he and I started to play, with me doing some explanation as we did the first few levels.

He picked it up very quickly, too quickly almost as he was solving puzzles before I had a chance to explain them.   There is another facet to the game that he knew about—the computer, GLADOS, has gone rogue and is actually out to get you.   In one of the levels she tells us, “we regret to inform you that this puzzle is impossible.   If I were you, I would quit now.    My son replied in a defiant tone, “I’ll never quit!”  

He’s on level thirteen now and they’re getting harder.   Tomorrow maybe we’ll tackle some more levels together.

The Big Boy Update:  My son does love screen time.   He has to earn stamps now to have any use of them and there are costs for weekend and weekday use, with weekday use being very costly.   If he does too much screen time he becomes a ‘monster’ afterwards as he’s cranky and difficult to deal with. Apparently he’s heard us say that one too many times as the other day when we told him his time was up he cried out in an angry voice, “I am not a monster!”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My husband and I have the new iPhone X.   It does the facial recognition. It’s great and very quick.   It also has something called Animoji, which animates your face and records your words as a cartoon animal (or the ever-present poop emoji).   It has no problem seeing my son’s or anyone else’s face but it has difficulty with my daughter.   We don’t know if it’s her thick glasses that are causing the problem.   But she doesn’t care, it still records her voice.   She loves sending animoji’s to friends and family members.