Playing Portal

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I started and finished Portal tonight. Wow. That was just.. wonderful! Fun, fun.. addictive. I'm willing to bet that most people that tried it ended up spending hours (as I did) saying "Just one more level..." until finding that they'd finished the game. I loved the atmosphere. Most reviews you read talk about the dark humor, which certainly was entertaining, but what got me was the gloom of being a test subject in a capricious, arbitrary experiment. It reminded me a lot of Cube, which, again, I'll emphasize I liked for its setting, for which I was willing to endure a contrived plot and logic holes. Anyway, yeah, that feeling of being taken out of one's life and thinking of nothing but survival, escape and, eventually, revenge. Of course, the Valve/Half-Life 2 engine makes the game SUPER pretty and pretty damn realistic (it helps that there is almost none biological life in this world).

While short at about 2-4 hours of play time, it's an intense couple of hours, unforgettable and, as the cliche goes, unique. As games get more and more true-to-life in feel, I wonder how they will affect my/our memories of life we once thought we'd lived? There are times when I hear or see that Morrowind music that I remember worlds I'd never breathed, rooms I'd never entered. I still have strong memories of a dream influenced by Dungeon Master. Sure, there are other games with good music too, but it's not just great music -- it's the FEELING of actually being in another world, another life. I do sometimes miss that. And that was something Portal gave me a flavor of, a familiar drug I'd forgotten that was so nice and tasty.

You know what's not nice and tasty? My bath towels, and how funky they get after only a few days. Seriously, what is up with that? Is it the iron in the shower water? The fact I've switched to non-scented detergent? That I air-dry my laundry now? A fungus perhaps residing somewhere in the bathroom, its otherwise undetected scent building up in my towels? Or am I, Hwan, simply getting smellier? I really hope it's not this last possibility, because it's a grodie wet dog smell!

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