Once upon a time during a podcast, I was asked what game I had played that had eluded to a sequal but never delivered. My response to this inquiry was quite simply; Portal. A fantastic game unlike anything we had all seen at the time, and one that had us all quoting it for months after the hype died down. The ending to this game was very open for more with the main character being alive, outside and [lo and behold] with portal gun in hand.
My imagine immediately started working out possible tie ins to Half-Life 3, an inevitability in the Valve franchise. Could it be that Gordon Freeman would happen across our poor lab rat, Chell, and together they would take on Aperture Science and Black Mesa in Co-Op awesomeness? Arguements were posed that it would be too difficult to manage, and that perhaps my dream would have to stay… just a dream.
Then I stumbled [a handy journalism tool] upon something that hit the web back in 2007. Nearly three years ago, there was a mind and an idea to find a way to put the portal gun into Half-Life 2. What is this insanity, you say? Freeman, with a portal gun!? Oh, it is true my friends and not only is it true and possible but it eludes to a future concept that might already be in the works behind a cleverly hidden cloak.
So much time has passed for Valve to take this idea and run with it, and I would think they would find themselves edging into foolishness if they didn’t. You would gain all of the Freeman fans, and all of the relentlessly-quoting-the-cake-to-be-a-lie Portal fans together in one big little guy takes down the big corporation battle for freedom! Even if they didn’t manage to find a way to braid together the concept with the idea of a two-player co-op [see Resident Evil 5], there is no reason not to include the portal gun in another Half-Life game.
Seriously, look at how awesome this could be.
What I’m really eager to see, if ever this game does get developed, is how they will mash together the standard first-person shooter aspect of Half-Life and the innovative puzzle aspect Portal.
If could lean either way. Being that either the Portal Gun will be another instrument to flank through your enemies. Or it could also be more of the Gravity Gun being used for really cleaver and well built puzzles. I think the balance of the two would be pretty awesome and I think that balance would be a challenge for Valve… but they are Valve, after all.
(Well, I haven’t played a lot of Half-Life so correct me if I’m wrong at something*stares at Cruz*)
Hey, sounds good to me!
If you want to play HL with the portal gun so much, do it.
* First off, backup up your entire Portal directory in a safe place. It’s the folder marked “portal” in ..\Steam\steamapps\(your_steam_id)\. We, nor Valve, take any responsibility in the unlikely event of you hosing your game files. Worse comes to worse though, you could always just redownload from STEAM.
* Next, download and install, if you haven’t already, GCFScape. This handy program will allow you to access the cached game files for any Source-powered game, in addition to several other Steam games you may have downloaded.
* Once that’s done, browse to the directory ..\Steam\steamapps\. There, you’ll see all the available GCF archives. We’ll start with Half-Life 2.
* Open the GCF marked “half-life 2 content.gcf” You’ll see a directory tree in the left pane. Click the box to the left of the folder marked “hl2″ to see the directory listing contained within it. Then, right-click “maps,” select ‘Extract’ and extract the entire folder into the directory \Steam\steamapps\(your_steam_id)\portal\portal. This will merge it with the existing Portal map folder.
* Do the same with the ’scenes’ folder
* Fire up Steam and run Portal. When it’s done doing its thing, open up the developer console with ‘~’ (you may need to enable it under your keyboard options).
* At the console, type “maps” to list all the available maps. Now that you’ve imported the Half-Life 2 maps, this will be a fairly lengthy list and some of the names, like citadel and canals, should seem familiar.
* Type “map” and then the map name to open that map. For instance, “map d1_canals_01″
* When the map is done loading, pull up the console again and enable cheats by entering “sv_cheats 1″
* To give yourself all weapons, including the portal gun, enter “impulse 101″
* Depending on how far you got in Portal, you may need to upgrade the portal gun to fire both portals. Enter “upgrade_portalgun” to do so
* Go lay waste to some alien scum with the power of portals!