orange box - Portal

I finished the Portal game included in The Orange Box. It's short.....way too short...and I mean that in a good way. It left me wanting more at the end. I haven't tackled the advanced maps yet.
So looking forward to them.

I admit, I got stuck for about 15-20 minutes in test chamber 18 at the point where you need to get the cube. I was very seriously frustrated and had thrown my controller on the floor a few times. Step away, deep breath, big glass of milk.....return to game, lightbulb moment.

The thing that is really cool about the game is how it introduces some new puzzle element in each chamber. It's almost like a great big tutorial without feeling like a tutorial at all. Case in point is getting that cube in test chamber 18. I re-used the lesson taught there later in the game.

The game also has a large dose of dark humor. A bit dry at times but on the whole, very funny. However, the voice over seems to have hit a nerve in my wife. She was upstairs in the bedroom preparing for a kid's bible study she teaches and came down to ask me to turn it down. It was specifically the voice that got to her.

I'm debating letting my older daughter play it. The only gore in the game is the blood specks left on the wall behind you when you get hit by bullets from a turret. That plus you don't actually shoot anything directly yourself. She's seriously interested in playing the games I play and this seems like a pretty tame introduction to the whole concept of the FPS. However, I still feel like this would be the beginning of the "slippery slope".