I had never played the video game Portal before this, but it's pretty awesome, and there are custom maps and mods and stuff so it can be expanded.

Anyway, Steam has released Portal for free, at least until May 24 - so act now. Why not? (Unless you already have the game, I guess)

So here it is. You'll have to register for a Steam account, and download Steam, both of which are also free.

If you do get the game, here is a good site to get some custom maps from, when you finish the actual game - the game itself is fairly short. Instructions to install maps are included with every one of the maps on that website. There are probably some other good sites out there for modding and custom maps.

If you're not convinced, I guess I'll try to explain what the game is. It's 3D, with a first person perspective. You play a character who can lift objects, mostly cubes, with some sort of telekinesis ability. And, of course, you get a Portal gun. When it's fully upgraded - which is very early in the game - you can shoot two portals, a blue one and a yellow one. A shot portal will open up on a wall (as long as the wall isn't metallic or something), and entering one portal will take you through the other portal, and vice versa. Portals can be opened on walls, floors, and even angled tiles, so you can imagine how crazy it gets.

Not to mention the toxic electric water, photon balls that have to be redirected to targets, innocent little robot sentries who want nothing more than to riddle you with bullets, and pistons that will... well, you can pretty much guess. There is some blood when you get shot but other than that there's no content advisory to be aware of.

So yeah. Portal. You should check it out.

Oh yeah, I've known this for awhile, and downloaded it onto my mac already. Haven't really thought to spread the news seeing as steam is quite popular already (though I don't play FPS's much).

Portal is a quite good game, will certainly be more playable with see threw portals from the last patch (I got far enough that just eyeballing the other portal is well too complex and death defying).

Crap, yeah, I forgot to mention that they have it available for Macintosh as well as Windows now. Good thing you brought that up, that's kind of an important thing to note.

I actually didn't know about Portal being released like this until a few days ago.

Well to be fair, it was only released like this a couple days ago... :P

I never have actually played Portal, and all things considered, unless it was at a friend's house or something, I probably never will.

That game's pretty much just one big first-person puzzle game, right? You just have align your blue and orange portals in certain positions to have you reach your destination? It sounds unique and interesting for a little while, but other then the whole "Companion Cube" and "The cake's a lie" thing, I probably couldn't play the game for more then five-ten minutes.

Oh, and this is probably what I'd do with a Portal gun.

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The Local Video Gaming Lunatic

Recent stuff I'm into:

Watching: A Certain Scientific Railgun (ep.14, stalled), Hoshi no Kirby (ep. 71, stalled), Nazo No Kanojo X (ep. 8), Acchi Kocchi (ep. 8)
Reading: nothing

Hahaha, yeah. There are some pretty silly things you can do with portals, other than the infinite falling loop. For instance, I put two portals side-by-side, on the same wall, and kept running in a half circle left, kind of like in those old cartoon chase scenes.

I would still suggest you try it out, I mean it is free after all, and you can just uninstall it if you don't like it. Mainly because of the deadline. Otherwise you might possibly end up trying it sometime later on and actually like it, when the deadline for free downloading is up. Unless you know for sure that it just isn't your type of game, in which case I certainly understand.  

If my computer can handle it, I may give it a spin. But my computer is probably a bad choice for most current games. The only things it can even really play are old computer games (Warlords III) and RPG Maker stuff as far as I know.

_________________
The Local Video Gaming Lunatic

Recent stuff I'm into:

Watching: A Certain Scientific Railgun (ep.14, stalled), Hoshi no Kirby (ep. 71, stalled), Nazo No Kanojo X (ep. 8), Acchi Kocchi (ep. 8)
Reading: nothing

Wow, really? They're actually letting people download the game free of charge? This must be some kind of celebration for something. o-o

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Theoretically a combination of factors, I'll list a few:
Celebration of Mac Steam release.
Testing ground for new Mac Steam users.
Celebration for soon to come Portal 2.
Demo of sorts for soon to come Portal 2.

more like

'oh crap, there is very little else available for steam for mac, we had batter do something about it'