Portals Invade Toronto!

Apparently, Bloor street in downtown Toronto has been taken over by Portals. I like their execution, and if you’re not familiar with Portal, you owe it to yourself to check it out: it’s a fantastic puzzle game put together by Valve that manages to weave a very interesting narrative where you least expect. Of course, any gamer worth his salt has heard the memes at this point (‘The cake is a lie’), but Portal still stands tall as a concept that could not have been executed in any other medium. You hear every so often how certain games attempt to mimic the cinematic structure in order to either be taken more seriously or somehow gain credibility. That’s missing the point, whereas something like Portal couldn’t be effectively replicated in any other medium. That in and of itself does more to advance the art form than a lot of other games. However, I don’t want to come off as arrogant or know-it-all sounding here, since so many different things can be accomplished with the medium. It’s just, when it comes to Portal, the game was so close to being a perfect experience that it will be etched in many different memories for a long time to come, I believe.

I’m still trying to get ‘Avatar’ to stream to my PS3, but for some reason I always get a ‘Data Type not Supported’ error when I’m trying to watch that on my system. Other AVI files of the DivX and xvid persuasion work fine, but for some reason ‘Avatar’ is not playing friendly. And since my Xbox 360 is out of commission, I can’t include it in my media equation. I’m not really interested in converting the files to another format, so I think I’m just going to drop by the video store tonight and see if I can pick up the DVD’s.