Weclome to My World

The game Portal is part of the Orange Box package that includes Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and others. It was just meant to be a side game but became one of the better known parts of the package. I'm totally spoiling the story, but you wake up in some testing facility for a futuristic tech company and a computer voice instructs you through the various challenges. Along the way you get a gun that creates portals interconnected to each other. So, say if one is on a lower

 floor and the other is on the wall. Jump into the lower one and your momentum through it will launch you out the other one sideways (or which ever direction it's pointed). As the game progresses, the computer, GLaDos, gets creepier and you'll notice strange things about her and the facility (marks and writings on the walls in blood helping you with more difficult areas) all the while she's promising cake for you at the end of the challenge (with blood-writing scrawled on the wall "The Cake is a Lie!!!!!"). Turns out she tries to kill you by dumping you into a fire, but you escape and make it through the back halls and utility rooms of the facility all the way to GLaDos herself. In attempting to kill you again, a piece falls off of her and you throw it into a furnace. A few more of these pieces knocked off and dumped into the furnace and she blows up and you escape into the outside world. 

Before the video fades black, a dark room of the facility is shown with shelves full of GLaDos parts that start lighting up surrounding a table with a chocolate cake sitting on it. A robotic arm then puts out the candle on the cake and it goes black.

The game is crazy cool enough that it's spawned a cult following and jokes about it jumped all over the internet within a few weeks of its release. It's not a long game, get it done in a solid afternoon if you want to, and then play again later just for the ambience of it. One of the greatest parts of the game are the machine gun Turrets and their catchy phrases. Your heart starts pounding when you hear their really cutey voices "I see you... There you are...I don't hate you....Dispensing product.." especially if you don't see them first. When you hear them talking, they see you and bullets will soon be flying (despite GlaDos's reassurances that any signs of danger are only there to enhance the testing experience and that a taste of blood is a normal part of the experience). 

After "destroying" GLaDOS and escaping this song plays with the text and various computer data being typed out. Some creative guy on the interwebs put this typography video of the song out there and it rose to the front page of Digg (since most digg readers are the same kind of internet geeks that get into games like Portal). 

Portal - Still Alive typography from Trickster on Vimeo.

As a further testament of my geek score, I used to play this song at least once a day. I even put together a file of various turret phrases and put it on my phone as the ring tone, which I put in the music player above- along with a few other clips floating around the playlist.com website. 

I played this at school for about 5 minutes (during a very boring lecture, and the sound was off, I mostly just wanted to show it to a friend, it was okay) and three other guys who'd been sitting somewhere behind me recognized it and came up to me later, "Were you playing Portal?!"