Portal 2

[janegray]

Five days ago, the videogame Company Valve released free Portal 2 downloadable content titled "Perpetual Testing Initiative." Basically, it's a free in-game map editor, which allows players to create and share maps with other player.

Everybody knows the "the cake is a lie" meme, but not everybody knows where it's from. Well, the answer is Portal.

The new maps reminded me that I really, really, really love the Portal games. So I've decided it's about time I shared my love for them by posting some scans from the comic "Lab Rat."

I love the art in this comic. The main character suffers from schizophrenia, and the art reflects his state of mind: when he is off his medication, it's all sketchy, but in flashbacks the pictures are clear.

16 pages out of a free 27-pages comic. At the end of this post you can find the link to the full comic.


WARNING: Lab Rat takes place between Portal and Portal 2, and as such is full of spoilers for the first game.

Of course, Portal is a 5-year-old game, so you might say that anybody who wanted to play it already has. But I got it 5 months ago, so I think it's always best to put spoiler warnings :P





Doug Rattmann, also known as "the Ratman," is the person who wrote all those "the cake is a lie" warnings in the first game. He is the only survivor (excluding the frozen test subjects) of GLaDOS's initial mass murder at the Aperture Science Enrichment Center; as GLaDOS locked the facility down, he couldn't escape, so he has been hiding from her and leaving clues for Chell, the playable character of the games.





Yes, that's a Companion Cube. When Rattmann is off his medication, he can hear the CC speak as if it was sentient. The CC actually gives him good advice.

Even so, Rattmann figures that he'll have better chances of survival if he has a clear head when the time comes to take out GLaDOS. So, he has saved the last of his medication until now.



Now, flashback time!



Back to the present, Chell has defeated GLaDOS!





This is where Portal ends, with Chell captured and dragged back to the facility.





Rattmann to the rescue!

I really love him. He has gone through a mass murder and spent a long time (months?) locked in a dark and cold prison, without his medication and with the sole company of an inanimate object, running away from a murderous AI and countless death-traps. Then, he finally, finally gets away and sees the sun, sweet freedom awaiting him... and he chooses to go back to save Chell!

He is not an action hero or anything. He has no military training, no equipment. But he is a genuinely kind guy, and he wants to help.







Flashback again! Right after GLaDOS' flooding of the Enrichment Center with neurotoxin.










You can read the conclusion, as well as all the pages I cut, here:

http://www.thinkwithportals.com/comic/#1

Comments

Ratman

[jeyl]

When I watched someone play the original Portal game, the first thing that really fascinated me were Ratman's dens. I remember the player going through the clean, pristine rooms and pushing over turrets, and than he came across a small room with the word "HELP" written on the ground. When he looked up, a piece of wall was wedged open revealing what was behind it. A stark contrast didn't even begin to describe what I saw. Not only was Chell outside of the test chamber for the very first time, she found signs of life. Ratman was no where to be seen, but without a doubt he was there. And the music that played when you first walked into that room is still one of those things that tells you "You thought this was messed up? It just got a whole lot darker".

And the more dens you discover, the more you started to understand who this character was. And more importantly, find out that he's actually been helping you with the wall markings. He's a full fledged character who you don't even get to see! Is he dead? Is he still roaming around the facility? You never find out. You're only certain of one thing. He existed. And for a setting like Portal, it's like seeing a small flint of light in a pitch black room.

Which brings us to Portal 2. In the comic, Doug is shot in leg and is supposedly bleeding to death. The comic ends with him climbing into Chell's sleeping chamber as seen from the opening to the first game. In Portal 2 when Chell revisits the same room, the sleeping chamber is gone. Not only that, but Doug has also been nosing around the facility and making more dens... and the most interesting part? Recent dens. There is no way Doug could have done all of these dens in the shape the facility was in before the destruction of Glados.

And if you have a special sound/imaging device and find the radio signal and the easter egg commentary track, you'll find that Doug managed to get his wish. :)

Re: Ratman

[janegray]

Recent dens. There is no way Doug could have done all of these dens in the shape the facility was in before the destruction of Glados.

"All of these dens"? I only saw one, the one needed for an achievement in the room with the garbage. And I assumed it was an old one.

...I just got this feeling I missed something.

And if you have a special sound/imaging device and find the radio signal and the easter egg commentary track, you'll find that Doug managed to get his wish. :)

Wait, what? Please elaborate!

[stolisomancer]

If they really wanted to stick Chell into the Half-Life games, most likely as an Easter egg, they've got all the tools they'd need to do it. Kleiner's teleporter already has a weird habit of interposing people in time (he teleports Alyx and Gordon across City 17 and a week forward at one point during HL2), and it'd be way too big of a coincidence for two separate top-secret projects in roughly the same time frame to be working on teleportation technology that shares absolutely no common elements. I can already see it now: Gordon goes into one of those flickering teleportation sequences that Valve loves so much, and one of the destinations is an overgrown field full of wild grass with a woman in orange walking through it.

Hell, there's your Portal 3 right there. Red is one end of the portal; blue is the other. White is forward in time; black is backward. The game as it stands right now is mostly about the challenge of actually thinking in three dimensions, so go ahead: add a fourth.

The only problem would be getting the portal gun back to Chell, but we don't know what happened to the broken prototype guns that Cave Johnson mentioned in the advertising trailers, and we have no guarantee that the portal gun in Aperture is the only portal gun that's ever existed.

Sure, odds are pretty good that Chell at the end of Portal 2 is punted out into a post-Combine Earth, where she very well could be the only living human on the planet, or the only unmodified pre-Combine human. That doesn't mean she has to stay there, and we already know that if there's absolutely one thing she wouldn't do, it's give up.

Re: Ratman

[jeyl]

*whistles*

You really missed a bunch of them. They're only in act one and they're certainly hard to find since the whole facility is in disarray. My favorite one is actually the last one you encounter in the game. You get out of the test chamber through an open panel in the ceiling and you walk through some abandoned offices. If you look up at the ceiling, you'll see a fan room where Doug made his Den where he's collected lots and lots of coffee drinks. You will also see his final art piece of Chell which is my personal favorite. What makes this particular room interesting is that it's the most detached den from the test chambers, and is the only one that Glados actually seals you out of once you reenter the test chamber.

Also, next time you're in one of his dens in Portal 2, get very close to his murals and listen very very carefully.

When Valve updated the original Portal game with the slightly altered ending, they also incorporated a new Radio game that played audio signals which could be translated into images. These images showed very early concept images of Portal 2 and some strange text that even today nobody understands. In Portal 2, there are two audio files that make up one whole image. The radio has the upper half while the commentary has the lower half. It's not until you put both images together that you see an image of the Companion Cube on the moon. He wanted to go to the moon. That's where he is in Portal 2, along with his faithful companion.

Also, if you're not afraid of the dark, you can also find the dry dock area where the Borealis was constructed. If you've played the Half Life games (Specifically Half Life 2: Episode 2), you'll finally know the answer as to how the ship just suddenly disappeared.

[lissa_quon]

Well, there was Makani - who was a fan artist- she did a rendition of the TF2 Administrator before there was any sort of depiction of her officially. Valve ended up using her design and she does some of the TF2 comics.

She also does a lot of TF2 art, slash or otherwise. Not sure if that helped her get the gig though.

Re: Ratman

[drexer]

"you'll finally know the answer as to how the ship just suddenly disappeared. "

Wait what? Where do they explain that in Portal 2? I saw the drydock but I didn't see any definite explanation as to the Borealis events there.

Re: Ratman

[jeyl]

Activate the speaker on the hatch at the end of the hall where the blown out hatch to the Borealis is.

Cave Johnson: Alright, we're working on a little teleportation experiment. Now, this doesn't work with all skin types. So try to remember which skin is yours and if it doesn't teleport along with you, we'll do what we can to sew you back right into it.

[kraesil]

Reading this and the comments.. well, you've gotten me curious. Could somebody tell me how to obtain Portal? I'm a bit too lazy to sort through Google search results.

[greenmask]

Thanks for the spoiler warning!

[janegray]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/400/

(Normally I'd tell you to play the demo first... Just because a lot of people like something, it doesn't mean you'll like it too. But for the next four hours there is a sale that lets you buy the bundle with both Portal games at 66% discount, if you wait you'll lose the discount).

Get a Steam account (it's free), then buy the game with Paypal. The game will then appear in your game library (you can view it using the Steam client), and you can click on it to start the download and to play it.

[janegray]

It was the least I could do :)

Re: Ratman

[janegray]

...But if Ratty is on the moon, that means he is dead.

NOOOOOOOO!!! My mind rejects that! DDD:

Going to the moon wasn't even his greatest wish or anything, it was just something he preferred to working with a murderous...

I'm going to hope that, if it's just an Easter Egg, it's not canon... I keep hoping Ratty (and Wheatley) could be saved in a future game :(
/possibly irrational fangirl

[janegray]

Thanks for the info :)

[jkcarrier]

Or this Starburst commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q_o1fIBzhQ

[eyz]

I'm a big Portal fan^^


Wheatley by *theEyZmaster on deviantART

[eyz]

stupid link didn't work... :(

[kraesil]

Thanks!

[janegray]

You are welcome :)

If you decide to buy it and beat it, could you let me know your opinion about it? Portal is a cult game that gets interpreted by different people in very different ways, and I love to hear what fellow gamers think of it, it's always interesting to hear other people's perspective :)

[lb_lee]

Years late, but oh man, this is making me want to get and play Portal, even though rotating 3D shapes in my head is one of THE most difficult things for me to do!

[janegray]

I know what you mean. A friend of mine is utterly fascinated with the story and characters, but she gets sick to the point of feeling like vomiting after 15 minutes of gameplay >_>

Maybe you could watch a Playthrough or Let'sPlay? The first game is only two hours long. The second is about 12 hours long (and has a MUCH richer story).

[lb_lee]

That might be the better idea; I'll have to see if one of my favored Let's Players did a play of it! (I don't get nauseous or anything, but I was that guy who took forever to learn how to understand driving in reverse, and that was just a simple flipping in my head. So figuring out 3D space is HARD.)