Now this is something awesome that I came across while reading Slashdot today, and I just had to write about it!  This is a game called Portal, developed by Valve Software (the guys behind the Half-Life games), which was apparently released very recently, as part of something called The Orange Box.  As with the previous post, descriptions will follow, and then a set of essential links will be provided below!

What amazed me most about this game was the simple yet very fun concept.  You play the game in a first-person mode, and you have a gun that can open up portals in the game environment.  You can only open up to two portals at any given time, and the idea is that if you step into one, you exit out of the other.  You have to use this to escape the puzzles within the game.  Apparently, the game also has a nice story built around this concept (you are trapped in a lab and an artificial intelligence called GlaDOS talks to you and urges you to complete the puzzles, but it may not be totally reliable either, and might actually be the villain in the story), and there is even an awesome song that plays over the end credits, once you finish the game.  The Valve website has a short video (done as a mock orientation video) which shows off just how great the concept is.  I doubt I will actually be able to play this game anytime soon (availability and price are issues, and even if I was able to get the game, I don't think it'd run properly on my laptop).  Fortunately, there is a 2D Flash version of the game available for anyone to play!  I would highly recommend you give it a try, you won't be sorry you did!

As promised, all essential links here —

• Play Portal (the Flash version)
• Valve Software's Portal Page, with desktop wallpapers, screenshots and the video
• Wikipedia article on Portal
• Slashdot article on Portal
• "Still Alive" sequence from the end of the game (on YouTube, the page also has a link to download the MP3 version of the song)
• Jonathan Coulton's Blog Post with info about the song and the lyrics

I played just 4 or 5 levels of the Flash game so far.  Would have played more of it, were it not for the fact that I need to go to office tomorrow, hence need to go and sleep...

[By the way, the headline is a reference to the movie Donnie Darko]