Portal 2 is coming to a game platform near you

On March 5, video game developer Valve Corporation announced the sequel to their runaway hit, Portal, was in development and slated to be released in time for the 2010 holiday season. Valve has recently said the release of the game will now be early next year, but the news of Portal 2 — and its arrival for PC, Mac OS X, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 — is still garnering feverish excitement among gamers around the world.

Set hundreds of years after the original, Portal 2 again takes place in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, a facility originally created for the testing of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (portal gun). In this new game, the center is dilapidated and overrun with natural vegetation, a state of decay unchecked after the final events of the first game.

In the first installment, players have first-person control over a character named Chell, a subject in the center, and are challenged to use the portal gun to manipulate real-time portals in order to navigate through levels and rooms in the company's testing center. Chell is guided by GLaDOS, a computer artificial intelligence that directs the testing and instructs her how to use portals.

As the game goes on, GLaDOS is revealed to have gone sentient and killed everyone else in the facility, and the object quickly becomes to escape and destroy it.

“One of the biggest design challenges was [that] we didn't want to just take Portal and make it more difficult,” head writer Erik Wolpaw recently told 1UP.com. “We wanted to broaden the amount of environmental and puzzle elements that you had to work with without necessarily making you be a Portal ninja to play it.”

Accordingly, Portal 2 is similar in tone and gameplay to the original, though a number of new features and concepts have been introduced. As in the first game, players can transport anything through the portals, from Chell herself to objects carried or thrown through — including new portable objects necessary to solve certain levels.

In Portal 2, however, the concept has been expanded to allow for air currents from nearby pneumatic tubes or for tractor beams within the game to move critical elements to otherwise unreachable areas. Also new are a series of gels that can be painted onto surfaces in the game to illicit certain reactions, like bouncing or propulsion.

And perhaps most exciting of all, Portal 2 also features a new two-player co-operative game, which has a distinct plot and series of levels. The difficulty is increased significantly in these to account for two characters, each with their own portal gun.

“(The first) Portal was a small team — an awesome game, but a very, very small team,” said Wolpaw. “Now we can really bring a lot of talented people and resources to bear on making the environment — along with GLaDOS, (who) is really in charge of Aperture Labs — the labs themselves are sort of a living, breathing puzzle piece.”

Released in October 2007, Portal became an international phenomenon. Its in-game jokes spawned several cultural memes, like the now infamous saying, “the cake is a lie,” and Jonathon Coulton's eclectic song “Still Alive” that was featured as the credits rolled.

To the delight of fans and gamers alike, the role of GLaDOS has been reprised by professional soprano/voice actress Ellen McLain, and Valve has confirmed new music by Coulton in Portal 2.

With its mix of celebrated elements from the original game and the employment of groundbreaking new concepts, Portal 2 is sure to be favoured around the world by beginner and seasoned gamers alike. But will it become the phenomenon that its predecessor did?