Quote:
It's funny, but for me, motion sickness is a bad headache rather than stomach upset. Oddly, the game that made me motion sick the worst recently was BioShock, whereas Halo3 and the Valve games don't cause that so much.


This is the same reaction I have, and I had to stop in the middle of Portal due to the headache. The FOV tends to be what triggers it quicker, and Valve keeps the FOV at 90 on 4:3 screens and expands it higher on widescreen. Where as Bioshock I think did 75 at all view points, 16:9, 16:10 and 4:3, resulting in the big backlash about improper widescreen support.

I liked Portal quite a bit, and hope they expand it. From what I gather from interviews and the commentary, Valve put it out there to test the reactions of it first, and will expand on the concept if it proves to be popular. I'm not sure how much value it will add to have additional maps added after the fact, since for me at least a big part of the game wasn't just the puzzles, but also how the environment and story were done. Portal 2 would be a definite buy for me if they made another complete adventure in a similar way.

Quote:
Vixy and I also spent quite a bit of time playing with GCFscape and listening to the GLaDOS audio files


Yeah, that was the first thing I did after beating it too. I have the soundtrack on my iPhone, and will be putting it on the CarPC and empeg at work soon. Did you by chance catch the name of the composer for the rest of the soundtrack? I'd like it to say something other then Valve.

Oh, and also, it looks like their audio engineer made a small mistake in one of the tracks. You can clearly make out the standard Outlook new mail sound. It's funny how that sound still triggers something in me, even though I haven't personally run Outlook for a while now. I had to rewind the track to see if that was indeed the source of the sound, as part of me just thought it was a phantom noise at first.

Quote:
By the way, if anyone wants HL2 and Episode 1, I can gift 'em.


I'm betting there are going to be a ton of people out there like this. While the bundle was cool for EP2, Portal and TF2, I don't see a lot of people making use of the gifting, since anyone interested in HL2 at this point will likely just go the Orange Box route themselves. Personally I held off on EP1 though, and still am waiting to play Half Life 2 until they are done with the episodic content. Once EP3 wraps it up, then I'll play the base game and the episodes in one go through.

I'm also not going to preorder again. While $45 seemed a decent deal, and was fun for the early TF2 access, Frys ended up having the Orange Box priced at $35 on release day. They also had EP1 cheeper then Steam as well when that came out.