Ok so you probably know Portal: Still Alive is out now for XBLA, but as I figured out its actually just Portal with some extra bonus maps.  But I'm not sad because I found even more Portally goodness the other day.  There's a free community developed prequel to Portal aptly called Portal: Prelude (which you can get here) which you can download for Steam.

Even though this is a free amateur mod effectively, its actually almost as good as the original.  There are roughly 20 levels with several hours of gameplay, some nice ambient original music as well as some commercial tracks thrown in (Believe by Chemical Brothers, Ghosts by NIN and Rock You Like a Hurricaine by Scorpion).  The puzzles are harder than the originals so if you haven't played Portal before, its probably best to start with the original first.  Its more of the same ideas, but this time more complex and often requiring some skill and timing to execute certain plans.  The game opens similarly to the first and gets better the further in you get, eventually letting you in on more of the backstory behind the Aperture Science Facility and GLaDOS the disturbed but strangley charming AI, during the later levels.

Its not all brilliant though, the game is of course not as polished as Portal, some puzzles being a little awkward to get through, its not always clear what you have to do, and even if you know what you have to do, its not always easy to pull off.  Sometimes I got stuck unable to get the precise angle of entry into a Portal to land on the ledge on the other side for example, and at times the game becomes frustrating for it.  The problem is more in the early levels and once you're past them, the game quickly feels more like the Portal we're used to - but harder.

There's just as much comedy value in this too, occasionally a little stranger and less universal, but there are some great lines.

If you liked Portal (and lets face it who didn't) and you have Steam, I'd definitely recommed trying this out, since its free and its a great addition to the original Portal.  You have to be a little masochistic when solving some of the levels, but its worth persevering.

So here are some screens from my machine. [:D}



















(nb images working now, thanks eddie :D)