About a year before Portal was released, I saw the trailer and was immediately in the fan club. I looked all around aperturescience.com, I downloaded Narbacular Drop, I even registered aperturescience@gmail.com. The idea seemed so simple, yet one of the coolest game mechanics I could think of. I remember leaving a birthday party early just to buy the Orange Box the day it came out. Boy did I have fun, for about three hours.

Unfortunately, the game was way too short. No doubt it was a good decision to release it in the Orange Box, it offers practically no replay value. However, when Valve made this I can tell they didn’t exactly intend for it to seem like a full-length adventure like Half-Life 2 was. It seemed more like a test to see if people would grasp the concept well enough for it to sell. Although it varies from person to person, I’d say it was fairly well-received. It also sprouted some memes like the song Still Alive, the companion cube and “The cake is a lie.” Funny at first, these things spread like wildfire to the point where I wanted to choke any motherfucker that mentioned them.

God dammit.

The game itself though, in my opinion, is incredible. Apart from it being a little short, it exceeded every one of my expectations. I’m hoping they make some kind of sequel or any other use for the portal gun in the future. Then one day I stumbled upon Portal: Prelude, a massive third-party mod to the original game. This prequel was released for free, despite that in some ways I feel it’s even better than the original game. I just beat it this weekend. I have a few complaints about it, but the storyline completely makes up for them. What they did in this version is what Valve should have done with Portal. The story was great, the scenes were great, it was pretty much all great.

Though the fatal flaw was the lack of real voice actors. Because they were working for free and with the lack of time and resources, they used text-to-speech software to come up with all the dialog. Obviously they knew this when they made it, and to be fair, it does sound more realistic than most robo-voices I’ve heard, but it does kind of kill the mood. Especially when they use a British white guy’s voice for a black dude. The dialog itself seemed a bit silly too, with undertones of teenage sarcasm which doesn’t really work without the inflection that text-to-speech software really can’t pull off. Also, Prelude is apparently intended for experts at the original game, which you will see in the first few levels because the learning curve is absolutely fucked.

Jesus fuck.

So, in an Absolut world, here’s what would happen: Valve would hire the dudes who made Prelude and come out with a project. It would be a standalone Portal game starting with Prelude and replacing those maps with the ones from the original game (not counting the ones that actually fit into the story). Re-do all the scenes and lip sync with Valve’s animation department and record some actual fucking voices. Continue from where Prelude left off and start with the fucking hard levels from the prequel, but after GLaDOS has taken over. Oh, and don’t use Still Alive anywhere in the game except for the original version in the final credits. That’s fucking stupid.