Reviews - ChilliusVGM

I am writing this review on my general experience of this mod from around 2010 to mid 2011 when I used to use this mod EVERY single day (and I'm actually not joking about that) so yeah.

Portal Map Editor is an insanely interesting concept of turning what is a complicated mess for newbies into something that anyone with knowledge on how to fire a pistol and manipulate gravity with a gun can handle, and surprisingly it does okay with a UI that's pretty simple to get into and a large space to work in which managed to set little 7 year old me back in 2010 on FIRE!!

Unfortunately, Portal Map Editor falls short of a 10 for a few reasons such as the awful limit of how much you can build, causing an "Overflow" error that can really set you back as the ability to remove objects and erase chunks of levels is way too complicated, and the limits of the editor are enough to really become frustrating; even when trying to build extremely simple concepts.

Unfortunately it appears that this mod has been out of development for almost 8 years now, which is a shame as even though it wasn't great for professional mapping it still was super fun to make challenges to see if your friends could beat them, or even to preoccupy yourself for an hour, I still remember most of my first stages built in po_edit (mostly remakes of the spike room in the Portal Trailer), as a result of the mod being out of development for 8 years it appears that not many links have been saved and that the mod in general is just becoming much more scarce to find on the internet, along with recent updates of Portal breaking the UI and making it almost impossible to use, it's a shame really.

So yeah that's my 7 year old minds' review of Portal Map Maker rewritten by me as a 15 year old, 9 years later, maybe it's just nostalgia, but this map editor was still tonnes of fun, even for being a small little tool built for sharing .sav files with your friends to see if they could be it, there's the Portal 2 built-in map creator, but it just doesn't invoke the same feeling that you would get from building a map using a Pistol and a Gravity Gun.

Blue Portals, exactly what it says on the tin; a Portal mod where you go through many new test chambers using only the single portal device. A very fun concept that was only explored very tutorial-wise in the original game, but is it any good when you take it into the full concept of the mod?

Well, to put it shortly, it's pretty damn good, to go into detail...

Gameplay wise, Blue Portals does its job very well. The tests in the game are paced well and feel natural in the way that they introduce new gimmicks to the table, despite a few minor flaws that are moreso of the aging process of the mod, and how we've seen better recently, the tests still hold up extremely well, and so do many of the new gimmicks and ideas seen in many of the tests. However, I will say that the final test in this game does feel pretty poorly designed, and is an extreme difficulty spike.

Visually, Blue Portals has a really nice aesthetic and looks great. The BPDC has a very nice aesthetic, replacing the concrete and metal walls from Portal with yellow ceramic tiles and black bricks, a texture style that immediately translates over well into the game mechanics with surfaces you can shoot on being as visibly easy to understand as well as the ones that you can't shoot on. As well as this, many of the new test elements are visually designed to be easily read without explanation on how they work.

Musically, this game has a great soundtrack, I really like a lot of the music choices in this game, coming from excellent artists like Naulziator and The Hamster Alliance, specifically The Hamster Alliance doing a great job creating new tracks for this game that fit in well, such as the Main Menu theme and Simply Think, two excellent songs that define this game's soundtrack style, creating a uniquely different feel to the original Portal, which works with the visuals of the BPDC.

Age-wise, unfortunately, this mod has not aged perfectly; there are a lot of different issues on different fronts, such as actual game design issues, visual issues and gameplay issues; a few to name being some tests having difficult to read solutions, water being bugged after game updates and game crashes in the final test that seemingly happen for unknown reasons, the game's extra content, which I will detail on some other day, seems to have a bug that makes the game unbeatable because it crashes in the final room.

So, to factor in everything that I've just written about, I'm going to give this mod an 8/10. I desperately wanted to give this game a 9/10, and would have given it such a few years back; but the issues related to how the game have aged have dropped my review score on this a bit. If this mod interests you, then definitely give it a shot; I still play it quite frequently and think it's still a worthy try.

The majority of this review does not contain spoilers, however the last part does.

Portal: Prelude is a mod released in 2008, and over the last 10 years it has not aged in the best way.

To begin, Portal: Prelude is honestly a really fantastic mod to look at, lots of effort has clearly been put in to make sure that this mod looks absolutely amazing and clean; along with a lot of design choices in terms of visuals that look really nice, it's like Portal with an extra tub of bleach scrubbed on the walls.

However, as you begin to play through the mod, you'll begin to realize many flaws with Portal: Prelude which appear to be just game design issues, since this mod was released in 2008, a year after Portal's release, I can somewhat give a bit of leniency to this, but the level design has not aged very well at all, with not much of a sense of Logic in puzzles, but rather really intense tricks that are extremely difficult to perform, two of the most difficult chambers in the mod for me are Chamber 15 and Chamber 18*, which both really dampen the experience for me as this game follows a rule of "everything before Test Chamber 14 is really simple to understand" which hinders the experience as the random difficulty spike really makes the mod feel extremely uncomfortable to play.

* I am not 100% sure if 18 is the correct chamber, but I believe it is the one with the buttons that randomly open a random door.

**SPOILERS**
**DO NOT READ IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE SPOILED**

One thing that rises my review by 2 however has definitely got to be the really awesome "final stage" where you are able to walk around Aperture and interact with Scientists and see GLaDOS finally get plugged in for the first time, this section is honestly somewhat of a save to the mod as I found this part really really enjoyable with new things happening to keep you entertained, it even manages to make Half-Life 2 enemies feel at home in Aperture without feeling like too jarring of a connection, which is great.
My biggest problem with this section is the parts where you need to plug cores to GLaDOS or "survive in GLaDOS's room" as these parts are mostly luck based as you are just thrown around the room and have to avoid taking too much damage or getting hit by debris.

**SPOILERS OVER**
**YOU MAY READ ONWARDS**

So that's Portal: Prelude, despite my 6 review though I still will revisit this mod as it is still a very enjoyable experience despite that, similar to that of Super Mario 64 where it has not aged the best, but is still enjoyable; which is really good.

Portal 2: The Fake Community-Made from what I can remember was an extremely terrible attempt at creating a "fan recreation" of Portal 1 in Portal 2 with missing textures and what appears to be terrible level design.

This mod is extremely forgettable, which is honestly great as I don't think I want to remember the horrors of it, in fact my old review might just sum it up for you.

"Well Crappy Missing Texures"

Despite that, the mod was a good laugh to remember and definitely made me a bit happier when I remembered it, so I'll give it a 2 just for some good measure.

I haven't played the 2010 version of Project-Beta in ages, but from what I remember I really enjoyed this mod.

To begin I'll just say it, in the terms of a Beta recreation this mod really doesn't do that, instead of being a Beta recreation it's more of a Beta re-imagining with 19 new test chambers and an incomplete end sequence that was rushed out to "get the mod done" as this can be seen in the last room where you can Noclip up to the room above to see two doors that would have lead to the second part of the escape sequence, a shame really as with a lot more time this mod could have had an interesting escape sequence coupled with many ideas that are also seen in this mod; but I do understand if this mod had went from a small project to a pile of rocks being carried on peoples back.

Despite that this mod still managed to be very fun with new concepts being introduced with some concepts from other mods (and Portal: Still Alive) being used in new creative ways, one of my favourite test chambers being Chamber 16 where the gravity was weird and different, and I also love some of the Beta recreations (my favourite being the Spike Room and Turret Room that were seen both in the Portal Trailer) being really accurate to their original scenes.

A small topic I'd like to touch on is glitches, Portal Project-Beta was rushed out pretty much in late 2010, which in turn meant that a lot of glitches were still in the project, one major bug appears to be spawning outside of the map sometimes in the campaign which can really hinder the experience for many people as if they do not understand console commands, it could be the end for that play-through.

One thing that Portal Project-Beta has that I like is the atmosphere from Portal faithfully recreated with a kind of "off" look to it, making everything look slightly darker and "wetter" with a feeling of Safety disappearing slowly as you walk through the game, which honestly makes the atmosphere widen as your imagination starts to fill in gaps, I also love a lot of the in-jokes that are hidden in test-chambers inside of walls, especially one of them in Testchamber 19, which give a bit of humor to this mod.

So that's Portal Project-Beta an unfinished mod with Nostalgia, If you can find a link to this mod (which you won't be able to as they all appear to be dead, and nonfunctional with the current steampipe version with portal) then enjoy, because it genuinely is fun; but it suffers with a sudden ending which could have been improved with a lot more time put into the mod.

August 12th, 2020 update: I understand that the mod had been in development hell for about 3 years at the time of release but yeah.