Reviews from

in the past


STOP DOING HYPER REALISM
VIDEO GAMES WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE REAL LIFE
YEARS OF SO CALLED TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT YET NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND IN MAKING A GAME HAVE MORE REALISTIC VISUAL AESTHETICS THAN METAL GEAR SOLID 4

Wanted to look better anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that, it was called "ART DIRECTION"

"Yes give me SLIGHTLY more smudges on that brown stained floor, give me slightly more lighting that completely destroys the art style at the cost of taking HALF A YEAR from my graphics card's life expectancy." - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

Look at what NVidia and it's mafia of bitcoin miners have been demanding your money all this time, with all the decades worth of beautiful low spec games in your backlog.
???????????
"Hello I would like my games to run and look worse please"
They have played us for absolute fools.

RTX? More like FarTX because this freaking stinks.

Much as this made me nostalgic for playing Portal at 17 fps on the family laptop in 2009, the new art assets are giving Fallout New Vegas graphical overhaul mod. The fact that the lighting consistently obscures whether a distant surface can hold a portal during the escape sequence is a stronger argument against ray tracing than I could ever form.

All of the other reviews are about tech stuff, but since I know nothing about all of that, I'll default to the basics:
This is Portal.
Portal is awesome!

my game didn't crash but the game was still a little jank
but as a free little add on
its a fun visual thing to explore


Some games look better with ray tracing. Portal is not one of them.

Demo técnica gratuita de mi videojuego favorito. Crasheó justo antes de los créditos finales, demasiado ray tracing. Corrigieron la inconsistencia de los núcleos de personalidad de la secuela, lo demás sigue siendo Portal. 10/10, lo rejugaré en 15 años si la guerra en Taiwan no retrasa el avance y abaratamiento tecnológico.

I mean... I guess it does its job, being nothing more than a tech demo for NVIDIA's RTX Remix technology? Although even then you need the latest RTX graphics card to even get the game to run at a smooth frame rate. The worst thing about this version has to be the fact that the art style has been replaced with something more like Portal 2's, creating this weird clash of Portal 2's "brighter" art style with Portal 1's more "lonely and isolated" level design. Stick with the original Portal instead.

I got a super computer to play an uglier portal!

Just portal but now it looks SHINY

It looks really nice sometimes but the game doesn't need it.

Oyuna grafikleri yenilemek dışında ekstra bir yenilik gelmedi, üstüne yeniledikleri grafiklerle rahatça güzel bir oyun oynamanız imkansız, optimizasyonu berbat oyunun. "RTX 2080" kullanarak oynadım, ama yapımcıların bahanesi 3080 öneriyoruz diyorlar, e iyi de hani 2080 çok eskimiş bir kart değil ki, 1080p oynatmalı, hadi onu bırak 720p en azından oynatabilmeli, bu fiyasko optimizasyon konusundadır tamamen, bir şeyler yanlış.

Grafikler de öyle ahım şahım bir yükselme yaşamıyor, oyunun orjinal halini açıp tekrar bakınca farkını anca anlıyorsunuz...

Still have to think with portals but this time the thoughts are ray traced

It's just Portal with ray tracing... AND a new coat of paint!
I would gibe it the same rating as Portal, however, while it does look pretty as hell, it ran TERRIBLY on minimum settings on my 3060ti. How?? I got less than 30fps on MINIMUM SETTINGS. I feel very conflicted about this.

This has to be the funniest marketing gimmick ever made. Honestly. It makes the Hatsune Miku Dominos promotion or the Saint's Row 4 ultimate edition seem tame.

For starters, it's just a copy of Portal with an RTX Remix injector bundled on. It comes with the dev menu. If you want to play Portal 1 for free you can get this, push Alt+X and disable everything. [This ended up not being true, I forgot that I owned Portal 1.]

But if you want to actually experience the shitshow that is Portal With RTX, you can also just open the menu and undo the shitty DLSS upscaler preset the game comes with. Setting it to any of the normal presets massively boosts performance. Yes, the default settings are an attempt to convey to laymen that their RTX card isn't good enough and they need a better one.

As for the actual game, it's a fascinating look into the minds of people obsessed with 'graphics' as a concept to such an extent that it becomes a detriment.

Portal With RTX looks terrible. Just absolute dogshit. I think whoever signed off on this should be forced to do a Drama course in University using only Garry's Mod models and lighting.

The original Portal has a very intentional, meticulously refined aesthetic. It is very bright, cold, and unwelcoming. Almost nothing in Aperture is rounded, with most of the geometry being angular brutalist walls and panels that look about as inviting as a field of landmines. It's very obvious just from 5-10 minutes of Portal that nothing lives in Aperture and nobody has been there in ages. Later on, you literally pull back the curtain of the testing chambers and run through back corridors, maintenance shafts and warehouses which completely turn the aesthetic on its head... By design. Intent. Yes, that's the word we're focusing on: 'Intent'.

Because Portal With RTX takes a sledgehammer to that meticuously crafted aesthetic. Chambers are now much darker, being lit up by overtuned light sources cast by either the few ambient lights, the lights bolted onto doors, or the red buttons. The latter in particular bathe everything in a sickening red glow that's so overdone it makes many Garry's Mod maps seem like professional work. There isn't really much of a difference now between the chambers and the lategame areas as a result.

But.

But.

There's a worse problem.

Whenever I talk about game design to people I'm friends with, I will more likely than not bring up Valve's amazing ability to signpost things without explicitly having a character say "go here", or having a big flashing arrow on the HUD telling you where to go. Most of the time they'll simply have lights, a literal sign, or clever lighting to guide you. Portal 1 in particular was great for this.
Portal With RTX is horrible. The 'modern' lighting gives equal importance to everything, and in a game where the lighting was handcrafted, this means player guidance is at an all time low. I cannot imagine this being your first experience with Portal, or Valve games.
Now, I'm a Portal autist, if you put a gun to my head and told me to run this game blindfolded, I'd be done before you had the gun loaded. For someone whose first experience with Portal is this game, though? They're in for a world of hurt, because in some chambers the lighting is so bad that it can be difficult to see cubes or doors at first. The later areas are sometimes pitch black, which is an awful statement to make about a mod for a game where nothing is pitch black BY DESIGN.

When I say "This is just Portal 1 with an RTX injector", there's no word of a lie there...

...Which means the developer commentary is still there. Yes, you can listen to the minds at Valve Software elucidate you as to how they very intentionally, carefully and almost neurotically tailored every single aspect of this game to perfection, all while playing a mod that's about as carefully created as AI art.

And you know what? AI art is a good comparison, because this feels like AI art. There's no regard for design, or consistency, or that magical keyword intent. Just a manic, soul-destroying fixation on 'looking good'. Beauty doesn't have to mean anything to these people, it just has to look good at a cursory glance. Spiritually, there's no difference between this... """product""", and going onto Midjourney and typing "portal realistic". This is very clearly a product made by and targeted at an audience for whom the word 'better' automatically means 'prettier'.

I was neutral on raytracing before actually getting a card capable of it, not really caring for the whole debate. I found devout shooters of it to be annoying, and devout haters of it to be wasting their time on what I perceived as the little brother to PhysX and HairWorks - two of Nvidia's other gimmicks that everyone replicated with ease.
After this, and seeing how ineffectual it is in Cyberpunk 2077/Mechwarrior 5/Resident Evil 4? Raytracing is a scam, dude. You can do better shit with Reshade, and it's free.

The original Portal is ten dollars. On sale, it usually becomes a dollar. Go play that instead.

Clássico atemporal, e nunca vai deixar de ser. É conciso e se preocupa apenas com o essencial, o que é traduzida pelo tamanho da duração do jogo e o tamanho do seu impacto nessa mídia. Uma única mecânica, abrir e fechar portais, em que o jogo se envolve por ela e permite ao jogador quebrar o design do jogo com a mecânica, se assim ele quiser.

Isso é foda, por que no final das contas, Portal é um jogo sobre ruptura. Somos Chell, uma mera cobaia comandada pela GladOS, até que não somos mais. É uma jornada sobre emancipação a partir da ruptura do exercício de pensar, pensar e pensar nos usos mais mirabolantes que a Portal Gun e toda a fisicalidade que são oferecidas nos permitem.

O bolo é uma mentira, assim como os avisos nas paredes desse laboratório vazio e enigmático nos dizem, mas o que é verdade? Portal 2 nos responde!

Ah, joguei a versão RTX, e é bem bacana e se parece até mais com um remaster por que substituiram bastante texturas e tal, mas é bem pesado e tem muito problema com perfomance. Deu pra tirar ótimos prints, entretanto: https://i.imgur.com/xwvxi04.jpeg

Good visuals but that's about the only thing that this supposed "remaster" has going for it.
I have a 3080 and performance is just abysmal, can't get to 120 FPS on a 15 year old remaster. Clearly just a BS excuse for Nvidia to market their 40 Series Cards. To any newcomers, just play the original version of this game and not this soulless commercial for Nvidia

Portal com RTX é o que o nome diz e nada muito além disso, é uma ótima forma de voltar a jogar o game que é excelente, mas não é um remake, muita coisa ainda é similar visualmente ao original, vale a pena mas pelo que vi ele é bem mal otimizado, joguei pelo GeForce Now, rolou algumas travadas mas bem raramente.

2/10. Dreadful. Fucking Dreadful.

My eyes actually hurt now, that's how irritating this was to look at. Nvidia really thought "Ah yes, sharper image + more shadows + overly bright lighting = Better game" like the absolute tools they are.

On top of the nauseating visuals and frame choppiness (I have a 3070 ti so that's ridiculous) this mod introduces actual bugs, most notably, moving platforms just... not doing what they're supposed to do, and falling asleep.

They even think they're being slick and hip with the secret 'Nivida processors sent to Black Mesa and Aperture' easter egg, fuck off. Fuck off with the nvidia cube as well, low-effort advertisement in a shitty mod for a great game you've desecrated.

I can't give it a 1/10 as, at its core, it's still Portal, an incredibly fun atmospheric, comedic puzzle game. Having said that, dear god just play the original Portal, not this RTX horseshit. Pay no heed to the upcoming Half-Life 2 RTX as well, it's likely to be just as shit.

bom mas ta mal otimizado em

I never played the original so i cant compare and contrast the visual upgrade. All i can say is that this was a wonderful puzzle game with an awesome soundtrack that kicks in later on, a fantastic sense of humor mixed, and a fun mechanic that wasnt very ventured before. The visuals were nice ofc, as expected of this rerelease. All around a fun time, albeit short. Im glad they have extra maps here, i'll definitely be playing those and the second game as well!!!

A glorified tech demo that at times is evident the artstyle wasn't designed around RTX... but it's still Portal

My first foray and love for first-person puzzle games can be attributed to the original release of Portal, and this visual update gives it a nice facelift. Still a banger, and I don’t think I can add anything new to the praise of Portal that hasn’t already been said. I was surprised all over again by the escape sequence at the end. It truly transforms this game from brilliant to transcendant.

you WILL buy a $500 graphics card to play a game from 2007 at 25 fps


played on a new ryzen 7950x3D/RTX 4080 build in 1440p after upgrading from an i7 8700K/1080 Ti rig. i think my frame rate was consistently in the 90 to 120 range with the default settings when the game wasn't constantly tripping over itself.

portal is a great game but this RTX version, despite yes being very pretty, kinda sucks ass technically. it stuttered a lot, which i'm assuming is because of some behind the scenes shader compilation from rtx remix, but it was bad enough that the credits sequence with still alive became hilariously out of sync with the lyrics text and the actual music, plus every time i quit out of it steam would still think i was playing it so it's leaving behind some ghost task or something, forcing me to close steam if i wanted to play anything else because said ghost task wasn't showing up in my task manager. the new assets and lighting also kinda fuck up a lot of the inherent aesthetic and intention; windows to previous test chambers in the escape sequence were virtually opaque and i couldn't see through them, and the whole thing felt a little too cleaned up in the direction of portal 2 from the original game's intentionally sanitized art style. it gets to a point where you can't really recognize some walls as being portal-able in the escape sequence, and the inherent visual guidance of things is just ever so slightly murkier. plus i dunno if it's the DLSS implementation or what but the whole thing just feels smeared in vaseline at times, which is definitely not the case in other games i've played so far with DLSS on.

this being a pretty decent demonstration of RTX/DLSS however (sure i'm playing it a year after the fact and on a newer generation of graphics card, but regardless) at an effective cost of zero dollars and zero cents for already owning the original game (as long as we don't account for the ballistic amount of money i spent on this graphics card), and it still being portal aka "One Of The Best Video Games Of 2007", i guess i can let it slide. i think i would rather just tell someone to play the original version, though.

it's what it says on the tin. and that's fine, it was nice to look at! i liked playing portal. it's a good game. the problem, though, is that I think my computer starts like. fusing. or something. smells electrical. i don't have a beefy computer, but it is very good, i think? idk its a ship of theseus that i didn't build BUT it should be able to handle this? so I'm not sure what about it is so 'taxing'. grow up. i'll try playing this again in winter idk lol

Awesome game, awesome puzzles, awesome writing. Shorter than I remember. The new coat of paint is fun!

portal só que rodando mal. o jogo é foda pra krl mas essa versão aq pqp, o dlss deixa o jogo feio tbm e é injogável sem ele no modo super performance