brhfl.com

I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy and emotion in video games lately, and this has really given me the itch to play through Portal again. This weekend, I did just that… sort of. Jamie Fuller¹ has released a 2D adaptation of the classic for the Commodore 64 (C64), and it is pure joy. It’s quick – 20 levels with brief introductions from GLaDOS, completable in around a half hour. The C64 had a two-button mouse peripheral (the 1351²) but it was uncommon enough that even graphical environments like GEOS supported moving the cursor around with a joystick. Very few games had compatibility with the mouse, and here we are in 2018 adding one more – using WAD to move and the mouse to aim/fire is a perfect translation of Portal’s modern PC controls. If you’re not playing on a real C64 with a real 1351, VICE emulates the mouse, and it works great on archive.org’s browser-based implementation as well.

If there’s one thing that I think really makes it lack the feel of Portal, it’s the absence of physics-based puzzles. Portal, of course, had some straight-forward shoot-here-to-end-up-there style puzzles, some straight-forward avoid-the-Sentry-Turret puzzles, and some straight-forward place-the-Weighted-Storage-Cube-on-the-switch puzzles, but a major aspect of the game was figuring out the physics. You had to have a pretty good grasp on how fast and how far you’d be launched if you placed your portal here instead of there. This is, of course, an unreasonable ask for a C64, but it does dramatically change the feeling of the game.

Regardless, Fuller’s adaptation is a wonderful success. I imagine it’d be fun to play through even without knowing the source material, but as an homage it’s blissful. From GLaDOS’s snark to an ending that I won’t spoil, this tribute was made by and for lovers of Portal. Well worth the quick play, especially given how smoothly it runs in a browser without the need to install your own emulator.