Physics Games and Physics-Based Game Downloads

GameSpot and others are reporting on Valve’s recent announcements at EA’s summer press event. Team Fortress 2 was announced as a real, impending, bona fide product, which is kind of amazing in and of itself, but what caught my eye was Portal, a single-player game that will also be bundled with Half-Life 2: Episode Two.

The official press release describes Portal as:

Portal is a new type of single player game that changes how players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment in a manner similar to how the Gravity Gun changed our approach to how an object may be leveraged in any given situation.

Apparently, the gameplay revolves around a “portal gun”, which fires projectiles that open up into Prey-style portals. The GameSpot article describes one physics puzzle as:

That’s the simplest example of how to use the portal gun. In other situations, you may be under fire by a gun droid. So all you need to do is shoot a portal open over the gun, then shoot a portal open beneath a crate, then watch the crate fall through the hole and crush the gun.

The article also quotes Gabe Newell as saying, “We wanted to take physics out of this domain as a tool that lets you bounce grenades around to how can we really change the game experience for our customers.” Sounds amazing. Half-Life 2 is well-known for incorporating physics into the gameplay experience, so I can’t wait to see what Valve has up their sleeve. Look for a Portal trailer sometime early next week.