Too young, too proud to understand

The ol’ router isn’t doing any better today. If anything, it’s actually getting worse. Damn thing’s cutting off internet access to whoever it wants whenever it wants. It never gave me any problems before, and at this point, I’m thinking the best solution would just be to reinstall Windows. That always fixes everything. But there’s more than the bitchy router going on today! Let’s take a look.

I learned about the next game from one of my new favourite blogs. While he was more talking about the game that will be included with Half-Life Episode 2, Portal, he linked to a similar game called Narbacular Drop, which was apparently the base idea for Portal. Obviously, I downloaded.

Simply put, I very much liked what I got. While Narbacular Drop is a DigiPen student project, meaning it’s rather short, it’s an incredible game. Hell, it’s an incredible experience.

So what’s the game all about? You play as a princess who’s been captured by a demon. With the help of some Mountain God or something, you can create doors in the walls of a room that link to each other. It’s a little hard to explain, but I’ll try. Assume you put one door on the north wall of a room, and one on the south. If you were to walk into one, you would come out the other. Well, maybe that wasn’t so hard after all. It’s pretty simple, but it’s enough to keep you entertained for a long time. Just the idea of being able to bend space is pretty enticing, I think. The ways that the level designers used the ability in the various rooms is pretty good, and there are a good handful of traps to avoid and puzzles to solve before you escape the dungeon.

The graphics are clearly the best of any game in this feature, not quite current-gen quality, but definitely a few steps above the N64/PS1 era. Textures are nicely done and put Super Mario Sunshine to shame, but the lava is unconvincing to say the least. There’s only like two music tracks in the whole game, and I can’t say that I can recall whether they were any good or not. But that’s not the point! Defying the laws of the universe is more than enough to satisfy me!

So yeah. Narbacular Drop pretty much rocks, and you can bet that I’ll be getting me some Half-Life Episode 2 just for Portal. You can check out the ND website and download the game here. High recommendation in this corner.

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