Portal
Portal is a single-player first-person action/puzzle video game developed by the Valve Corporation. The game was released in the bundle package The Orange Box for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 on October 9, 2007, and for the PlayStation 3 on December 11, 2007. The Windows version of the game is also available for download separately through Valve's content delivery system, Steam and was released as a standalone retail product on April 9, 2008. The game consists primarily of a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player's character and other simple objects using the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (dubbed the "Portal Gun"), a unit that can create an inter-spatial portal between flat planes. The player character is challenged by an AI named "GLaDOS" to complete each puzzle in the "Aperture Science Enrichment Center" using the Portal Gun with the promise of receiving cake when all the puzzles are completed. The unusual physics allowed by the portal gun are the emphasis of this game, and is an extension of a similar portal concept in Narbacular Drop; many of the team from the DigiPen Institute of Technology that worked on Narbacular Drop were hired by Valve for the creation of Portal. Portal has been acclaimed as one of the most original games in 2007 despite being a comparatively short game. The game has received praise for its unique gameplay and darkly humorous story (created with the assistance of Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek of "Old Man Murray" fame), the "character" of GLaDOS (voiced by Ellen McLain), and the final credits song, "Still Alive" (written by Jonathan Coulton for the game). The game's popularity has led to official merchandise from Valve as well as fan creations using elements of the game.
GlaDOS Chatbot
An attempt at creating a chatbot artificial intelligence that mimics the responses from the game Portal. This attempt has been created in the Flash multimedia format. Its intelligence engine appears to use a very strict pattern matching system, and will return 'critical error' when it does not understand. The AI is also case sensitive, which again limits its abilities.
Zero Punctuation
Zero Punctuation is a weekly video-review column by Croshaw produced for The Escapist. In it, Croshaw reviews a recent game or games, using his rapid-fire speech delivery, analogously followed by a minimalistic cartoon mirroring what has been said. Croshaw more often than not provides highly critical reviews of games, usually focusing on a game's obvious faults and comparing them to praised older titles - he also noted that "No one likes it when I'm being nice to a game" (after his positive Psychonauts review), and "I know it's not very funny to love a game", on a rare occasion, when he "couldn't think of any criticism for Portal". His style can be considered similar to that of the British TV critic Charlie Brooker. The reviews led to a four hundred percent increase in the Escapist's traffic.
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