Closing Time
I’m sure there are many reasons, design-wise, why it wouldn’t work. This all began when I wondered about the “closing a portal while a character is going through it”, and how demanding for hardware would be that kind of collision detection… yet gaming should’ve already advanced in that direction. (Consider this the first in a series of comics about “What Gaming Should Already Do, But Doesn’t, Because Graphics Became the Focus at Some Point”.)
As how such a game would proceed, I was inspired mostly by pro-wrestling ladder matches. I was thinking how their psychology sometimes dictate not for the wrestler to climb the ladder, but to take out the opponents instead in order to have a clear path. For PortalVS., a time limit would ensure constant movement, but you’d have to choose to make a run for the exit or block the path of your opponents… or try to do both. The maps would have to be complex, perhaps with moving parts, and, obviously, danger zoooneeeeees.
This moves away from the simplicity of Portal‘s concept, and I’m the first to acknowledge that, even if something like this could be put together, it would be confusing and probably not fun to play… but hey, Portal always sort of reminded me of the movie Cube, only more forgiving. I had fun imagining a more hectic, desperate and bloody variation of this classic game.
–Pedro Arizpe
PS. Valve please don’t sue.
10/10 Would buy
A parody? No. This is a sales pitch!
Oof, as a Portal fan, just removing the leg springs/Long Fall Boots would be terrifying! You could have ended the joke right about there and that would’ve done it for me 🤣 Combining that with PvP and the ability to move and close other people’s portals is way more evil than anything GLaDOS ever came up with! Good work.
(I don’t think closing a portal would cut someone in half though; the way portals behave in-game suggests they would safely push you out. Obviously you could design them so that they do cut people in half, but that feels like changing the nature of portals too much compared to making them movable or closable, which both are already things you can do in the actual games, albeit normally only with your own.)