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Get Portal for free

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172 pointsabraham67 comments

Didn't we have some fun, though? Remember when the platform was sliding into the fire pit and I said 'Goodbye' and you were like 'NO WAY', and then I was all 'We pretended we were going to murder you'; that was great.

Is this a metaphorical commentary on the PC gaming industry?

Nope. That's what GLaDOS, the AI you beat in Portal, says in one part of the game. GLaDOS is a psychotic AI who says hilarious things like that. It's only funny if you know what happens in the game though.

ehsanul is lying. The computer is your friend.

And there will be cake.

I laughed so hard when it was revealed that there was actually cake.

You may not want to eat the cake when you find out what's in it. http://www.planetfortress.com/dfa/portal-recipe.html

I don't know what a "trans-borehole magnetic imaging rhubarb" is, but I want one. It's in the recipe, too, but for some reason the rhubarbs were not transcribed on that page.

>> HTTP ERROR: 404 Not Found

>> RequestURI=/jump.aspx

ASP's in it? You're right! Do not want!

Funny, my second click went right to the page, though.

Easily one of the best games ever made. It takes a mere four hours to play through, but I call that a feature, not a bug. Most games keep going long after they've became repetitive and dull. Portal is a pure pleasure from start to finish.

Tip for OSX: If steam complains that it needs to be on a case insensitive file system, you can go to the disk utility and select 'New Image' from the toolbar and create a files system, make sure it's case insensitive, and mount it in /Volumes/SteamDisk.

Then you have to make some symbolic links to this file system, like:

~/Documents/Steam Content -> /Volumes/SteamDisk/Steam Content

~/Library/Application Support/Steam -> /Volumes/SteamDisk/Steam

Once you've got that set up, you should be able to drag the steam icon over to the /Volumes/SteamDisk and then run it.

This is a triumph.

I'm being so sincere right now.

Nice try, GLaDOS. I'm not touching that 1500 megawatt Aperture Science Heavy Duty Super-colliding Super-button.

To any hackers who haven't played this game, I highly recommend it. Even if you aren't the gaming type, it's a short and highly enjoyable experience. The writing is great, the gameplay is fun, and the puzzles will get you to use your brain (if not in the main game, then in the challenges). It's only a few hours long, and you could potentially beat it in a few hours. Above all, it's free. Try it out; there's no reason not to.

I'm officially disappointed in Portal, and glad I got it for free. Everybody in the trade press said it was this extraordinary thing: a short but sweet puzzler. Sadly, the game/dev's roots as a FPS house really shows here. Not all of us (especially us older people) have the reflexes anymore to do some of the real time tricks required to solve the last couple of stages. sigh

Funnily enough, the game developers are not from Valve if that is what you are implying by "FPS house" since they are team that attended Digipen and made a similar game called Narbacular Drop (also a fps). You should check it out.

It know this is late, but...

I really wanted to try Drop first, but that's probably never going to be ported to the Mac. (I have Parallels, but no Windows license to install it with.) I want to play "Devil's Tuning Fork" for a similar reason.

I now better understand the love Portal got. The final level (including the boss sequence) made up for most of the frustrations of the last couple of test chambers. According to Portal's commentary track, the developers realized that real time and complicated puzzles needs separation, and this game design made the last level much more enjoyable.

"The Steam servers are currently too busy to handle your request. Please try again in a few minutes"

I don't even get that, just a blank screen :(

edit: It seems to be working now. I think I needed to go verify my email first. If you are also a new Steam user trying to download portal, go check your inbox first.

Steam is being a huge pain so far. I was downloading portal and it crashed. I relaunched it but it didn't resume downloading, yet I couldn't play the game, and didn't find a way to restart the download. Ended up deleting the whole thing and I'm now trying again from the start... sigh

edit: Great, I re-installed but it still lists Portal in my "library", and I don't see any way to re-download it or delete it or anything. This sucks.

Did you try cleaning out the local game cache files in ~/Documents/Steam Content/?

Also, if you right-click on the game in your Library, and then select "Properties," there's a "Local Files" tab which lets you delete the local cache, and verify that everything's there. Hopefully one of those will make it realize the download didn't finish.

I'm on a Mac, so this doesn't quite applies. But thanks anyway. If someone else on a Mac had the same problem, I'd love some help. Thanks.

Update: Okay, somehow my download resumed from where it crashed last time. Not sure what I did; i think their servers are just really slow, and if you keep trying, at some point it will work. I think that what I did is go to "library", then went to Portal (my only game), and the "downloading" thing on the left ended up connecting after a long time. Then I could click on the downloading progress bar on the bottom and I can see the download speed. HOpefully it'll work this time.

I'm on a Mac, too. ~/Documents/Steam Content/ is where Steam dumps all its content on a Mac. The "Properties" option is in the context menu when you right-click on Portal in your games list in the Steam client, and that brings up another Steam box that lets you verify the local game cache. I wasn't referring to the Windows Explorer "Properties" option (which I think you thought I was referring to).

I'm sorry, I think I read what you wrote too fast because I thought I recognized a windows path at a glance. Thanks for the tip!

I've got the blank screen too, on a Mac. Verifying my email didn't help.

AAh! Thank you!

It's apt. APT!

http://xkcd.com/606/

That's totally me. I never played portal, got very late into COD4. The only game that I'm likely to get when it's released is Starcraft 2.

You should be able to get a beta key if you preorder it, and you could start right now...

Oh, I didn't know that's how the beta worked. Thanks!

Well, this is a great way to get the Steam store on to my computer.

"Now these points of data make a beautiful line and we're out of beta we're releasing on time" ... my favorite video game song ever. Full lyrics here: http://www.lyricsera.com/513316-lyric-Valve-Still+Alive+port...

Put a spoiler alert on that link. The lyrics refer to events late in the game.

So, this is because it's an older game? Or are the going to be getting into the virtual goods business?

I would say it's a move to get new Steam users, particularly users with Macs.

The "Free" part will work for me. Although I dual boot my Mac with Windows 7, and I've always wanted to try Portal, I never really got into it. That will change when I get home.

absolutely. Also, to rope in more Portal fans, because Portal 2 is being released soon-ish.

I imagine Portal downloads and purchases have also probably reached all-time lows. With the press coverage and meme-ification it got, there are probably very very few people left who would be willing to buy it, and have not because they haven't heard of it yet. Thus, by giving it away free to people who wouldn't have bought it anyway, no money lost.

It's a push for people to install the Mac version of Steam.

Secondly I would think they've decided most people that are going to buy it, have already. So why not try to pick up more fans before the second one comes out this fall.

2.5 years is "older"?

Well it's older than any game released in the past slightly-less-than-2.5-years, sure.

What do you call a movie that is not a new release? I'm not sure what the right terminology is. A catalog movie maybe?

old: 1 having lived for a long time; no longer young

portal is no longer young, older seems reasonable to me.

Note that the ending changed since we all first played it!

Thanks for the tip! Just re-downloaded and played through again. Not a big change, but well worth it. :)

how?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7lgqS-yq88

You now get hauled off at the end.

So it's free for Mac and Windows... what about Linux?

You can get the game without steam installed (though you do need to sign up for an account on-line and you may need to give your CC info), so you may as well "purchase" it now. Worst case you never get to play it and are out 5 minutes of your time.

> You can get the game without steam installed (though you do need to sign up for an account on-line and you may need to give your CC info), so you may as well "purchase" it now.

How does this work? I don't see anything but a big red button that downloads Steam.

At what point in the process does this happen to you? You should be able to add Portal to your cart, at which point it'll ask you to create an account. After you've registered you can then checkout. It shouldn't ever force you download steam.

And just so there's no misunderstanding, I didn't mean you can play the game without the steam, I meant you can purchase games without steam.

Originally, I got the Big Red Button upon clicking on the provided link; but, right now, the linked page is blank for me.

Anyway, I went ahead and downloaded the Steam client, so it's not a big deal. I remember the original web-based preview (or rip-off?) of Portal quite fondly; Lore Sjöberg linked to it somewhere from his vast empire.

I run steam under wine to play Half Life II and Counterstrike occasionally. I'm hoping this one works as well.

A Steam client for Linux isn't out yet ("shortly" is the official word).

This looks like a ploy to reward people for the mac beta.

I'm guessing more like getting people to install Steam on their Macs. Worked on me! installing

I had some worries that it wouldn't work so hot, but it was decent playing on my MBP.

Do I need steam, or can I just download the game?

Do I need to have internet access when I run the game?

I really don't like the new model of needing to know all this, a good reason I gave up on games along time ago.

You need steam. You don't need internet access to run the game.

Link is getting Error 324 (empty response) for me, using Chrome on Linux.

same here. just hit reload a few times, it'll work.

Free Mac play testing before releasing the entire platform?

good find. you need a steam account and steam installed though.

Deleted comment

Are you sure? I reread this, and it looks like it's free before May 24th, and if you get it before then you get to use it indefinitely.

I installed Steam on my Mac, started download of Portal, then Steam crashed to desktop. Upon restarting it prompted me for my root password so that it could update itself. The combination of crashiness and needing my root password earned it an immediate delete. I'll try again in a year or two.

I installed Steam on my Mac, started download of Portal. It saturated my 15 megabit internet connection for nearly the entire download. Portal launched just fine and ran very smoothly at 1920x1200. I already beat portal on Xbox 360. Mac version is easily as good if not better.

I'm making a note here, "Huge success."

EDIT: corrected the quote

(ahem) the correct quote is "huge success"

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