Portal: Still Alive Enhanced - Quick Review
It was only while writing about #RememberPortal yesterday that I noticed that I have actually barely talked about the game at all in this blog, despite being my favourite game of all time. I guess I've just had more of my focus on Half-Life 2 lately.
Anyways, a few days ago YouTube recommended to me a video called "Portal: Still Alive Enhanced Official Trailer", which really interested me. I thought it would take a bit for it to come out, but I saw its release trailer this morning and it's already available! And I played it!
You can check its ModDB page here.
Now for some context: The original Portal: Still Alive came out in 2008 and was a port of Portal 1 exclusive to the Xbox Live Arcade, and included some remade levels from the fan-made Portal: The Flash Version Mappack. The original mappack adapted levels from Portal: The Flash Version, which was a fan-made demake of Portal 1 made in Flash that came out just the day before the full game released. (Yeah that's quite a bit of information lol)
The point is, for a while the Still Alive-exclusive levels were only available on the Xbox 360, until they were datamined and brought into PC by Tyler McVicker and his crew. And more recently, HazardVPK released this enhanced version! Which cleans everything up, and improves the visuals and level design.
Yahtzee Croshaw once said that a sign of a good remaster is one in which things look and feel like how you remember them, but not necessarily as they actually were, and this encapsulates the mod very well!
The visual and level design changes are very subtle, sometimes even hard to notice at all, however they all work extremely nicely and feel natural. Even if the changes are kinda small, they all make the whole thing feel more polished, and in some cases even strictly better than the original in terms of telegraphing what to do!
Because of that (and also because, due to its age, the original version is a bit janky now) I can safely say that this modpack is the definitive way to play these levels! And one I can definitely recommend to anybody wanting to play the XBLA levels!
(By the way, my favourite part of the Still Alive levels is the Death Cube, which I have a very fun history with, but I'll leave that story for another time.)
