Portal This is the first game where, shortly after playing it, I came to the realization that I'm an idiot.  Self-assessment has never been my area of expertise, but Portal forced me to acknowledge my shortcomings, namely; that I'm a lot slower than most people when it comes to the obvious.   Portal has your unnamed character awakening in an Aperture Science lab where she's instructed by a sedate, monotonous computer voice over the intercom.  The voice leads you to a portal gun, which you must use within the facility in order to reach the exit.  There you'll be treated to cake.  Lies, empty, terrible lies.  Don't believe it for a second!   You're tasked with creating portals on surfaces, one blue and one orange.  You enter one, and you come out the other.  This will enable you to reach the elevator at the end of the level. Sounds simple enough.  However, the ingenious level design forces you to think abstractly, especially when you discover clever nuances of your portals.  For instance, say you create a blue portal on the floor  and an orange portal on the ceiling immediately above it.  You can drop through the blue portal and come out the orange, and fall down into the blue portal and out through the orange again, gaining momentum each time you do.  With some skill, you can use this to rocket yourself to previously unreachable ledges and areas of the stage, which will invariably lead you to the exit.  There are dangers within the game of course, besides the false pretense that there will be cake.  There are mechanized turrets that will gun you to death without hesitation, pits of acid that I wouldn't recommend falling into, and a weighted companion cube that you'll come to befriend, and then euthanize, because you were TOLD to!  Seriously, that moment in the game is harder to deal with than you think it is. At any rate, the levels are challenging but never frustrating.  They simply demand a modicum of intelligence, something that few first-person games require.  And besides being wholly original, Portal provides an endless amount of entertainment from the computerized voice that seems to be observing your every move.  That thing is HILARIOUS, providing some of the funniest lines in any video game.   Portal is a rewarding, fast-paced, refreshing virtual experience, one that is is only mitigated by its disappointing length.  You can easily beat the game within four hours, provided you have the capacity for rational thought.       Rating:  A- I played the only piece of music in the game, which comes during the end credits.  It's entitled "I'm Still Alive" and it's really funny.  Youtube the actual version if you haven't already beaten the game.

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