Portal 2: Turret Lullaby comic recounts origins of an underloved obstacle

Valve has a new comic about Portal 2 for your eyes! It's a Portal 2 renaissance this week: besides lining up free DLC to compete for your time, the company also has this short strip to remind you that Portal 2's not only one of the cleverest titles to come out this year, but also one of the most whimsical. And assuming you missed out on buying a real live turret from the game a few months back, you'll just have to console yourself with this one-shot story of science's struggle to perfect the murderous proficiency of a kid-friendly, robotic babysitter. Click here to view the strip.

Above: Game design (more or less)

It will not escape the astute reader that this tale is probably a pretty good analogy for the process of building a game like Portal 2. How many improvements can you add before players get fed up? Is it really all that important to iron out bugs that might potentially break everything? Don't testers have the worst lives in the whole industry? Oh yes, don't think we were done with being clever about Portal when we told you it was all about Freud calling you fat. We could do this all day. Or at least until that new DLC's done downloading.

Oct 3, 2011