I’m not the biggest first-person shooter fan – I do play them occasionally and they can be lots of fun, but it’s not my genre of choice. As such, I never really followed Valve, whose most successful games are FPSs. And I certainly paid no attention to the Orange Box when it came out.
My friend finally managed to convince me to play Portal during fall 2010. He described it as an FPS-puzzle hybrid, which honestly didn’t appeal to me since I assumed he meant an FPS with jumping puzzles, and not only do jumping puzzles suck, but also they suck infinitely more in an FPS. He assured me there were no real jumping puzzles in Portal, so I tried it…and I’m glad I did.
With the exception of some of the advanced maps, there are indeed very few places in Portal that require platforming or jumping skill. Instead, Portal is a mentally stimulating game, where it’s more important to look around you and think about how to use the environment in conjunction with your portal gun to solve the puzzle. I found the concept incredibly fun, although Portal does have some frustrating moments. The best part of the game is GLaDOS, the computer AI that guides you through the first half of the game. I sometimes refer to her as Cathy after my college friend, who is known also as the One-Winged Demoness, Her Evilness, Evil Incarnate. Oh, by the way, this shrine contains spoilers ahead.
Portal 2 came out in 2011 and I was in a bit of a low point in my life, so I didn’t really touch it. It wasn’t until April 2014 that it suddenly occurred to me to try it out. My first experience with Portal 2 was the co-op mode, and to my chagrin it took me like 2 hours to solve one of the puzzles (it’s the one where GLaDOS adopts some baby birds at the end of the mission). I surmise my friend was irritably laughing at me the entire time. Oh well – I’m pretty sure I’ve suitably convinced her that I’m a bumbling idiot several times over by now, so she should be used to it.
…Anyway, the single-player campaign is significantly easier with the exception of the final test chamber, which took me a whopping 3 hours to figure out. I actually gave up after 2 hours, went to bed, and thought about it as I was falling asleep, and eventually the solution came to me. The single-player campaign is also much longer when compared to the original, and the story is quite fun. I’ll be talking about the stories, so again: spoilers.
To shrine these great games, I’m going to list the achievements (on Steam) that I have obtained and give my commentary for each one. It’s a pretty simple shrine, I know.
Portal
Achievement: Lab Rat
Description: "Acquire the fully powered Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device."
Comments: You get this achievement in the story. The game would be significantly less fun if you could only place 1 portal, eh?
Achievement: Fratricide
Description: "Do whatever it takes to survive."
Comments: You get this for "euthanizing" the Weighted Companion Cube by throwing it in an incinerator, which you have to do to progress. Am I alone in not really being that attached to the Companion Cube? If anything it was annoying having to carry that thing around. Also, I've heard the game theory that the cube contains the remains of failed test subjects and…well, I don't really have any counter-argument to that, except to say that if the developers really meant for this to be the case, they've got some twisted ideas going on over at Valve (not that that's necessarily a bad thing…).
Achievement: Partygoer
Description: "Assume the correct party escort submission position decision."
Comments: The first time I played Portal, when I was on the platform slowly descending into the fire, I was like, "Should I…do something about this?" My friend responded, "Yes…" and so I did. I mean…in other games, as you were lowered into the flames, a cutscene would occur to save you, right? And to be honest, if Portal had simply ended with you being incinerated, I wouldn't have really been surprised.
Achievement: Heartbreaker
Description: "Complete Portal."
Comments: GLaDOS doesn't have a heart. Not only is she a computer, but also she's a homicidal one. There is no way she has any sort of heart to break. That being said, GLaDOS is awesome.
Achievement: Terminal Velocity
Description: "Fall 30000 feet."
Comments: This achievement is easy: make a portal above you and one below you; you'll fall in an infinite loop. The real question is: does Chell really achieve terminal velocity after falling 30000 feet? Let's take a break and look at this.
The equation for terminal velocity for an object free-falling through air is $$\|\overrightarrow{v}_t\| = \sqrt{\frac{2m\mathfrak{g}}{Ak\rho}}$$ where \(\overrightarrow{v}_t\) is terminal velocity (double bars denote vector magnitude), \(m\) is mass, \(\mathfrak{g}\) is the acceleration due to gravity, \(A\) is the projected area of the falling object, \(k\) is a drag term, and \(\rho\) is the density of air. Let's assume Chell, an average woman in her twenties, is around \(60\text{ kg}\) (I think that's a bit high for average, but Chell running around performing these physically-intensive tests probably has high muscle mass). The density of air is \(1.28\text{ kg/m}^3\).
The projected area is a bit more difficult, as we don't know whether Chell is falling feet-first or with her back/stomach toward the ground. Since in an FPS you can't change your body's orientation, we'll assume the former and thereby estimate the projected area to be a transverse section. If we assume Chell to be 5'4", based on the aspect ratio of different images of Chell we can estimate her waist diameter to be 19.2" in the left-right axis and 13.2" in the anterior-posterior axis. Approximating an ellipse to these numbers yields an area of \(6.96\times10^{-2}\text{ m}^2\).
The drag coefficient is about 1, based on some tests people other than me have done. With these approximate parameters, we obtain a terminal velocity of \(115.0\text{ m/s}\).
Suppose we denote Chell's starting position as \(y = 0\) and she begins falling at \(t = 0\). To figure out what distance she has to fall to reach terminal velocity, we use the equations of motion, where the net force on her is given by drag minus weight: $$\overrightarrow{F} = \left(\frac{1}{2}\rho\|\overrightarrow{v}\|^2Ak - m\mathfrak{g}\right)\hat{j}$$ where we have defined a coordinate system of negative going down. Note that if the force is 0, we've reached terminal velocity by definition and we recover the first equation up there. Before that, by Newton's second law, this force equals her mass times her acceleration. Acceleration is the time derivative of velocity, which means $$m\frac{d\overrightarrow{v}}{dt} = \left(\frac{1}{2}\rho\|\overrightarrow{v}\|^2Ak - m\mathfrak{g}\right)\hat{j}$$ If you separate variables and solve, you get $$\overrightarrow{v} = -\sqrt{\frac{2m\mathfrak{g}}{Ak\rho}}\tanh\left(t\sqrt{\frac{\mathfrak{g}Ak\rho}{2m}}\right)\hat{j}$$ According to this it takes infinite time to reach terminal velocity, which just comes from the differential calculus theory used to derive this equation. We can approximate real conditions by solving for the time required to reach 99% terminal velocity, \(113.8\text{ m/s}\), whereupon we obtain \(t = 31.0\text{ s}\).
Integrating velocity from \(t = 0\) to \(t = 31.0\text{ s}\) yields a total displacement of \(–2640\text{ m}\), meaning that in 31.0 seconds Chell would have fallen 8660 feet. So, yes, she would've reached terminal velocity by 30000 feet, but this also means I HAD TO SIT THERE AND WAIT FOR HER TO FALL 21340 EXTRA FEET FOR THIS DAMN ACHIEVEMENT.
My audience: No, Ben, what this really means is that you're a NEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRD!!11!!!!!1!!
Achievement: Long Jump
Description: "Jump 300 feet."
Comments: This achievement is a bit confusing, as technically I should've gotten it long before I got the Terminal Velocity achievement. I'm of the opinion it records horizontal displacement rather than vertical displacement, which would explain why I didn't get the achievement while falling 30000 feet. At any rate I eventually got it per a friend's suggestion by flinging myself back and forth in the giant room where all the turrets attack you, so that was cool.
Achievement: Cupcake
Description: "Beat two Portal advanced maps."
Comments: There's an achievement for beating all 6, which I got, so I'll hold off commentary here.
Achievement: Fruitcake
Description: "Beat four Portal advanced maps."
Comments: See previous entry.
Achievement: Vanilla Crazy Cake
Description: "Beat all six Portal advanced maps."
Comments: The advanced maps are pretty hard, especially the last one, but they're hard because they require more precise physical skill (e.g. place a portal perfectly the first try while flying through the air) rather than mental skill, which means I didn't enjoy their challenge as much as I thought I would.
Achievement: Camera Shy
Description: "Detach security cameras from the walls."
Comments: This one was pretty fun, and I made it a point to spite GLaDOS every chance I got by destroying her "vital testing apparatus" anyway, so this achievement wasn't hard.
Fun fact: I am fairly camera shy in real life.
Achievement: Friendly Fire
Description: "Knock down a turret with another turret."
Comments: Easy. Here's also a good time to mention my personal achievement: play through the entire game without getting hit by a turret once. I did it (can't really prove it, but I did it).
Achievement: Transmission Received
Description: "...?"
Comments: This is a Steam-only achievement where, in your second playthrough onward, each map has 1+ hidden radios and you need to bring the radios to specific locations to get this achievement. I solved most of this achievement myself, but I had to look the remainder of it up. And while we're at it, whoever designed this achievement is A GODDAMN SADIST. Some of these radios are in really hard-to-reach locations and carrying them around while having to jump through portals is a PAIN IN THE ASS. All the while I had to listen to the god-awful music playing from those things. This was pretty much the only time I did NOT have fun playing this game, obtaining this achievement.
Portal 2
Achievement: Wake Up Call
Description: "Survive the manual override."
Comments: There's no way to fail this achievement, as far as I can tell. You get this just for starting the game and watching Wheatley make a giant mess trying to save you. Also, I'm still unclear as to how long the timeskip is between Portal and Portal 2. How long was Chell sleeping for? And what…did robots fit her with boots while she was sleeping? She was barefoot the first game but now she has boots (not complaining, just nitpicking; in fact, I think the boots look better).
Achievement: You Monster
Description: "Reunite with GLaDOS."
Comments: GLaDOS uses mechanical arms to crush Wheatley, pick you up, and drop you into an incinerator. Why didn't she just do that in the first game instead of letting me run around directing rockets into her face and incinerating her cores? Again, not complaining, just nitpicking. It would've sucked to have to dodge mechanical arms while at the same time doing all that other stuff under a timer. I hate timers.
Achievement: Undiscouraged
Description: "Complete the first Thermal Discouragement Beam test."
Comments: These "deadly lasers" are lots of fun. I may or may not have laughed maniacally each time I redirected them into a turret. *goes off to laugh maniacally
Achievement: Bridge Over Troubling Water
Description: "Complete the first Hard Light Bridge test."
Comments: These bridges are kind of fun too, but not as much fun as the deadly lasers. *goes off to laugh maniacally
Achievement: SaBOTour
Description: "Make a break for it."
Comments: After GLaDOS awakens, you run tests for her until Wheatley provides an escape route. You get this achievement then. Also, this comes up later, but Wheatley's a bumbling idiot. That’s not opinion, this is in-game fact; he was designed to be an idiot. How did he manage to plan this escape? And, also, isn't GLaDOS in charge of the whole facility? How did we escape to an area within the facility that's safe from her, anyway?
Achievement: Stalemate Associate
Description: "Press the button!"
Comments: Here's where you hand over control of the facility to Wheatley by replacing GLaDOS with him. It's…not the best decision you make in the games.
Achievement: Tater Tote
Description: "Carry science forward."
Comments: In case the previous comment was too vague, Wheatley becomes megalomaniacal upon being wired into GLaDOS's chassis and, instead of freeing you, decides to keep you around. He also turns GLaDOS into a potato and smashes both of you into the bowels of the facility where the test centers of the 1950s, 1970s, and 1980s were sealed long ago. Potato GLaDOS (PotatOS) promptly gets carried off by a bird, and you get this achievement when you recover her later. But…we're several kilometers underground. How the hell did a bird get down here? Was it around since the 1950s-1980s? How did it survive for all those decades, even centuries? Or is it the product of an entire population of birds? If that's the case, how did they get food kilometers underground and how has their population not succumbed to genetic bottlenecking?
Achievement: Vertically Unchallenged
Description: "Master the Repulsion Gel."
Comments: These gels are kind of fun, especially the part where I shoot them everywhere…
Achievement: Stranger Than Friction
Description: "Master the Propulsion Gel."
Comments: ...until all the surfaces of the room are covered in these thick, viscous liquids…
Achievement: White Out
Description: "Complete the first Conversion Gel test."
Comments: …especially this white one. Let's, uh, move on.
Achievement: Tunnel of Funnel
Description: "Master the Excursion Funnel."
Comments: This is my least favorite new mechanic. It's still fun and interesting, but when you're being transported in it, you have 0 control over your speed/direction. It's kind of like those Unstationary Scaffolds.
Achievement: Dual Pit Experiment
Description: "Do the same experiment twice."
Comments: Wheatley kind of makes you get this achievement as he makes you do his first test chamber, the most difficult chamber ever, twice...which reinforces my comment from earlier. This first test chamber, consisting of dropping 1 box onto 1 button and that's it, is the most creative test Wheatley can come up with. How the hell did he manage to do all the other things he did in the game? We'll be revisiting this later.
Achievement: The Part Where He Kills You
Description: "This is that part."
Comments: By later, I mean right now. Wheatley lures you into an elaborate path that places you right into his death trap. That requires things like planning and coordination, traits that only non-idiots possess. It's like the opposite of other games, where we're told some character is awesome but he's not. Here, we're told Wheatley was designed to be incompetent, but he actually pulls off some pretty competent moves.
…Or, this means the people who designed him to be a moron failed at it because they themselves were morons?
Achievement: Lunacy
Description: "That just happened."
Comments: You confront Wheatley with PotatOS in tow. PotatOS's plan involves attaching corrupt cores into Wheatley such that another core transfer gets initiated, by which you can restore control to GLaDOS. While GLaDOS takes care of dispensing corrupt cores into the arena, you need to fight Wheatley. Wheatley informs you that he "watched the tapes" of you killing GLaDOS and thereby took precautions. That…doesn't sound like something an idiot would do. I mean…his precautions are bypass-able, but still…
Anyway, you corrupt Wheatley and core transfer is initiated. You portal into the stalemate button room, and hit the button…but Wheatley had booby-trapped the button with a bomb before. Awful lot of foresight for a core designed to be stupid…
Anyway, you survive the booby-trap with your toned body of solid steel (the same body that allows you to survive being shot at by turrets or survive being propelled into metal walls) and shoot a portal to the moon's surface through a hole in the ceiling, sucking everything onto the moon. GLaDOS resumes command of the facility, pulls you back in, and beats Wheatley into space. Cue the ending.
Normally I'd have a problem with such a ridiculous ending, but this was actually pretty funny…and also it's not as random as it sounds, because it was stated in the Conversion Gel tests that moon dust conducts portals; in fact, Conversion Gel is made of moon dust. Chekhov's Gun, anyone?
Achievement: Drop Box
Description: "Place a cube on a button without touching the cube."
Comments: There are 2 maps where this can be done easily, but one of them doesn't grant the achievement since in that map I guess you're not dropping a cube but instead are dropping a Franken-turret?
Achievement: Overclocker
Description: "Complete Test Chamber 10 in 70 seconds."
Comments: This one is pretty difficult and requires near-perfect efficiency. It took me several tries to get it. The main trick is that when you're waiting for the Discouragement Redirection Cube to come up, place your redirection portals and then catch the cube at the edge of the ledge, saving about 5 seconds.
Achievement: Pit Boss
Description: "Show that pit who's boss."
Comments: When Wheatley tries to kill you and fails, he asks you to come back and jump into a bottomless pit. If you do, you get this. I suspect they added this achievement because otherwise there'd be absolutely no reason to listen to the guy who asked you to suicide to cover up for his failure at killing you.
Achievement: Pturretdactyl
Description: "Use an Aerial Faith Plate to launch a turret."
Comments: Easy. The turret launched into the air, only to fall into the pit of acid. Why exactly does Aperture have liters of acid sitting around anyway? When you go into old-timey Aperture, there's an entire lake of it.
Achievement: Final Transmission
Description: "Find the hidden signal in one of Rat Man's dens."
Comments: The description is misleading, as this is essentially another "find the radio and take it to a specific place" quest. I'll be honest; I just Googled this one.
Achievement: Good Listener
Description: "Take GLaDOS's escape advice."
Comments: When you're escaping from GLaDOS, she tells you to complete her final test and she'll let you go. Again, it's the most obvious trap ever, and if you do go in, she seals the room and neurotoxins you. But you get an achievement.
Achievement: Scanned Alone
Description: "Stand in a defective turret detector."
Comments: I actually did this accidentally, as I stood in the detector because I thought that was how you solved that particular puzzle. I was wrong, of course.
Achievement: No Hard Feelings
Description: "Save a turret from redemption."
Comments: "Redemption" is another word for incineration, apparently. Anyway, the turret I saved was a friendly Oracle Turret, which told me cryptic factoids rather than try to insert bullets into me at high velocities.
Achievement: Schrödinger's Catch
Description: "Catch a blue-painted box before it touches the ground."
Comments: …No idea what this achievement has to do with a physicist who sarcastically postulated that a cat must be both alive and dead simply because we don't know whether it's alive or not. Oh yeah, and he came up with an equation for waves.
Achievement: Ship Overboard
Description: "Discover the missing experiment."
Comments: I'm assuming this is an Easter Egg reference to something in the Half-Life universe? I found it but I didn't understand it.
Achievement: Door Prize
Description: "Examine all the vitrified test chamber doors."
Comments: This description is misleading…you need to examine the little voice-box buttons beside the doors to get this achievement.
Achievement: Portrait of a Lady
Description: "Find a hidden portrait."
Comments: This is a picture of Cave Johnson and his assistant, Caroline, whose brain was downloaded into the computer that would become GLaDOS. It's established that Caroline is more moral and caring than GLaDOS is, which makes me wonder at what point in this procedure did Caroline's personality obtain GLaDOS's homicidal tendencies…
Achievement: You Made Your Point
Description: "Refuse to solve the first test in Chapter 8."
Comments: Well, you refuse for a little bit, and then you need to do it or else the game doesn't proceed…
Achievement: Smash TV
Description: "Break 11 test chamber monitors."
Comments: This achievement is a lot of fun, except for the last monitor, which is very difficult to break, as you need some of that physical coordination skill I was talking about before (you know, the kind I lack). Also, does it make me an unbalanced psycho if it felt good to smash all those monitors?
Achievement: High Five
Description: "Celebrate your cooperative calibration success."
Comments: This is my only co-op achievement and I admit I have exactly no idea how we got it.
My friend finally managed to convince me to play Portal during fall 2010. He described it as an FPS-puzzle hybrid, which honestly didn’t appeal to me since I assumed he meant an FPS with jumping puzzles, and not only do jumping puzzles suck, but also they suck infinitely more in an FPS. He assured me there were no real jumping puzzles in Portal, so I tried it…and I’m glad I did.
With the exception of some of the advanced maps, there are indeed very few places in Portal that require platforming or jumping skill. Instead, Portal is a mentally stimulating game, where it’s more important to look around you and think about how to use the environment in conjunction with your portal gun to solve the puzzle. I found the concept incredibly fun, although Portal does have some frustrating moments. The best part of the game is GLaDOS, the computer AI that guides you through the first half of the game. I sometimes refer to her as Cathy after my college friend, who is known also as the One-Winged Demoness, Her Evilness, Evil Incarnate. Oh, by the way, this shrine contains spoilers ahead.
Portal 2 came out in 2011 and I was in a bit of a low point in my life, so I didn’t really touch it. It wasn’t until April 2014 that it suddenly occurred to me to try it out. My first experience with Portal 2 was the co-op mode, and to my chagrin it took me like 2 hours to solve one of the puzzles (it’s the one where GLaDOS adopts some baby birds at the end of the mission). I surmise my friend was irritably laughing at me the entire time. Oh well – I’m pretty sure I’ve suitably convinced her that I’m a bumbling idiot several times over by now, so she should be used to it.
…Anyway, the single-player campaign is significantly easier with the exception of the final test chamber, which took me a whopping 3 hours to figure out. I actually gave up after 2 hours, went to bed, and thought about it as I was falling asleep, and eventually the solution came to me. The single-player campaign is also much longer when compared to the original, and the story is quite fun. I’ll be talking about the stories, so again: spoilers.
To shrine these great games, I’m going to list the achievements (on Steam) that I have obtained and give my commentary for each one. It’s a pretty simple shrine, I know.
Portal
Achievement: Lab Rat
Description: "Acquire the fully powered Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device."
Comments: You get this achievement in the story. The game would be significantly less fun if you could only place 1 portal, eh?
Achievement: Fratricide
Description: "Do whatever it takes to survive."
Comments: You get this for "euthanizing" the Weighted Companion Cube by throwing it in an incinerator, which you have to do to progress. Am I alone in not really being that attached to the Companion Cube? If anything it was annoying having to carry that thing around. Also, I've heard the game theory that the cube contains the remains of failed test subjects and…well, I don't really have any counter-argument to that, except to say that if the developers really meant for this to be the case, they've got some twisted ideas going on over at Valve (not that that's necessarily a bad thing…).
Achievement: Partygoer
Description: "Assume the correct party escort submission position decision."
Comments: The first time I played Portal, when I was on the platform slowly descending into the fire, I was like, "Should I…do something about this?" My friend responded, "Yes…" and so I did. I mean…in other games, as you were lowered into the flames, a cutscene would occur to save you, right? And to be honest, if Portal had simply ended with you being incinerated, I wouldn't have really been surprised.
Achievement: Heartbreaker
Description: "Complete Portal."
Comments: GLaDOS doesn't have a heart. Not only is she a computer, but also she's a homicidal one. There is no way she has any sort of heart to break. That being said, GLaDOS is awesome.
Achievement: Terminal Velocity
Description: "Fall 30000 feet."
Comments: This achievement is easy: make a portal above you and one below you; you'll fall in an infinite loop. The real question is: does Chell really achieve terminal velocity after falling 30000 feet? Let's take a break and look at this.
The equation for terminal velocity for an object free-falling through air is $$\|\overrightarrow{v}_t\| = \sqrt{\frac{2m\mathfrak{g}}{Ak\rho}}$$ where \(\overrightarrow{v}_t\) is terminal velocity (double bars denote vector magnitude), \(m\) is mass, \(\mathfrak{g}\) is the acceleration due to gravity, \(A\) is the projected area of the falling object, \(k\) is a drag term, and \(\rho\) is the density of air. Let's assume Chell, an average woman in her twenties, is around \(60\text{ kg}\) (I think that's a bit high for average, but Chell running around performing these physically-intensive tests probably has high muscle mass). The density of air is \(1.28\text{ kg/m}^3\).
The projected area is a bit more difficult, as we don't know whether Chell is falling feet-first or with her back/stomach toward the ground. Since in an FPS you can't change your body's orientation, we'll assume the former and thereby estimate the projected area to be a transverse section. If we assume Chell to be 5'4", based on the aspect ratio of different images of Chell we can estimate her waist diameter to be 19.2" in the left-right axis and 13.2" in the anterior-posterior axis. Approximating an ellipse to these numbers yields an area of \(6.96\times10^{-2}\text{ m}^2\).
The drag coefficient is about 1, based on some tests people other than me have done. With these approximate parameters, we obtain a terminal velocity of \(115.0\text{ m/s}\).
Suppose we denote Chell's starting position as \(y = 0\) and she begins falling at \(t = 0\). To figure out what distance she has to fall to reach terminal velocity, we use the equations of motion, where the net force on her is given by drag minus weight: $$\overrightarrow{F} = \left(\frac{1}{2}\rho\|\overrightarrow{v}\|^2Ak - m\mathfrak{g}\right)\hat{j}$$ where we have defined a coordinate system of negative going down. Note that if the force is 0, we've reached terminal velocity by definition and we recover the first equation up there. Before that, by Newton's second law, this force equals her mass times her acceleration. Acceleration is the time derivative of velocity, which means $$m\frac{d\overrightarrow{v}}{dt} = \left(\frac{1}{2}\rho\|\overrightarrow{v}\|^2Ak - m\mathfrak{g}\right)\hat{j}$$ If you separate variables and solve, you get $$\overrightarrow{v} = -\sqrt{\frac{2m\mathfrak{g}}{Ak\rho}}\tanh\left(t\sqrt{\frac{\mathfrak{g}Ak\rho}{2m}}\right)\hat{j}$$ According to this it takes infinite time to reach terminal velocity, which just comes from the differential calculus theory used to derive this equation. We can approximate real conditions by solving for the time required to reach 99% terminal velocity, \(113.8\text{ m/s}\), whereupon we obtain \(t = 31.0\text{ s}\).
Integrating velocity from \(t = 0\) to \(t = 31.0\text{ s}\) yields a total displacement of \(–2640\text{ m}\), meaning that in 31.0 seconds Chell would have fallen 8660 feet. So, yes, she would've reached terminal velocity by 30000 feet, but this also means I HAD TO SIT THERE AND WAIT FOR HER TO FALL 21340 EXTRA FEET FOR THIS DAMN ACHIEVEMENT.
My audience: No, Ben, what this really means is that you're a NEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRD!!11!!!!!1!!
Achievement: Long Jump
Description: "Jump 300 feet."
Comments: This achievement is a bit confusing, as technically I should've gotten it long before I got the Terminal Velocity achievement. I'm of the opinion it records horizontal displacement rather than vertical displacement, which would explain why I didn't get the achievement while falling 30000 feet. At any rate I eventually got it per a friend's suggestion by flinging myself back and forth in the giant room where all the turrets attack you, so that was cool.
Achievement: Cupcake
Description: "Beat two Portal advanced maps."
Comments: There's an achievement for beating all 6, which I got, so I'll hold off commentary here.
Achievement: Fruitcake
Description: "Beat four Portal advanced maps."
Comments: See previous entry.
Achievement: Vanilla Crazy Cake
Description: "Beat all six Portal advanced maps."
Comments: The advanced maps are pretty hard, especially the last one, but they're hard because they require more precise physical skill (e.g. place a portal perfectly the first try while flying through the air) rather than mental skill, which means I didn't enjoy their challenge as much as I thought I would.
Achievement: Camera Shy
Description: "Detach security cameras from the walls."
Comments: This one was pretty fun, and I made it a point to spite GLaDOS every chance I got by destroying her "vital testing apparatus" anyway, so this achievement wasn't hard.
Fun fact: I am fairly camera shy in real life.
Achievement: Friendly Fire
Description: "Knock down a turret with another turret."
Comments: Easy. Here's also a good time to mention my personal achievement: play through the entire game without getting hit by a turret once. I did it (can't really prove it, but I did it).
Achievement: Transmission Received
Description: "...?"
Comments: This is a Steam-only achievement where, in your second playthrough onward, each map has 1+ hidden radios and you need to bring the radios to specific locations to get this achievement. I solved most of this achievement myself, but I had to look the remainder of it up. And while we're at it, whoever designed this achievement is A GODDAMN SADIST. Some of these radios are in really hard-to-reach locations and carrying them around while having to jump through portals is a PAIN IN THE ASS. All the while I had to listen to the god-awful music playing from those things. This was pretty much the only time I did NOT have fun playing this game, obtaining this achievement.
Portal 2
Achievement: Wake Up Call
Description: "Survive the manual override."
Comments: There's no way to fail this achievement, as far as I can tell. You get this just for starting the game and watching Wheatley make a giant mess trying to save you. Also, I'm still unclear as to how long the timeskip is between Portal and Portal 2. How long was Chell sleeping for? And what…did robots fit her with boots while she was sleeping? She was barefoot the first game but now she has boots (not complaining, just nitpicking; in fact, I think the boots look better).
Achievement: You Monster
Description: "Reunite with GLaDOS."
Comments: GLaDOS uses mechanical arms to crush Wheatley, pick you up, and drop you into an incinerator. Why didn't she just do that in the first game instead of letting me run around directing rockets into her face and incinerating her cores? Again, not complaining, just nitpicking. It would've sucked to have to dodge mechanical arms while at the same time doing all that other stuff under a timer. I hate timers.
Achievement: Undiscouraged
Description: "Complete the first Thermal Discouragement Beam test."
Comments: These "deadly lasers" are lots of fun. I may or may not have laughed maniacally each time I redirected them into a turret. *goes off to laugh maniacally
Achievement: Bridge Over Troubling Water
Description: "Complete the first Hard Light Bridge test."
Comments: These bridges are kind of fun too, but not as much fun as the deadly lasers. *goes off to laugh maniacally
Achievement: SaBOTour
Description: "Make a break for it."
Comments: After GLaDOS awakens, you run tests for her until Wheatley provides an escape route. You get this achievement then. Also, this comes up later, but Wheatley's a bumbling idiot. That’s not opinion, this is in-game fact; he was designed to be an idiot. How did he manage to plan this escape? And, also, isn't GLaDOS in charge of the whole facility? How did we escape to an area within the facility that's safe from her, anyway?
Achievement: Stalemate Associate
Description: "Press the button!"
Comments: Here's where you hand over control of the facility to Wheatley by replacing GLaDOS with him. It's…not the best decision you make in the games.
Achievement: Tater Tote
Description: "Carry science forward."
Comments: In case the previous comment was too vague, Wheatley becomes megalomaniacal upon being wired into GLaDOS's chassis and, instead of freeing you, decides to keep you around. He also turns GLaDOS into a potato and smashes both of you into the bowels of the facility where the test centers of the 1950s, 1970s, and 1980s were sealed long ago. Potato GLaDOS (PotatOS) promptly gets carried off by a bird, and you get this achievement when you recover her later. But…we're several kilometers underground. How the hell did a bird get down here? Was it around since the 1950s-1980s? How did it survive for all those decades, even centuries? Or is it the product of an entire population of birds? If that's the case, how did they get food kilometers underground and how has their population not succumbed to genetic bottlenecking?
Achievement: Vertically Unchallenged
Description: "Master the Repulsion Gel."
Comments: These gels are kind of fun, especially the part where I shoot them everywhere…
Achievement: Stranger Than Friction
Description: "Master the Propulsion Gel."
Comments: ...until all the surfaces of the room are covered in these thick, viscous liquids…
Achievement: White Out
Description: "Complete the first Conversion Gel test."
Comments: …especially this white one. Let's, uh, move on.
Achievement: Tunnel of Funnel
Description: "Master the Excursion Funnel."
Comments: This is my least favorite new mechanic. It's still fun and interesting, but when you're being transported in it, you have 0 control over your speed/direction. It's kind of like those Unstationary Scaffolds.
Achievement: Dual Pit Experiment
Description: "Do the same experiment twice."
Comments: Wheatley kind of makes you get this achievement as he makes you do his first test chamber, the most difficult chamber ever, twice...which reinforces my comment from earlier. This first test chamber, consisting of dropping 1 box onto 1 button and that's it, is the most creative test Wheatley can come up with. How the hell did he manage to do all the other things he did in the game? We'll be revisiting this later.
Achievement: The Part Where He Kills You
Description: "This is that part."
Comments: By later, I mean right now. Wheatley lures you into an elaborate path that places you right into his death trap. That requires things like planning and coordination, traits that only non-idiots possess. It's like the opposite of other games, where we're told some character is awesome but he's not. Here, we're told Wheatley was designed to be incompetent, but he actually pulls off some pretty competent moves.
…Or, this means the people who designed him to be a moron failed at it because they themselves were morons?
Achievement: Lunacy
Description: "That just happened."
Comments: You confront Wheatley with PotatOS in tow. PotatOS's plan involves attaching corrupt cores into Wheatley such that another core transfer gets initiated, by which you can restore control to GLaDOS. While GLaDOS takes care of dispensing corrupt cores into the arena, you need to fight Wheatley. Wheatley informs you that he "watched the tapes" of you killing GLaDOS and thereby took precautions. That…doesn't sound like something an idiot would do. I mean…his precautions are bypass-able, but still…
Anyway, you corrupt Wheatley and core transfer is initiated. You portal into the stalemate button room, and hit the button…but Wheatley had booby-trapped the button with a bomb before. Awful lot of foresight for a core designed to be stupid…
Anyway, you survive the booby-trap with your toned body of solid steel (the same body that allows you to survive being shot at by turrets or survive being propelled into metal walls) and shoot a portal to the moon's surface through a hole in the ceiling, sucking everything onto the moon. GLaDOS resumes command of the facility, pulls you back in, and beats Wheatley into space. Cue the ending.
Normally I'd have a problem with such a ridiculous ending, but this was actually pretty funny…and also it's not as random as it sounds, because it was stated in the Conversion Gel tests that moon dust conducts portals; in fact, Conversion Gel is made of moon dust. Chekhov's Gun, anyone?
Achievement: Drop Box
Description: "Place a cube on a button without touching the cube."
Comments: There are 2 maps where this can be done easily, but one of them doesn't grant the achievement since in that map I guess you're not dropping a cube but instead are dropping a Franken-turret?
Achievement: Overclocker
Description: "Complete Test Chamber 10 in 70 seconds."
Comments: This one is pretty difficult and requires near-perfect efficiency. It took me several tries to get it. The main trick is that when you're waiting for the Discouragement Redirection Cube to come up, place your redirection portals and then catch the cube at the edge of the ledge, saving about 5 seconds.
Achievement: Pit Boss
Description: "Show that pit who's boss."
Comments: When Wheatley tries to kill you and fails, he asks you to come back and jump into a bottomless pit. If you do, you get this. I suspect they added this achievement because otherwise there'd be absolutely no reason to listen to the guy who asked you to suicide to cover up for his failure at killing you.
Achievement: Pturretdactyl
Description: "Use an Aerial Faith Plate to launch a turret."
Comments: Easy. The turret launched into the air, only to fall into the pit of acid. Why exactly does Aperture have liters of acid sitting around anyway? When you go into old-timey Aperture, there's an entire lake of it.
Achievement: Final Transmission
Description: "Find the hidden signal in one of Rat Man's dens."
Comments: The description is misleading, as this is essentially another "find the radio and take it to a specific place" quest. I'll be honest; I just Googled this one.
Achievement: Good Listener
Description: "Take GLaDOS's escape advice."
Comments: When you're escaping from GLaDOS, she tells you to complete her final test and she'll let you go. Again, it's the most obvious trap ever, and if you do go in, she seals the room and neurotoxins you. But you get an achievement.
Achievement: Scanned Alone
Description: "Stand in a defective turret detector."
Comments: I actually did this accidentally, as I stood in the detector because I thought that was how you solved that particular puzzle. I was wrong, of course.
Achievement: No Hard Feelings
Description: "Save a turret from redemption."
Comments: "Redemption" is another word for incineration, apparently. Anyway, the turret I saved was a friendly Oracle Turret, which told me cryptic factoids rather than try to insert bullets into me at high velocities.
Achievement: Schrödinger's Catch
Description: "Catch a blue-painted box before it touches the ground."
Comments: …No idea what this achievement has to do with a physicist who sarcastically postulated that a cat must be both alive and dead simply because we don't know whether it's alive or not. Oh yeah, and he came up with an equation for waves.
Achievement: Ship Overboard
Description: "Discover the missing experiment."
Comments: I'm assuming this is an Easter Egg reference to something in the Half-Life universe? I found it but I didn't understand it.
Achievement: Door Prize
Description: "Examine all the vitrified test chamber doors."
Comments: This description is misleading…you need to examine the little voice-box buttons beside the doors to get this achievement.
Achievement: Portrait of a Lady
Description: "Find a hidden portrait."
Comments: This is a picture of Cave Johnson and his assistant, Caroline, whose brain was downloaded into the computer that would become GLaDOS. It's established that Caroline is more moral and caring than GLaDOS is, which makes me wonder at what point in this procedure did Caroline's personality obtain GLaDOS's homicidal tendencies…
Achievement: You Made Your Point
Description: "Refuse to solve the first test in Chapter 8."
Comments: Well, you refuse for a little bit, and then you need to do it or else the game doesn't proceed…
Achievement: Smash TV
Description: "Break 11 test chamber monitors."
Comments: This achievement is a lot of fun, except for the last monitor, which is very difficult to break, as you need some of that physical coordination skill I was talking about before (you know, the kind I lack). Also, does it make me an unbalanced psycho if it felt good to smash all those monitors?
Achievement: High Five
Description: "Celebrate your cooperative calibration success."
Comments: This is my only co-op achievement and I admit I have exactly no idea how we got it.