Portal

Portal is a short but extraordinarily inventive puzzle game built around the portal gun, which Valve packaged into The Orange Box compilation together with Half-Life 2, both of its episodes, and Team Fortress 2. In it, the player moves through a series of test chambers under the guidance of the artificial intelligence GLaDOS and solves puzzles based on opening two linked portals in space and using momentum-based movement - despite its short length, it became one of the most discussed titles of its time. On PlayStation 3, Portal launched as part of The Orange Box compilation on December 11, 2007, roughly two months later than the PC and Xbox 360 versions, which arrived already in October. The delay had a clear reason - the PlayStation 3 port wasn't created directly by Valve but by a hired external team, and the result was noticeably weaker technically by the standards of the time, with a lower frame rate and longer loading times than on rival platforms, which a number of period reviews noted.

The game itself - the sequence of test chambers with the portal gun and the story about the controlling artificial intelligence GLaDOS - remained unchanged in content; it's an identical experience to the PC or Xbox 360 versions, with the same puzzles, the same pacing of story revelation, and the same closing song Still Alive. The difference lay mainly in the fact that the PlayStation 3 version lacked comparable achievement support and online features on release day, because the PlayStation Network was only at the start of its development in the fall of 2007 and was missing a number of services that Xbox Live players were used to.

Valve took players' dissatisfaction with the quality of the port to heart and, in the following months, took over care of the PS3 version of The Orange Box itself, including updates and later Steamworks support on this console - a unique move on PlayStation 3 at the time that showed how seriously Valve took its reputation on this platform, and fans still remember it today as an example of an unusually accommodating publisher response to a flawed port.

Why play it: For Portal fans, it's interesting to see how Valve, after a weak start, took the quality of the PS3 version to heart and was the first to bring full Steam integration to this console - a unique move for its time.