After yesterday’s SOTD, I figured I’d post something a little silly and lighthearted. This song was so stupid and funny and we all loved it back in… 2008? 2007 according to the video. The song is the ending credits to the video game Portal, which I believe was originally conceived as a Half-Life 2 mod, but then it became its own thing. The game was basically a tech demo and was released as part of The Orange Box with Half-Life 2, its two expansions, and Team Fortress 2, though it also was released on its own via the company’s new PC gaming storefront, Steam (which has gotten much bigger since). Portal has been given away or discounted to under $1 multiple times to the point where almost every Steam user has a copy of it.

I’m assuming a few people still aren’t familiar with it. If you are, you probably already know everything I’m about to say. For those who don’t… it was set up like a first-person shooter, and you wake up in a glass room, and you’re introduced to the concept of the portal gun. At first you don’t control it. Then you get the gun, but you can only make one kind of portal (orange or blue). Later, they unlock its full potential. One trigger fires one kind, the other trigger fires the other. A portal can only be placed on a smooth, flat surface, and some surfaces don’t qualify. Anything that goes in the orange portal comes out the blue portal at the same speed and orientation — and vice-versa (it doesn’t matter which one you go in, you’ll come out the other). You also had a thing on your feet that completely negated fall damage. So you were tasked with completing various obstacle courses with the power of portals.

If you didn’t know how to use a game controller, this game would happily teach you. In fact, I was always a keyboard/mouse guy, and this game taught me the game controller. There was this level with a pit of acid, and pillars of increasing height. The exit was about a mile or so up. There was also a deep pit that just led down to a floor. So what you had to do was simple, as long as you were good with a controller. You’d put portal A in the base of that pit, and portal B on the first platform in the acid, which was at your level, but you could not quite jump to it. You would then jump into the pit, which makes you fly out of the first platform. While at your apex, you would have to carefully aim at the next platform up and fire portal A at it. This way, when you fell back down into portal B, you would come shooting out of portal A, higher up. You’d have to then look for the next platform up, and fire portal B at it, slingshotting yourself higher and higher. What usually happened was, you’d fire the wrong portal and wind up standing on the platform. So you’d just aim down at the starting area, shoot a wall with one portal, and then drop the other one at your feet, ejecting you back to the starting area, where you’d begin again.

The neat thing about Portal was, like Dark Souls and Souls-like games, there was no easy mode. It was just what you got. That said, it wasn’t terribly difficult to beat Portal, or even its sequel, which was a full-fledged game in its own right. What was neat about Portal was, in the final level, they told you to get on this platform and ride it to the end of the line, where you would be given cake as a reward for your testing. However, if you know the first thing about Portal, you know the meme “the cake is a lie.” Your usefulness at an end, you were being discarded. However, if you took everything you’d learned, you could escape at the last minute, getting out of the testing area and into the warehouses that held the testing chambers, ultimately confronting the mastermind behind the tests and battling for your freedom. Of course, if you’d played the Half-Life games, you probably had some idea what was waiting for you outside. The song’s line “Maybe you’ll find someone else to help you / Maybe Black Mesa / That was a joke, haha, fat chance” tells you that Black Mesa, the corporation behind the events of the Half-Life games, exists in the world of Portal, and is somewhat of an antagonist and/or competitor to Aperture Science, the company behind the Portal experiments. (You wouldn’t want to trust, or be backed by, either of them.)

Hilariously, at the end of the game before the credits roll, they show you the cake. The cake was real all along. It just wasn’t for you. It’s also a cake you can actually make, just don’t follow GLaDOS’s directions. Do not put broken glass in a cake! But no, it’s just a Black Forest cake. So it’s two round cakes with whipped cream frosting (and/or chocolate shavings, and/or raspberry compote (or strawberry if you favour that)) in between. The cake is frosted with the same whipped cream frosting, and then covered with chocolate shavings. Then, make six “puffs” of the whipped cream frosting, and top each with more chocolate shavings, and a berry you used the compote of. That’s a Black Forest cake (traditionally with raspberry). Now if you wanna be REAL fancy, set aside some Wilton Buttercream (recipe easily found online) frosting you used for another cake (it makes a lot), divide it in two, and dye half orange, and the other half blue. Now get two L-shaped stands that have a mirror on the back. Cut the cake perfectly in half and place on the stands, so that when looking in the mirror, you see a complete cake. I hope you see where this is going! If not, take your orange and blue frosting, and make portals on the glass (a big arc) so the cake appears to be going through the portal. (My wife has done this for me. It was AWESOME.)