Or TBX:MSBU:TR:DC for short. Or just TBX.

I've always had an intense love for Japanese-style bullet hell shoot-em-up games, "Ikaruga" and the like, despite the fact that I no longer possess the reflexes or coordination to play them. On that subject, I was overjoyed to hear that one of the FIEA programmers I worked with on "Erado," Zach Ellsbury, shared a similar interest in shoot-em-ups. We kicked around a couple of ideas and came up with TBX (design doc pending).

The general idea is you play as a ridiculously skilled pilot flying off into the wild blue yonder, pitted against an army of baddies that are somewhat less skilled than you, but make up for a lack in skill with sheer numbers. Typical shoot-em-up fare. However, once again, there's a twist!

You are such a bad-ass, that you cannot die from conventional weaponry. You're immune. In fact, you collect bullets for weapon upgrades. You're just that awesome.

Well then, how do you lose? Simple. Your ship is designed to turn you, the pilot, into the perfect killing machine. It scans the battlefield for enemy units, and gives you a quota. If you fail to meet your ass-kicking quota, it kills you. See? Simple.

Add in environmental hazards to navigate and over-the-top bosses that actually CAN kill you, and you have "TBX" in a nutshell.
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I plan  on getting my portfolio up and running within the next few weeks.
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Portal, as a franchise, has made a lasting impact on geek culture in general, I think. Already we see the old cake and "Still Alive" memes replaced with images of potatoes, lemons, and SPACE; new "in-jokes" floating all over the internet, officially zeitgeist-ified by anons everywhere.

Portal 2 was an amazing game. It captured me like it captured so many others out there, and for a myriad of different reasons. There's a lot of "good" to be had in Portal 2, in other words.

For me, the real charm of Portal 2 was the personification of Aperture Science itself. The puzzles were great, challenging and clever but not overtly difficult, and the writing was superb, with hilarious writing and voice acting for all three "major" NPCs, but where Portal 2 really excels is the subdued method of story telling. Valve doesn't coddle the audience with overt reveals. The (literally) buried secrets of Aperture are simply presented to the player, put on display, a tomb frozen in time for the audience to explore. 

We, as players, put the pieces together. It soon becomes apparent to the player that Aperture isn't just a science lab, it's an extension of Cave Johnson himself. The eccentric shower curtain salesman turned super scientist, Cave literally built Aperture Science from the ground up. It shows an insatiable desire to prove something, to someone, anyone. Consistently in second place (to Black Mesa), he keeps pushing the logical limits of responsible science; his obsession became his undoing. 

When we, the player, hear about the ridiculous experiments that ultimately leads to Aperture's bankruptcy and subsequent testing on the homeless and its own employees, we laugh. It's clever black humor, and the experiments behind those vitrified doors in the basement of Aperture are presented in such a way that we can't help but laugh. However, much more startling, we believe that these experiments are grounded in the logic of the game's universe. We believe that they were actually conducted, no matter how ridiculously absurd their premise. Aperture Science is Cave Johnson's reality, a bizarre world that Valve skillfully brings to life for us to unravel and explore. The depths of Aperture are both fascinating and frightening, a true vision of super science gone wrong.

Then again, the worst thing that came from Aperture Science was the wholesale slaughter of its employees via neurotoxin. Black Mesa inadvertently enslaved humanity to the Combine. So maybe Cave got the last laugh after all.
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