Just beat it. Awesome game, amazing dialogue, and just very well thought through. And lord, the song at the end just cracked me up. The killer droids that said things like "No hard feelings", and "Are you still there?" were just funny characters. You could make a killing selling toys for those things with motion sensors that say things whenever you pass in front of them. I loved the whole "companion cube" challenge. All the things in that back room where a previous test subject had gone crazy was just creative.
And the computer itself is such a character. Whoever wrote the dialogue for this game knew how to instill both comedy and menace into a character that speaks monotone.
The final boss battle was also a blast. I loved how each piece you knocked off had a unique personality and said things frantically. The first one made me laugh when I had it by the incinerator and it said "Is something cooking?" XD
As far as gameplay though, I'd LOVE to see the Portal gun make it into HL2 Episode 3 somehow, but while this game REALLY made you think, a lot of it got repetetive...then again, I played it all in one sitting. Once you got used to the portals and what you could do with them, some of the fun ebbed a bit. I have to applaud the people at Valve for making this game so bug-free. I didn't run into any sort of error even once. If anyone's tried the "Exite" Half Life 2 Portal mod, you can understand why this impresses me. The mod crashed half the time I did anything. I was even more impressed by how the NPCs were smart enough to shoot at you through your own portal; I had to watch my back a few times when it came to that.
All in all though, this is a GREAT game. I'd love to see someone put the Portal gun into the actual Half Life series, or at least the Multiplayer. Multiplayer when you have the Portal Gun would add so much room for strategy that it would transform the FPS.
I'm gonna try out Episode 2 now. After all that thinking, I need to let loose and kill some Combine
