Portal

Wow. Portal's a rare game, and I mean that in a good way. It's good that it's only $5 or $10, because of its length, but I don't know that a longer game would have been a better game in this case... but the base concept is unique and fun, a rare combination in this day and age.

So, the basics... it's a first-person shooter without the "shooter" part. It's really more of a puzzle game, where you have to exploit physics and the game's unique hook, the Portal gun, to advance through various tests and, eventually, try to escape the testing facility entirely. The Portal gun... well, think of the old cartoon standby, the portable hole. Now, separate the two sides of the hole and make them individually placeable on most surfaces (walls, floors, ceilings and the like) but still connected... walk into one wall on one end of a corridor and walk out another wall on the other end without going down the entire corridor, as one example. A more entertaining example... put one end up high on a wall, put another on the floor, and fall through. The first trip through, you have no momentum, so you just fall from the upper portal normally... the second trip, you end up shooting across the room, because your downward momentum is conserved and transformed by the portal into horizontal momentum.

Apart from the physical aspects of the game, the, erm, characters are loads of fun, too... the test overseer is an AI program filled with corporate doublespeak and a naive underestimation of how not-gullible you are. There are also some "turrets" here and there, which will gladly fill you full of holes... but are abnormally cute for the job physically, and sound so very innocent as they try to put you down.

So, if you've got a machine that will run Portal (I know it's on PC, and I think it's on the non-Wii consoles, too), I'd say it's worth getting... it's a great little game, and you will finally know why "the cake is a lie" is the meme it is today. If nothing else, you might want to Google up "still alive"... the credits song at the end (as sung by the destroyed(?) AI) is on YouTube, and has some fun bits that will come through even if you haven't played the game, I think.