Portal 2 summer mapping contest winners announced, GLaDOS resumes testing

[Dekstar]

[br]

[br]Whether you've heard about fan-site thinkingwithportals' summer mapping contest or not, you'll be pleased to hear that the Valve-picked winners were announced earlier. These maps aren't just devilishly hard (the winner being over 30 minutes long even if you're good at the game), but also of exceedingly high quality.[br]The winner, Patent Pending, by ebola, mixes practically every puzzle-type found in the later levels including hard-light bridges, excursion funnels, and aerial faith-plates.[br]My favourite-sounding has to go to the second-place winner though, with a map called 'Infinifling' by MrTwoVideoCards, which apparently has a lot of mid-air portalling (easily the best kind of portalling).[br]Third place in the competition went to Omnicoder, with his map 'Edifice', which even Omnicoder himself said was a fairly hard map (and he designed it).[br]Below there's a couple of screens from these maps to tempt you into downloading them all and giving them a go. After all, with Portal 2's DLC still being a fair way off, this is the perfect stuff to fill your time. The rest of the winners can be found here with download links to all of the maps.[br]

​

 

[sappy]

Yeah if we don't count the DLC most of us are not getting.
Anti Portal 2 MotionPack Exclusive Content

 

[Lanthanide]

I downloaded these and played them last night.

Infinifling is very easy and straight forward. Very nice level decoration and theatrics, but the level itself is straight forward and pretty obvious, and there's not really much mid-air portalling at all.

Patent Pending is very well done, although I got completely stuck on the 3rd chamber until I saw a youtube video of the walkthrough. At which point, as usual, you feel like a complete chump for missing it. I knew what I had to do, but just couldn't see how to do it. Haven't played the 4th chamber yet.

Edifice is quite tricky. I spent a good 20 minutes on that and got most of the way towards the solution for the first chamber, but not quite. After I went to bed I thought about it more and think I have the solution for it now. Others on thinkingwithportals.com said that the remaining chambers are solved using the same mechanisms as the first and so isn't difficult once you get the hang of it.

 

[Lobster]

The winning maps are really great and well worth a look!

I see a lot of people waiting for custom content to appear for Portal 2, who seem unaware of how many custom maps exist already, the contest alone had around 240 entries, not to mention another hundred or so that existed prior. Obviously they vary in quality like with any custom content, but there is a lot of really great stuff in there, that is certainly worth having a look at.

Really hoping Valve bring in the pak system from Portal1 and L4D soon though, the copy/paste/console stuff does seem to put people off at the moment.

 

[Dekstar]

I downloaded these and played them last night.

Thanks for that, Lanthanide. Good mini-reviews of the levels. It's a shame infinifling seems more straight-forward than the others, after that awesome Portal 2 'boots' trailer showing chell doing all those aerial acrobatics.