Fighting Mongoose Note

Courtesy of Josh, who currently cannot access the blog:

Recently i've been playing through the entire first game of Portal obsessively, and have noticed some beautiful contrasts when conversing with my fellow peers concerning how they handled the puzzles, particularly the ones concerning the combat puzzles (well, the closest puzzles you could consider combat puzzles). Using my various family members, friends, aquantencies, game forums and World of Warcraft forums (very very scary places), and sifting through various videos of people playing through the first Portal, i've managed to pull together a rather staggering realization that women are more likely to directly assault the combat turrets than men. By directly assaulting the combat turrets, I mean grab them and toss them aside, put them in front of other turrets, hit them with weighted storage cubes, or otherwise manhandle the turrets, while the men in my large query tended to gravitate towards using the portal gun to dispatch the turrets, dropping cubes onto the turrets and forcing the turrets to fall through the floor.

Also, a few years back, we conducted a small but fairly representative case-study of the legendary event: Burning your companion cube. We being myself, Christopher Bennett, and Dustin Barrett, were spurred to this study after being accused of being "girly" when we felt remorse and sadness at burning our respective cubes, to the point that Dustin had hacked to the game specifically to keep the cube with him wherever he went. This accusation led us to bring in as many men and women as we could to play through this particular stage, and when it came to the burning of the cube, the observers noticed an inverse trend to the burning of the cube, and a trend that defied the earlier assessment that not willing to burn the cube outright was "girly": Women burned the cube much faster than men. Our studies included math majors, computer science majors, a biology major, a few english majors, a few undecided majors, and a rather feisty art major on the female side, and a representative slice close to that for the male side. Due to the fact that we did not jot down data for this experiment, only the conclusion, i've resolved to create a new study with this same consideration in mind while I complete Portal 2.

Thirdly, i've noticed that, for all intents and purposes, the main character of the first portal game looks like a robot. Yes, it may be a game engine flaw, but I remain unconvinced.

Fourthly, and this is in consideration to a fellow Mongoose's note concerning the music of Portal, I have save points at every place that there is a radio, and have come to the conclusion that the radios are in relaxation and rest points in the game, which indicates, to me, that Portal's construction follows a real-life construction that there is no music in real settings, only in relaxation settings.