True History of Britain: Facts You Won't Get Anywhere Else.
The Total and Complete Encyclopaedia to the world of Interesting Things and Notable Curiosities located on, or in relation to, the Island of Britain. (unfinished)
I get that one all the time, but I never get the luxury of waking up because of it. I'm just there trying to tell my teachers that while, yes, I never finished my A-Levels there, I think my Bachelors in Quantum Physics makes it a little superfluous.
Also, I'm a grown man now and it seems inappropriate for me to be back in secondary school. I have a beard and taxes and everything.
All the games I have on Steam that are First Person Shooter-Style Puzzle Games About Women Navigating Abandoned Scientific Research Facilities and Solving Cube and Button Based Obstacles With Their Robot Buddies, rated by how much I'm stretching the terms to fit this name
My word, that's a long title. Anyway, The Talos Principle 2 was on sale recently and, while I haven't actually played it yet, it reminded me that back when I did a post about The Entropy Centre I mentioned it added another entry to my another item to my list of “First Person Shooter-Style Puzzle Games About Women Navigating Abandoned Scientific Research Facilities and Solving Cube and Button Based Obstacles With Their Robot Buddies” games, a.k.a. Portal-likes™. I was going to do a post about them, and never did. So this is that list, and here are the criteria.
First Person Shooter-Style (FPS) Puzzle Games: Is it first person? With shooting? But in a Puzzle context?
About Women: Is the player character female?
Navigating Abandoned Scientific Research Facilities (SRF): Are you in one of these? After it has been abandoned? Navigating it? (Also, the player character being there won't count for judging the abandonedness of the place)
and Solving Cube and Button Based Obstacles (CBO): Cubes with which to push buttons? Buttons to be pushed by cubes? Cubes that have buttons on them? Buttons that have cubes on them but in a different way to the cubes activating the buttons?
With Their Robot Buddies: Do you have a lil' robo buddy to chat with between puzzles? Is this lil' robo buddy 1) little, 2) a robot, and 3) your friend?
Spoilers abound, so be wary.
Portal
The OG. Surely this one has to pass with flying colours, right?
FPS: Indeed, Portal is entirely first person, and you fire your Portal gun. Handy side-effect of being based on the Half-Life engine, I guess. 5/5
Women: Chell does appear to be a woman. In the absence of any evidence to suggest she is not, I'm going to assume she is. 5/5
SRF: This depends a lot on your definition of the word 'abandoned'; Aperture Science is less abandoned and more everyone died from deadly neurotoxin. The only person actually working in it is GLaDOS, but then against she is the entire operating system for the facility. And yes, I'm considering sapient robots to be people, c'mon now. So... 3/5
CBO: Lotta Cubes, lotta Buttons. You put the cubes on the buttons. 5/5
Robot Buddy: Well, Chell has GLaDOS. But she's not really a buddy; heck, for the first half of the game she's treated like a completely automated message system. Also, she's trying to kill you. That's not very friendly of her. So I'm afraid this only gets 1/5.
Total: 19/25
Portal 2
The OG 2. Let's see how much this one holds up.
FPS: Gameplay is identical to Portal 1. 5/5
Women: Chell makes her return, so she's still as much a woman as she was before. 5/5
SRF: Aperture is more abandoned than it was before, if we're counting 'everyone dying' as 'abandoned'. And while GLaDOS was around for the first one, she too has succumbed to the passage of time and Chell. Wheatley and the nanobots are the only entities around. I'm sure they're doing their best, but 4/5 'cause it fits the aesthetic better.
CBO: Still more cubes and buttons to be pushed. Even rounded safety cubes and new receptacles for them. 5/5
Robot Buddy: You actually have two now; Wheatley and GLaDOS herself. So while there are stretches of the game where you don't have them around, or one of them isn't very friendly again, they're integral parts of the story. Wheatley fits the robot buddy archetype better at the start of course, which GLaDOS being a reluctant hanger-on. But even GLaDOS gets some growth, and while I won't say she likes Chell, she has definitely grown a respect for the lass. 5/5
Total: 24/25
The Entropy Centre
It's like Portal, but with time instead of space.
FPS: It's like Portal, but with time instead of space. Rather than a Portal gun that opens Portals, you're equipped with an entropy gun that reverses objects through time. 5/5
Women: The heroine of this game is Aria Adams, a woman. 5/5
SRF: This might be the only one where the facility is actually deliberately abandoned rather than having all the residents die. I mean, the residents did die, but only after they decided to collectively abandon the facility. 5/5
CBO: The Entropy Centre not only has cubes, but it has more types of cube! We've got regular cubes, we've got cubes that shoot lasers, cubes that make light bridges, cubes that help you jump, cubes that mimic other gameplay elements in Portal... point is, they're all in cubes or cube-like shapes (cuboids). And buttons, those too. 5/5
Robot Buddy: Aria is joined in her mission by ASTRA, a friendly little AI built into Aria's entropy gun. She fills Aria (and, thus, the player) in on the backstory of the eponymous Entropy Centre, though as she has had her memory wiped just before the game she can't help you with the current situation beyond telling you where to go and providing encouragement. Also, you can give her a little hat! Adorable. 5/5
Total: 25/25, this game is somehow more Portal-like than Portal itself.
The Turing Test
It's like Portal but with... robot philosophy? I don't know. I'd say 'energy balls' since that's what you're using most of the time, but Portal also had energy balls for puzzle elements before they were swapped for lasers in Portal 2.
FPS: Like in Portal, your main tool is a gun. In this case it simply absorbs and releases energy balls, but it's even more gun-shaped than the Portal gun. 5/5
Women: Ava Turing is a woman... but this only gets 3/5. If you want to know why, read on to 'Robot Buddy'.
SRF: The moonbase on Europa is not actually abandoned at all. Not by the inhabitants at least, the people on Earth seem to have given up on it but the ones sent there are still around. They're hiding from you, but they're still there. Waiting. In the walls. Or in a secure area, whichever. 2/5
CBO: This is the kind of game you'd think has a lot of buttons in. There are cubes, sure, and you can pick them up and move them around and stuff. But these cubes are all power sources to be slotted into sockets, there really aren't many puzzles that require placing them onto buttons, Portal-style. 2/5 because it does have cubes and the idea of putting them in places (though they're not even really cubes anyway. Cuboids again.)
Robot Buddy: The puzzles are broken up between little dialogues between Ava and TOM, where they discuss things like the Turing test, the Chinese room, and other thought experiments related to the sentience of AI. So normally, this would bring it to 5/5, it's like the quintessential robot buddy sidekick role. Except, as one will learn mid-way through the game or by continuing to read this sentence, you aren't actually playing as Ava at all. You are playing as TOM, who is in turn controlling Ava's actions. So if anything, the roles are reversed. TOM is the player, and Ava is his human buddy sidekick. 1/5.
Total: 13/25, on a technicality
The Talos Principle
Hey look, it's the game I mentioned at the start. The first one, anyway.
FPS: It's first person, that much is true. You don't get a gun, however. You do get an axe, and the image of a robot running around with a primitive metal axe is very nice, but it's not a gun. However, and this is a point that needs to be made; The Talos Principle actually started life as a testing area for Serious Sam, which is an FPS. So it has FPS in its bones. 2/5
Women: So, the Talos Principle's protagonist is a robot. And you learn nothing about who they are as a person. I'm not even sure they know who they are as a person. But, one thing I do know about the second game is that your character names themselves Athena, and I am assuming considers herself a woman. Does that mean she was a woman during the first game too? I really don't know. The philosophy of gender identity is a complex enough beast for humans, so I'm really out of my depth when it comes to robots. 2/5, barring any further information.
SRF: Welllllllllll... Kinda. You are in a scientific research facility, and there are no humans left in the world. But the actual gameplay doesn't involve the place much at all. Your character is actually in a simulation of different environments running on a computer (Elohim) within this facility. But the simulation you're in is also a series of ruins. So... 2/5 again?
CBO: It's actually called a Hexahedron, I'll have you know. This is a fancy geometry term meaning 'cube'. 5/5
Robot Buddy: In addition to The Player/Athena being a robot, you also get to chat now and again with an entirely digital entity known as Milton. It's kind of a dick, honestly. And it's not there all the time. So there's always an AI present since you/the world are/are inside of an AI for all/most of the game, but you/Elohim don't count as a 'buddy'. Sorry. 3/5
Total: 14/25
For further comparison purposes, here are two games that, while not simply mods of Portal 2 (you need to own Portal 2 to download them but they are their own separate application within Steam) are non-canon fan games designed to expand the world of Portal in a non-canon fan fiction way.
Portal Stories: Mel
FPS: As this is, as mentioned, a fan made stand-alone mod of Portal 2, it runs off the same engine and is intended to be a non-canon prequel to the events of Portal 2. So yeah, the gameplay is pretty much the same. 5/5
Women: You play as Mel, who, like Chell, I'm pretty sure is a woman. She's an Olympic athlete, and one of the volunteers for Aperture Science's experiments back when they could get that quality of volunteer. If the name sounds familiar, it's probably because Mel is a very common name. Also, she was intended to be the player character of Portal 2 before they went with Chell again, and then was going to be the Player 2 in the co-op campaign before they went with the robots. 5/5
SRF: Like I said before, this is set between Portals 1 and 2, in the long stretch of time between GLaDOS dying and GLaDOS waking up. So the facility is about as abandoned as it ever was and is ever gonna get. 4/5.
CBO: I said before that the gameplay was the same, and that's the case here too. There are a few new puzzle elements, but the Cube-and-Button aspects stick around. 5/5
Robot Buddy: Mel is joined by Virgil, another personality core who acts as Mel's guide to the world after she's woken up from her primitive form of cryogenic storage. He is friendly to you. 5/5
Total: 24/25
Portal: Revolution
FPS: Again, like Portal Stories: Mel, this is a stand-alone mod of Portal 2 so it runs of the same engine yadda yadda. 5/5
Women: The player character is not named in this game, but in true Portal tradition she is a woman as well. Let's call her Pel. 5/5
SRF: Yeah, like before, you're in Aperture Science between the events of Portal 1 and 2, 4/5. Listen, you cannot say that the facility is being poorly maintained by sapient robots and get full marks for abandonment, that doesn't work. Either get rid of the robots' intelligence or eat the point loss.
CBO: Again, Portal 2, buttons, cubes, the whole shebang. They even have the red energy barriers that kill you like in Mel (these are used in a variety of Portal 2 fan games). 5/5
Robot Buddy: Pel is woken up by Stirling, a Wheatley-esque Personality Core. Like Wheatley, he needs your help to escape the facility as it is breaking down. Also like Wheatley, he turns on you mid-way through the game and becomes the main villain of the story. Unlike Wheatley, Stirling is more condescending to you from the start and just not as likeable as the pre-corruption Wheatley was. After this shocking but inevitable betrayal, Pel is joined by Emilia, another Personality Core who is more of a typical robot buddy. If I'm being honest I didn't care for either Core too much; Stirling spent most of his time being patronising and Emilia spent most of her time trying to tell me stuff I already knew. 3/5
Total: 22/25
In Conclusion:
Huh? I'm doing conclusions now? Oh OK. Well, Portal 2, despite being the alleged baseline that these games are working from, didn't get full marks (albeit over a technicality regarding the word 'abandoned'). The Entropy Centre did, the Portal 2 mods got the next highest, and the lowest points went to The Turing Test, or The Talos Principle if we're not going to count the other technicality with who the 'player character' of TTT is. But then again, is higher points in this list something games should be striving for? If anything, a lower score on this list is just a higher score in the 'originality' list. Don't get me wrong, I liked The Entropy Centre a lot, but the Portal influences were strong even if the core gameplay mechanic was totally different (or mostly different, anyway). While the two games designed to be like Portal 2, which were also enjoyable, I didn't care for anywhere near as much. There's a lesson here, somewhere.
Irn-Bru is a popular carbonated soft drink here in the UK, famous for its vivid orange colour and indescribable taste. It is considered one of Scotland's national symbols, and even has its own unique pattern of tartan. It is bottled and canned in the town of Westfield, North Lanarkshire, with the liquid extracted on-site from the large Irn-Bru spring now contained within the Barr's company building. The drink emerges in a large hole approximately 17 metres in diameter and 12 metres deep. The exact height of the Irn-Bru 'fountain' varies, but rarely reaches two metres above the surface of the pool. Geological surveys suggest the source of the Irn-Bru is far deeper than most aquifers providing spring water, but attempts to excavate down to this source have been rejected.
The original drink to be named 'Iron Brew' (stylised as IRONBREW), actually came from America, and was first produced in 1889, ten years before the Scottish 'Irn-Bru' was being sold. This drink and the Scottish beverage of the same name have very little else in common; IRONBREW was a dark brown with a vanilla flavour and, like most of the soft drinks being created in the USA at the time, was an attempt to recreate the viscous substance believed to be the ichor of the god K'uk'ukola (possibly a local version of K'uk'ulkan), enemy of the trickster spirit Pepe Sico.
Haha, I'm glad you liked the 9/11 post I made! It was partly inspired by your excellent post on The Boat Race, which I enjoyed so much I've had to gleefully read it to several friends ^^
Genuinely very nice to hear, thank you.
Oh, and the 2026 Boat race was quietly cancelled and secretly replaced with an AI generated version to be aired on TV. The footage created was of very poor quality; teams frequently changed position, the water in the Thames was often flowing backwards, and a sudden power cut killed the generation during the final segment of the video before any crew could cross the finish line. Boat race organisers were forced to confess to their deception and pay compensation to the broadcasters, as well as cover the electrical costs for misusing the Oxford University supercomputer SYMEONIS.
The thing that people don't really get about 9/11 is that the towers were hated while they existed. Leaving aside the gigantic, worst-of-brutalism, slab-of-concrete exteriors, they also garnered poor public opinion due to them being dark icons of capitalism, accounting, and the financial elite. So, after the 1993 terrorist bombings (which failed to destroy either tower and only killed six people), joking about the destruction of the buildings was not uncommon in popular culture, movies, and even (cancelled) album covers. One can consider it like joking about terrible fates befalling Healthcare CEOs prior to 2026.
All of this, of course, abruptly ended in 2001 with the destruction of the first World Trade Center. For a while, even the critics stepped back from their targeted opinions (though admittedly, there weren't any more buildings to be mad at, until the One World Trade Center opened in 2014). But when an institution is so hated, even a mass tragedy event is not going to turn opinions forever. So, as anti-capitalist and anti-USA sentiment was ramping up in the early 21st century, opinions and ideologies slowly built to a boiling point. Which means that, while the terrorist attack on the One World Trade Center in 2029 was a shock, few could say they were surprised. The fact that it was destroyed by another plane strike was felt to be, while an additional tragedy, par for the course.
What was also not very surprising was the tenacity of the USA elites. With the cultural power of capitalism and a vote-winning sentiment of not bowing to terrorism, the Third Great World Trade Center was built and running by the end of 2031, with the much advertised feature of a surrounding fence of pylons that would break up any plane trying to hit it.
What, perhaps, was surprising was those who took this as less of a deterrent, and more of a challenge. So when a Boeing 737, flown by a stunt pilot, weaved through the pylons to hit the tower just three weeks after its opening, many began to see this as less a third great national tragedy, and more the outlandish death sport it was rapidly turning into.
Subsequent World Trade Centers would construct more and more elaborate ways to stop incoming aircraft, and the opposition - now less an ideologically-motivated group and more a coalition of dedicated (if suicidal) fans of the sport - would find new ways to overcome them. Notable examples include the 2036 Global Trade Center's geodesic cage (defeated by a fighter jet small enough to fit through the holes), the 2043 New World Trade Center's always-on EMP-emitting towers (defeated by a refitted WWII Lancaster), and most spectacularly, the 2052 Ultimate World Trade Center's array of AI-controlled anti-aircraft batteries (defeated by a replica of the Wright Brother's aircraft, piloted by an ex-air force test pilot, flying slow enough to not trigger the batteries, but fast enough to take out a single structural pillar that held up the building's northern facade - the controversial weak point included in a brief spirit of 'sporting etiquette').
Not every attempted destruction was successful, of course - most notably, the failed 2044 attack on the World Wide Trade Center, where competitors lost control of their Airbus A380 and crashed it into the East River. The plane failed to break up, instead lodging nose-first in the riverbed with its tail section sticking fifty-nine feet above the surface; it was left in-situ, later to be unofficially and somewhat contentiously christened as a memorial to the planes lost.
By the 2060s, it was clear that this was not going to end anytime soon. The capitalist team were too bull-headed to not keep building new WTCs, and the aircraft team - buoyed by a mix of continual anti-capitalist opinion and the thrill of the game - meant they would keep getting destroyed. Even though the death toll of each season had dropped significantly (by now, the buildings were largely empty, and public commercial air travel would practically dry up after the construction of each new building), the financial and manpower effect was a growing burden, and the increasing surface area of Manhattan given over to memorials and building works was causing spiralling congestion. This was perhaps the thinking behind the setting up of the 'World Trade Center Flying League', or WTCFL, in 2063, which was hoped to be a sort of lightning-rod for this sort of behaviour. Unfortunately, it was later acknowledged that setting the headquarters of the WTCFL in a Manhattan Skyscraper was perhaps not the most sensible choice, after it was destroyed by an old hijacked Lockheed A-12 museum piece.
It was 2071, seventy years after the anniversary of the first impromptu WTC game, when the latest season made the public conclude that the greater tenacity came from the aircraft team. The capitalists, in a stroke of what was thought to be genius, built an inverted skyscraper stretching nine hundred and eleven floors into the earth, only for the opposition to slowly smuggle in parts of an Airbus A9000 piecemeal over the course of two years, build it in-situ on Floor -768, and then accelerate it on a purpose-built catapult into the wall. This particular event was barely consequentially destructive to the five-sixths of the floors above, but public opinion settled on an aircraft victory, and the rest of the building was purposely detonated the following week.
The future of the WTC Games is unclear. Some have speculated that the ominous sounds coming from The Dome on Two Mile Island is the building of the next WTC iteration, while others have reported seeing distinctly tower-shaped sections being launched on recent SLS missions from Cape Canaveral, the capitalists perhaps hoping to build the next tower beyond the reach of conventional aircraft (at least until the aircraft team develop their own space-flight capabilities). Until the next season is announced (traditionally ten minutes after the opening of the new tower), we can only speculate. However, we can be sure of one thing in particular - that it will be something to never forget.
Today (15th April 2026) marks the 114th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, which isn't a particularly notable anniversary to commemorate but here we are. (Also, the Titanic actually began to sink in the late hours of the 14th, but the process took about two and a half hours so it was 2:20am when it finished). Despite multiple investigations and over a century of interest, there has never been one conclusive agreement on what was responsible, rather, the sinking was due to a variety of unfortunate factors: damaged equipment, misunderstandings within the crew, poor safety standards of the time, the mysterious cursed amulet, unfavourable environmental conditions, the excess number of time travellers (visiting as a form of disaster tourism), and aggression from the North Atlantic Ice Titans.
The wreck of the Titanic was only rediscovered in 1985, after a joint US-French expedition led by retired Navy officer Robert Ballard. Because of the confluence between multiple unlikely misfortunes and the weakening of reality caused by the time travellers, the area surrounding the wreckage is still highly cursed. The most notable effect of the curse in recent times is the 2023 Titan submersible disaster, which imploded and tragically took the life of that one guy who didn't want to be on the boat.
For some context: I had previously, in the waking world, mentioned that I needed to trim my beard.
I then dreamt that I went down my bathroom and noticed in the mirror I was now beardless; not completely clean shaven but trimmed down quite a bit. I freaked out, because I assumed I had trimmed my beard and forgotten, and that meant I was having random moments of amnesia again. I told my mum, holding back tears, only for her to tell me that actually she had gone into my room while I was sleeping, noticed I had some celery in my beard, and decided to trim it for me.
Considering it's Easter Sunday, I'd like to share a fun family fact
My mom is very religious, but for some reason the idea that the date for Easter changes from year to year due to being determined via Lunar calendar genuinely upsets her any time I bring it up
One day she decided Easter was April 6th and refused to hear anything to the contrary
Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.
Cedric the Racist Owl from King's Quest V
Or, more serious answer... 'best' is a category that has a lot of variables to it (this is partially why I only review games on sensible objective criteria) but if we define 'best' as the one who left the biggest impression on me at the time: Maligula from Psychonauts 2.
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