There is much confusion over what exactly Portal: Still Alive, an upcoming Xbox Live Arcade release of Valve’s excellent platformer-thing, is. After all, it was announced amazingly vaguely during Microsoft’s E3 press conference, and there was little followup. So I asked Valve’s Doug Lombardi, and he explained it to me.

Portal: Still Alive is a standalone version of the original Portal that can be purchased through Xbox Live Marketplace.  In addition to Portal itself, it will include a number of levels that are not part of the game’s story, and do not feature story-related elements such as GLaDOS voiceover.

The game is exclusive to Live Arcade, at least for a while, but PC players can get basically the same experience right now anyway. Here’s why.

You may have seen Portal: The Flash Version, a clever Flash-based tribute to Valve’s game. You are slightly less likely to have seen the Portal: The Flash Version MapPack, which recursively ports the Flash game’s levels to Portal itself.

Still Alive’s bonus content consists of 360-certified versions of the levels from that pack. So if you’re a PC Portal owner who, like me, was feeling excluded by Still Alive’s bonus content, fear not: you get to play that content first, and for free.

Though I play a lot of games, I finish relatively few of them. Often this is simply because I feel I have exhausted most of what a game has to offer before it is even close to being complete. Most games seem as though they last as long as they do either because that is what gamers want (at least, what the small contingent of forum-dwelling hardcore gamers want, or think they want) or because they are such expensive products, not because they actually have ten or twenty or thirty or sixty hours of genuinely fresh and entertaining gameplay packed inside.

Some games are all about breadth over depth, about exploration over linearity, but there are still not all too many of those that need to be as huge as they are. They also give gamers ammunition for slamming shorter games. (”I played Oblivion and GTA: San Andreas for three hundred hours each,” one might exclaim, “so why would I pay $60 for BioShock?”) I am glad games like this exist, but they should clearly not be any length benchmark for different types of games. Multiplayer games are obviously a different beast entirely.

For years, I have been hoping for games that are cheaper, more densely packed, and on the whole shorter. Many of my most memorable gaming experiences have come from such games, and this is surely at least in part because those are the games I actually finished–Beyond Good & Evil, Ico, Full Throttle, and so on. Still, these are full-budget games with essentially full single-player experiences and full prices. It seems like there could be something else. (more…)