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Portal 2 Hints
General Portal Info
1 of 12: The portals that Aperture Science has created are not really like the teleporters that were developed at Black Mesa, though instantaneous travel from one point to another is still the main idea.
2 of 12: Each portal consists of two sides: a blue side and an orange side. These hints will refer to "blue portals" and "orange portals," but they're really not separate portals -- they're the two sides to the same portal.
3 of 12: You can't use portals to see or move through walls -- unless, of course, you have the blue portal on one side of a wall and the orange portal on the opposite side. The idea is that the blue and orange sides of a portal can be anywhere, and going into one will immediately take you out through the other.
4 of 12: For instance, if the blue portal was on the ceiling of the room you're in, and the orange portal was on a nearby wall, you'd end up falling from the ceiling when you walked into the orange portal. (If this was a real-life possibility, the person traveling through such a portal would feel some major "gravity twist" as the direction that gravity is pulling them suddenly changes.)
5 of 12: Also, if you had a blue portal in the ceiling and an orange one directly beneath it on the floor, you could conceivably fall forever through the room, gaining more and more momentum as you continue to fall unhindered, by simply stepping into the orange portal. Pretty weird, huh?
6 of 12: Thankfully, your character can't take damage from falling in this game, even if she falls a really long way. This is due to the odd metal things attached to her lower legs. (Gordon Freeman needs to get himself some of those!)
7 of 12: When the game starts, you'll have no way to make portals yourself, and you'll have to rely on the computer to open up the blue and orange portal halves for you.
8 of 12: In Chapter 1's Test Chamber 02, you'll get the one and only "weapon" in the game, which is a portal gun. With it, you can fire blue portal openings onto almost any flat, stationary surface that's not dark metal or glass. (Note that you can't fire portals through force fields or other portals.)
9 of 12: After you get the portal gun, you'll have to solve various portaling puzzles by deciding where to put your blue portal opening. The computer will still be in charge of the orange portal openings.
10 of 12: Near the end of Chapter 1, you'll get a new portal gun that'll allow you to fire both blue and orange portals. This will give you a lot more control over portals, but will also guarantee that the portal puzzles will get a lot harder and trickier.
11 of 12: Just remember that there can be at most one blue portal and one orange portal open at once. There's never any way to have two orange portals open, or three blue ones, or anything like that. Creating a new portal side of either type will erase the previous one of the same type.
12 of 12: Also note that once the blue and orange sides of a portal are set, you can go through the portal by entering either side (as long as you can reach them). The hints will often say to open an orange portal in one spot and a blue portal in another, but that's just to avoid clumsy wording like "open a portal of either type in one spot, then open the portal of the other type in the other spot." You can always switch them around.
