Something I realized today about playing Portal…
…is that it made me a lot better at first person shooters.
Having grown up preferring keyboards to aim in the earliest first person shooters, I never switched over to mouse, even when it proved to be a huge hindrance in later FPSes. But Portal’s “shoot a portal while you’re falling” spots made it almost impossible to play with keyboard alone, so I started using the mouse, and then got used to it, and then found it natural.
The funny thing is that when I was lining up my shots with the keyboard, I had to approach firefights like they were puzzles to be solved. It was the only way to get through a lot of them. It made me pretty good at the tactical side of things, but it’s amusing that I had to play a first person puzzle game to learn how to shoot well.
