Sounds like your video card is overheating. That's what mine always did anyway when I overclocked it too high.

Just wanted to share with everyone that there are two custom maps out for Portal. Actually there might be more, but I only found two at Fileplanet.
linky

I beat Portal recently and it wasn't too hard but mainly the last one is what kinda boggled me a bit. That end credits song was so hilarious, I fell to the floor laughing for a good 10 minutes straight.

I completed Portal in one night. I just wanted to play a level or two, but I couldn´t stop. Took me about 4 hours to complete. There were some missing textures somehow, maybe I need to update DirectX.

You could also try right clicking on Portal in the games menu, and selecting Properties -> Local Files -> Verify Integrity of Game Cache. This'll check to see if any of the texture files themselves are missing.

Good idea - I´ve been sticking to consoles for so long I´ve forgotten that there could be such an option in a game. ;)

That's one nice thing about the PC....you can always redownload or patch your game for extra features.

Where have you been for the past two years?

Been replaying the game with the commentary running, and boy is it dry. Guess that's what happens when you ask a bunch of programmers to share their thoughts on the game, though. I was amused by the fact that they only came up with the companion cube because playtesters kept ditching the box and tried to time their run down the hallway instead, so they needed to find a way to get players to keep the box...

I actually found the commentary interesting. I like learning about how they put the game together. And learning how they did the view through the portals was very intriguing, as well.

My only complaint with the commentary is that it says that you're invulnerable while it's running, so the first thing I did was run into one of those energy balls. *CRACK* *DEAD*

Oh well.

Can this game (and the others in the orange box) run on an intel integrated graphics card? It doesnt have to look good, as long as the framerate isnt choppy.

Not really, no. At least not Portal, from what I've read.

I wouldn't count on it. Portal is pretty processor intensive for obvious reasons. My computer (to my surprise) handles Half Life 2 pretty well with most of the eye candy on, but there were occasions where Portal just made it cry. Playing the "Run around in circles" game sends my framerate into the toilet.

Also, yeah, invulnerable my ass. Even the turrets can still kill you in commentary mode. Maybe they realized you could get stuck if you were invincible, since there's no way to climb back out of the death water in several parts.

I thought they said you're invulnerable when listening to the comments.

I noticed if you place yourself to look at yourself from a portal when you activate a commentary node, a white box will appear around you and certain platforms, at least in the 360 version.

EDIT:
I also noticed if you place a portal on a wall and then another on the floor under it, so that it's upside down (meaning every other view is the other way around), when you look at the "endless" chain of portals, you'll notice about three portals down there's a "non-connected" portal visible. I guess the 360 runs out of calculating memory or something when it has to draw each space upside down and the othe way around.

On the PC version there's an advanced option for "Portal Render Depth," which is set to 3 by default. So yeah, 360 probably just had that done for you. I tried running it with 10 or so, but honestly all it did for me was cause lag spikes every time I shot the portal gun. (And when I was playing, I couldn't tell the difference anyway.)

No but see, if you place a portal on a wall and another opposite, you'll see way further than three. It'll look like it goes on forever as it's supposed to, but with the wall-reverse floor one you actually see an unconnected portal very clearly.

I remember one of the commentaries saying something about them limiting it to five.

Must be something to do with the way the texture is painted on. The commentary as I remember it said that the rendering just slaps a flat image onto the rendered "wall" (which to us looks like a portal) and voila, the portal, she looks like another room!

I guess basically what I'm telling you is that you're breaking the optical illusion. Stop it. :(

Check out this flash music video VG cats did.

VG Cats - Still Alive

I dont care about Half Life 2, the episodes or Team Fortress but I was a bit interested in Portal. Is it even worth getting Orange Box just for Portal? Is it way too easy and short or something?

Did you even bother to read the thread?

No, I would not suggest buying the Orange Box if you don't want Half-Life 2 or Team Fortress, but if you just want Portal there's this thing called Steam. Perhaps you've heard of it.

That's assuming he has a PC that can play it, since you can't be selective with the 360 version.

And, also assuming you're willing to shell out $20 for a 3-5 hour game, tops.

I finally got to see the fuss about lies and cake and making spiffy portals and such last night as I played through all of it in about a rather short 3 1/2 hour time. It certainly felt longer, but puzzles 1 through 16 or so were maybe try out different things once or twice and I'm off to the races. I swore I didn't want to spoil the puzzles for me but the second last puzzle (18, I believe where a beam projector shot in 4 different directions and about 4-5 camera drones had to be taken out with) had me literally killing Chelle. Taking out the drones was super easy, but trying to get to the other side took way too many tries as I was silly enough to not notice you had to well, do something to a certain something (I could use spoiler tags but ...) I succumbed to Gamefaqs, just that one time, I swear to God! All in all from start to finish it was one of the most refreshing first person puzzlers I've tried out in a while on the 360 version. It ran beautifully and very smoothly.