The icing on my PS3-cake is certainly not a lie.

I was hoping to bring you some sort of interesting observations about my first few days with a PS3, and how it differs from being a purely Nintendo person or exactly what difference HD makes. There's just one problem: None of that seems to exist. It's not as 'dirty' a feeling as it should have been, as it felt before the postman handed it over to me. I haven't really noticed the prettier graphics, to be honest, which is odd, considering how much abuse the Wii seems to get from the likes of the dreaded Cliffy B and even Valve, the company that's probably made my opening PlayStation weekend.

Yes, with my PS3 I purchased, for fairly small prices, The Orange Box and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Whilst it's the later that's currently keeping me amused, following the lengthy set-up, I decided that I'd start the game that really lead to me buyig this console: Portal. Maybe it was the sequel that made me go the lengths, but I began it anyway and I didn't stop it until 10PM.

5 hours of Portal began to blow my tiny mind. Thankfully due to the amount of pieces it was now left in, my brain found it easy to rest, but after a few hours sleep I was back up and ready for Portal. I finished it within another hour or two, but loved every single second of it. It set a really rather high benchmark for every game I'm going to play on the system from now on.

The thing about Portal is that it's a smart game. It's feels as if the developers thought about it the whole way through, with every single square inch delicately planned out- Which I'm sure they did. The last time I saw this kind of attention to detail was in the Super Mario Galaxy games, and it's no coincidence that they happen to other two best games I've played from the past five years.

Portal is based around a smart concept, but it doesn't leave it there, as many games do, (Eledees, I'm looking at you.) but continues to be smart through every level. New ideas are introduced constantly, but when they eventually begin to dry up, the old ones are reintroduced with such vibranse and finesse that they feel like new ideas all over again. Yet the portal creation at the heart of it remains an ingenius idea through the entire game and as more and more bits are introduced, it never threatens to become conveluted in the slightest.

A games' quality can usually be judged by the amount of love a developer has for it. This is why the likes of Nintendo are great developers, because they care what the player thinks, and want to give the best possible expeirence to them. Valve's emotions towards The Orange Box are clear throughout, with GLaDOS being the main indicator. her dialogue is constantly chirpy and funny, but still somehow nonethemoreblack. You can tell the writers and actors alike are having a good time with her character. She truely is one of the great video game heroes/villians, depending on where you want to stand on her.

I think it's an understatement to say that I love Portal. I finished the game in around 7 hours (one of which was simply trying to get my head around the double fling) but they were a brilliant 7 hours. A clever 7 hours. A well-designed 7 hours. A good-looking 7 hours. A 7 hours that have set me up to be extremely disapointed by the so-called 'Next Gen' expeirence. Ah well, Portal's worth a lifetime of disapointment, don't you think?