Portal: Still Alive (and staying that way)

So, I love Portal. In fact I recently named it my number 20 on my list of greatest games ever on our recent Top 5 Weekly Podcast. [Download]. Portal: Still Alive is the recent Xbox Live, 15 dollar re-release of Portal with quite a bit of extra puzzle content. You can not buy this release in stores, and you can not buy the extra content for Portal if you already own it on The Orange Box on consoles. I could give a shit about the fact that I already owned the original game. Still Alive was 15 dollars, and I wanted GLaDOS on my hard drive.

Oh wait... 629 MB? No thanks. At any given time I have about 2-3 gigs free on my 20 gig hard drive, and I refuse to play 150 dollars just to be able to freely download these games without worrying about space. But yeesh, my Xbox hard drive isn't my only worry.

The PSP also looks like it is trying to make the full transition to a download only handheld. Sony announced that next year all PSP retail releases will also be downloadable. This is a HUGE step towards the future of game content delivery; and honestly, having my entire game collection in my pocket sounds like an amazing feat.

Sony has also recently(finally...) patched Playstation Store functionality into the PSP; and having access to the sleek store on-the-go is definitely cool. I was looking at all the games I could be playing in minutes without ever having to lift my ass off the couch when I ran into the problem. While I ultimately made a purchase, it might have literally been the smallest game (in memory size) on the entire list.

The fact that I had to take into consideration the size of the game before I made my purchase is the problem. I had never had to consider anything but the quality and price of a game before. I want Portal: Still Alive. I want to buy some of those downloadable PSP games. I know they are good and I know I can afford them. But it's a brave new world out there and I'm peeing my pants a little.

Now I understand that in the near future hard drive space will be a non issue. They will become cheaper and larger much faster than the speed at which games increase in size. But right now? Yeah... it's a problem.

Brad