Portal 2 Cooperative: The Greatest Game Ever

I do enjoy me some video games.  The demands of a responsible life means my time playing is limited and often in relatively small chunks.  One of the games that has fit this lifestyle well is  Portal and its' sequel, Portal 2.  The strength of both of these is a truly creative game-play mechanic: the ability to connect two points in space with a portal.  Rather than trying to explain any more than this, I'll let the video below do the talking.

(The humor demonstrated in this video also persists throughout the game, adding to the enjoyment).

Portal 2 added more of the same in all departments as well as expanding on the repertoire of mechanics with fluids that allow your character to run faster and jump higher, bridges made of light, and catapults that throw you across the room.  I loved it all from the humor filled introduction sequence to the difficult (for me) final showdown with the test-obsessed robot overlord.

Except I didn't get to play it all.  There is a whole second half to the game which you must play with a friend, each of you controlling a character with a portal gun to solve puzzles that couldn't be solved otherwise.  Until recently, I had no friends....

.... who had played Portal 2 and could join me on this mission.  That changed a few weeks ago and though our time playing together has been limited, it has been a fantastic experience. I can't highly recommend enough playing the co-operative test chambers with a good friend. I look forward to every minute of it, even though those minutes are often weeks apart.  One of these days we will finish all those test chambers and the satisfaction will be high.

(This will only leave all the community created test chambers, both single-player and cooperative.  I just discovered these when I started playing cooperatively with my friend.  The software developers have provided the tools for game players to become game creators by developing there own test chambers and posting them online for others to play. There are over 200,000 of these, more than I will ever play.)