The New York Times, even while interviewing Mason for the job, had acknowledged it need to change. Mason said creating a fellowship has been on her mind from the very beginning. The new constructor fellowship is the brainchild of Everdeen Mason, who joined the Times as editorial director for Games almost exactly a year ago. Only those who have not yet had a puzzle published by The New York Times will be considered. The chosen fellows will receive three months of mentorship from one of five puzzle editors - that’s Liu, Bennett, Joel Fagliano, Sam Ezersky, and the legendary Shortz - as they work to construct a puzzle for general submission. “There’s an expectation that the person solving your puzzle looks like Will Shortz.” (Until editors Wyna Liu and Tracy Bennett were hired in 2020, the Times puzzle team consisted of three white men.) We’ll know in a few days if this lives up to the Portal legacy.March 12, 2021“You’ll get a rejection from the Times saying ‘This is not something that the average solver will know,’ which carries with it this connotation that an average solver is a white man in his 50s,” one crossword constructor told me last year. For now, fans will just have to settle for what they can get. Also, because of Valve’s extremely quiet tendencies, there’s no answer if this is what Gabe meant, or if it was something more. In a 2017 AMA, Gabe Newell did say that Valve was currently working on a single-player game, and yet no details have been revealed at all about this game, leading many fans to wonder if he meant tie-in properties like this when he touted a single-player experience. Still, it is understandable why the masses are so angry.
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So any complaints about the Portal license being given to a developer are several years late. Poker Night featured both the Heavy from TF2 and GLaDOS in different iterations, and TF2 has even crossed over with Monopoly and Surgeon Simulator. Valve has certainly lent out their name and brand before, so this is nothing new. That said, most of the criticisms of the title thus far are just frustrations that Valve is not releasing a new title. On the one hand, the fun of Bridge Constructor is in the silly physics, but Valve has also made a name for themselves by quite literally inventing the physics engine that all others used, so there is certainly going to be a question of whether the game has the silliness of the original or the perfection of Portal. It’s hard to tell if the physics engine will be more Bridge Constructor or Portal, either. Bridge Constructor Portal looks vastly more chaotic and at the same time clean than the original. Looking at the pictures side by side, it’s hard to argue that they look much the same at all. The actual game does look vastly better than the original iterations despite critics saying it is a simple re-skin. The odds are that the game will be well made, but the odds of it living up to expectations are fairly low. It’s the same team behind The Binding of Isaac, Terraria, and Limbo.
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The publisher is also Headup Games, which most PC gamers would recognize even if they couldn’t put a name to it. The developer, Clockstone Studio, has worked on every Bridge Constructor to date, so Valve didn’t exactly outsource the project. However, there is some street cred behind the team. After all, the writers for Portal 1 and 2 have long since left Valve, and with one company on publishing and another on development, it would be difficult if not impossible for the game to capture the humor of the original titles even if GLaDOS is back. While the trailers definitely seem to embrace all things Portal, it’s difficult to say if the newest Portal-feature will have the same flair as the original Portals. Reddit has already savaged the new game for daring to pretend it was a Valve property, something which Jim Sterling recently covered as well. The first thing to point out is that this is NOT a Valve game.