TF2 has cutscenes?
A note on the Portal talk: The main reason Portal is "overrated" is the clash between what people expected and what Valve delivered. As the contents of the Orange Box solidifed people were A) Super-hype for Ep. 2 B) Mega-hype for TF2 C) Mildly curious about Portal. All we expected, and all that was advertised, was that Valve had bought some tiny student group's project (and hired the students) and were throwing this little puzzle game into the bundle as a bonus, and because it was too small a thing to sell normally. No one but no one expected a plot, wonderful humor, an all-time great villain, a Jonathon Coulton song, busting out of the puzzle rooms into the Half-Life universe, and everything else we got.
Glorb's last post spoke of how he thought something felt left out of Portal, but it's quite the opposite. The game delivers far more than you expect going in. He says it has no "middle", but the middle is the period where you start discovering bloody handprints and the hideouts "outside" of the puzzles. The middle is the part before you escape the chambers, but after you begin to wonder about the game's universe instead of thinking of it as A Puzzle Game.
This all would have been ruined, of course, if Valve had acted like a normal company and spoiled the magic with trailers and magazine articles and demos. But they didn't; they played it straight just talking about the portal mechanic and I love love them for it. Of all the realizations I've come to in my life, perhaps the one that has improved my enjoyment of life the most is that MARKETING IS YOUR ENEMY. Over the last couple years of avoiding info, not watching trailers, and not playing demos of anything I was remotely interested in, games, movies, and books are incredibly more potent experiences. You don't have to say, "here's the demo section". You don't already know all the best one-liners. You don't know that Mel Gibson's daughter is going to die within ten minutes.
So, if you want a better life: close your eyes and plug your ears at the movie theater, don't read the blurb on the back of that book, and do not play that demo if you already know you're getting the full game.
This is why you people watching YouTube vids of the end of SMG2 baffle me. You seem the same as people who decide to kill themselves. Spoilers are mind-suicide, the destruction of an experience that can never be recreated. Don't do it. There's so much to live for!