So, a long *** time ago, I downloaded Portal when it was free on Steam. That was on my old computer. So after seeing that Portal proposal, I decided to download it on my new computer (with Windows 7 64 bit) and tried to play it. I launch the game, the picture with the fat guy with a valve in his head shows up, then the screen stays black and I hear the error sound. If I hit escape, everything closes and I'm at my desktop. If I hit atl+tab, I see the error pop up, which says "Corrupted or invalid background texture" and some random letters and numbers. I can't click ok at all. I have to right click the Portal thingy on my task bar and close it from there.
I did a Google search to see if anyone else had this problem, and there was a suggestion to put -32bit in the launch options in Steam. I tried that, still no go.
So... what do I do? And if I decide instead to just buy Portal 2 and play it without playing Portal, will I miss anything, really?