Claiming to recreate the physics engine implies that somebody remade the Source engine on a calculator. This is a massive exaggeration.

The title says 'in 25kb on a graphing calculator'. The only way it's "amazing" is if you know what a graphing calculator is, and if you know that, then it's pretty obvious that the title is a mild form of poetic license rather than a sensationalist attempt to mislead. And really, when people think of "Portal physics", for the most part they think of 'a hole between two non-adjacent surfaces you can travel through', not 'a realistic 3D world where objects behave according to newtonian physics', because the latter is a dime a dozen.

Honestly, how many people who know what a graphic calculator was would seriously think that they "remade the Source engine", misled by the 'sensationalist' title?

The technically fascinating aspect of implementing narbuncular/portal physics is the optics of looking into a portal, not the trivial translation/rotation of passing through a portal in a platformer sideview.

You don't think that ionforce is over-egging the criticism pudding by throwing in inferred claims about graphics, too?

I find it ironic that such a tactic should be used in a criticism that strongly applies the 'shameful' label.

You're right that it is ironic. It's ironic the same way bigots say that liberals are being intolerant of their beliefs.

You're right in a way. Portal could be thought of as two parts, the raw physics and the raw graphics. But when a lay person makes claims of recreating Portal's secret sauce, they're really implying the portal mechanism which is one part physical and one part graphical.

Literally recreating only the physics portion of Portal would be silly.

And yes I was intentionally trying to be sensationalist back because it's a waste of time being victim to submitter's sensationalist headlines, especially on a technical site such as as this (one would hope).