Slashdot Mirror
Valve Opens The Portal
Via Joystiq, an IGN story giving some background on the Portal project, the interesting FPS/Puzzler that Valve has planned to go out with Half-Life 2: Episode 2. The article interviews the team behind the technology, and gives some insight on what it must be like to have the best senior year of college ever: "Along with the other members of the Portal team, we were students at DigiPen Institute of Technology located in Redmond, WA, next to the Nintendo of America campus. During our senior year, the seven of us created a game called Narbacular Drop, which was an early test of our ideas about portal-based gameplay. Every year, DigiPen puts on an expo for graduating seniors to show their game projects to prospective employers. A couple of Valve people attended, and they asked us to come to the Valve offices and show it to Gabe Newell. Gabe watched our demo and basically hired us on the spot. It was kind of shocking. We stood around in the parking lot afterwards gibbering to ourselves for about 20 minutes."
The rocks in level 3 won't show? Try hitting esc, and then 'Restart Level'. 9/10 this fixes problems like that for me.
That scene in the demo where the player seems to be chasing someone. He's actually chasing himself.
To answer your question specifically, you can refer to this post http://www.steampowered.com/index.php?area=news&ar chive=yes&id=691. This is part of Valve's Content Delivery system aka Steam. It would appear that you only need to purchase Half Life 2: Episode 2 which comes bundled with Portal and TF2 (Team Fortress 2).
:/ ), I've had my fair share of frustrations with Steam but lately, it's rock solid. Valve has been done some good work with the system. In addition, if you haven't already played Half Life 2, or the original, I'd highly recommend it. I'm a firm believer in the episodic content (if implemented correctly) that Valve is testing out. I finished Episode One in about 5 hours and thoroughly enjoyed it. HTH.
Having said all that, you are not obligated to buy anything by setting up a Steam account. I've had a Steam account for over 4 years (early beta tester was not fun
"I'm not willing to sign up for any sort of we'll-give-you-a-new-game-every-month-try-it-you'l l-like-it sort of system. Can I still play?"
Yes, yes you can. This "episodic content" is essentially in the form of (small) self-contained games which are published in a serialized manner, to be bought either through stores or through Valve's downloading service.
Sort of like a series of novels. You don't actually have to buy the former novels to read the new ones, though you might miss out on something if you do. Expansion packs are a bit like extra chapters, you can't read them without the book which they belong to (ok, you technically could in that case, but you shouldn't).
Portal is three hours of single-player gameplay, you probably wouldn't want it as a standalone game. They use steam to track things like how many people bought it, how many people downloaded it, and how many people actually finished it. If it does well, I'd expect it to get fully fleshed out into a longer single-player game and also several multiplayer components.
Unreal Tournament has had a teleporter gun since its inception - you throw a beacon and you can right-click to teleport to it. Great fun telefragging people with it :) portals-as-an-offensive-weapon might be tricky, though
Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
There's a trailer of sorts at YouTube. Looks like it could be really cool.
End of line..