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Portal Update Hints At New Game
An anonymous reader writes "It appears Valve has begun another ARG (Alternate Reality Game) similar to the one that led up to the release of the original Portal game. A recent Portal update unlocked a new achievement which has uncovered various hidden images and sounds containing references to the Portal and Half-Life universe. Many believe this to be part of the run-up to the announcement of Portal 2 and/or the next installment of the Half-Life series. A thread on the Steam forums has already reached over 1 million views as people piece together the information. Another thread summarizes the information found so far. Based on clues from the ARG, some are speculating an announcement at the 2010 Game Developers Conference where Valve's co-founder Gabe Newell is to receive this year's Pioneer Award."
I thought this was going to be another boring videogame article until I actually read it:
THAT is neat!
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Actually, there is no space between "back" and "up". Additionally, the clue is meant to be taken literally.
The username for the BBS is backup and the password is backup. There was much forehead smacking late Monday night after that was figured out.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
They had to install a morality device in her to prevent her flooding the Enrichment Centre with a deadly neurotoxin after she flooded the Enrichment Centre with a deadly neurotoxin. That's... pretty evil, I think.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Portal and Half Life are already set in the same universe. Black Mesa is mentioned in Portal, and the Borealis is explicitely said to be an Aperture Science ship.
This
The difference between an ARG and another game is that you have to take actions in the real world to advance in the fictional plot.
In this case, they didn't get the meaning of the messages by an automatic test of a virtual "intelligence" atribute or a dice roll, or by folowing a set of rules given by the game. These people actually had to figure out what the secret messages meant using the skills they have in real life.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
They've shown in the games that Portal and Half-life are in the same universe.
Players have modded the original Half Life 2 to allow you to use the Portal gun in the game. It works very much like you'd expect - so your possibilities ARE endless.
The only issues are that current Half Life 2 AI don't fall through portals (dang!) - don't see through portals - and on occaison you can bug out the engine or fall through the map if you place your portals in weird places.
So - given that the community managed to pull that off (withouth Portal Source code, I might add, this was maybe a month after Orange Box was released). I don't doubt that Valve -COULD- easily pull it off. The question merely remains on whether they will or not.
I was helping to decode all of this on Monday. And it was really cool.
Popping open the updated .gcf (game archive) revealed 9 new files - the "dinosaur" wav files. The first few are clearly in Morse code. Translating the Morse revealed some rather cryptic messages that sounded like a GlaDOS bootup sequence. One Morse message encoded the word "BEEP" or "BEEEP" - translating *those* from Morse revealed "LOL". Another Morse message was clearly an MD5 sum - reversing that revealed the phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", which sounded like another test.
Then the sounds got more confusing - they were much noisier. Someone in the forums, presumably a ham, ran those sounds through a SSTV decoder and came up with some clear, deliberate images. The images were full of random stuff, but one image had what looked like an amber terminal with the pattern (###) (###)-(####) - a phone number
Each image had 4 hexadecimal digits circled. Taking them in order from the pictures revealed another md5 hash. Somebody wrote a little python script - assuming that the area code would be near Seattle (Valve headquarters), they brute-forced the md5 and came up with a phone number.
Dialing the phone number played a dialtone. While most of the people on the forum couldn't wrap their head around connecting to a computer without the internet, some folks fired up HyperTerminal and connected, getting a login screen. After looking around again, they found a hint in one of the pictures to try backup/backup. Each time this password was used, a "record dump" (mostly ASCII art) was sent.
I wouldn't believe it if I wasn't part of it. Reversing an MD5 hash, come on. But it's true - you can run the script yourself.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
No, /. is trying to pretend they're Valve.
A new update, which came out today, changed the ending. Now, after GLaDOS explodes, you get dragged away by a robot of some kind. Video.
FPS is also a sub-genre of "shooter", just like shmup. So you can't use "shmup" to refer to an FPS as they are different. That's like calling an "apple" an "orange" because they are both a sub-genre of "fruit".
Mada mada dane.