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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."
Considering it's been what...6 years since Half Life 2, and 2+ years since episode 2, I'd say it's about freakin' time for 3 to get released. Hurry it up, Valve!
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I thought this was going to be another boring videogame article until I actually read it:
THAT is neat!
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The sequel is a lie.
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I have to give Valve a lot of credit for this one. They have gone to a lot of work putting this whole thing together. They even put up a dial-up bulletin board system to host the ASCII images that everyone is speculating about. In fact, just getting to the BBS required a lot of work on behalf of geek gamers. Say what you want to say about Valve, but they deserve major credit here. I enjoy the Half-Life universe, and am hoping and crossing my fingers for an announcement this month.
the most interesting theory i've heard regarding this is that you'll have a portal gun in episode 3.
the possibilities, they would be endless.
That was not wise. They should have waited a month.
Hello this is Eugene Walter, VP of Research and Development at Apeture Food Group Inc.
Some people are implying that the now dissolved Apeture Science Group's (which I was the former CIO of) computer systems has some How recoverEd from the horribLe chemical explosion at the former ASG Production facility. This rumor is a LIE. An out right lie by jaded Black Mesa Research employees who's Grant money aLso collapsed Around the time of the Apeture Science Group's inDustrial accident at the San PedrO facility for AeroSpace DeveLopment. SInce the ASG's dissolVment thosE at the parent company ASG Inc. have Spent years fighting baseless rumors of "Exotic Experiments" and under-the-table military experiments. These claims are outright lies. No portion of the GLADOS survived the explosion as the federal investigation that followed clearly substantiates.
In closing please remember that the ASG no longer exists and there it no cause for further speculation. I would also like to remind you that the Apeture Food Group has a wonderful bake sale going on at the Leanaa facility to raise money for the Hope Charity group. Please stop buy and try the cake.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
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.
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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.
I know, right? I mean, why can't companies be more like Activision. Franchises should be released on a yearly basis, regardless of quality or originality. Modern Warfare 2 sold like 50 bajillion copies and it was more or less the same game as the original (and in many ways worse). It's time these selfish companies like Valve stop wasting our time and give us all what we really want... mediocrity.
Alternate Reality Game?
Isn't that all games. In reality I have a job and killing scads of people makes you a bad person and usually lands you in jail. In games, neither of these are the case.
So how is "alternate reality" a qualifier that separates one kind of game from another?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Valve spends way too much effort developing the latest bit of overblown DLC for the 6-year-old title they've been milking to death (Half-Life 2)
Exactly what DLC are you referring to? Episode 1 and 2? You and I disagree as to what is DLC and what isn't I guess. Episodes 1 and 2 were entertaining, pushed the story and concepts forward. From my perspective, they haven't been "milking it" enough, I want episode 3 to come out more than I want portal 2.
Portal is their best property, and they seem to treat it as an red-headed afterthought to Gordon Freeman's latest round of sewer running.
Counterpoint: No it's not.
Your OP indicates that the people doing the sleuthing uncovered a PHONE NUMBER for a BBS. Not an IP address + port number.
i would LOVE a multiplayer Portal thing. No weapons, just portals, turrets, cubes and pools of acid. The goal is to make an enemy fall into a fire, or drop cubes on each other's heads. It would be difficult to design, but awesome if it worked.
Multiplayer puzzles might be nice.
Or imagine one player is Gordon and the other is Chell with their respective equipment. i open a portal for you behind the guards and you spray them with red hot rebar. You could have team death match or CtF the same way. Each team gets one portal gunner and a the rest are goons.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
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.
I worked on a Mod that allowed Multiplayer Portals - and I had ideas for much of what you described. Player A gets a fully functional gun and B gets the weapons, or Player A does blue portals, Player B does Orange. Or they both have fully functional portal guns.
Certain things crash the engine, like using the grav gun to hold an object near a portal. But thats pretty easy to restrict.
It really fell apart on level design - something I had Ideas for but never the time to get around to building. Plus I wasn't very familiar with Hammer, I use Unreal most of the time - which only frustrated me. Certain things missing, hotkeys not functioning, probably would have been better if I hadn't used Unreal before Hammer, empty your cup as a Monk might say.
If anyone wants the source code - drop me a line. I've still got it lying around (at the computer in my parents basement, haha!).
The evil one was the contractor who installed a computer-controlled deadly neurotoxin pipe that vents into the building.
The computer is second-degree evil, at best.
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http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/62617 Valve has released a series of images in the style of well known Apple ads including a TF2 Heavy in an Ipod-like image, a TF2 sentry gun with the words "I'm a PC" next to a Portal sentry gun, a "Think Different" style ad featuring L4D's Francis with the text "I hate different" and an old Macintosh ad with text about bringing a gaming download system to another operating system.
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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.