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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."
The hint is a lie!
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)
Half Life imo has too much shooting in it
I know! I -hate- it when FPS have a lot of shooting. The first person perspective also gets to me when there's too much of it. Same complaint with pornos really, they all seem to have way too much sex in them, imho.
Ugh. This cup of coffee has way too much coffee in it. Not enough lobster bisque if you ask me. It's like, yeah, it's a cup of coffee and not a cup of lobster bisque, but still. :-P
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.
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
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.