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Valve Announces Portal 2
eldavojohn writes "Enough rumors, Portal 2 is due out for 2010. Valve also let users know through an announcement on Steam. Game Informer seems to be the de facto provider of Portal 2 information so far. Prepare yourselves for more aperture science! Notice anything funny about the underlined letters in Steam's announcement?"
drattmannh0nee?
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
...along with the rest of the ARG. They've already been quite solved, over there. http://portalwiki.net/
While you're waiting for Portal 2, play the FV mappack if you haven't already. It introduces some new game mechanics, and would itself have been an OK sequel (or prequel), except it's a totally free mod instead.
Don't put advice in your sig.
From what I saw, drattmann/h0nee is a username/password used in the ARG, apparently giving you access to a BASIC program that generates this:
http://techplethora.com/COOP.jpg
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
There were some cliffhangers though, like the reference to that ship and other stuff. Also;
After she has destroyed the final piece, a portal malfunction tears the room apart and transports everything to the surface. Chell is then seen lying outside the facility's gates amid the remains of GLaDOS. In the PC version, Chell is then dragged away from the facility by an unseen figure speaking in a robotic voice, thanking her for assuming the "party escort submission position" (a reference to GLaDOS requesting that she assume this position after escaping).[25] This retcon was added to the PC version in an update on March 3, 2010.
It seems Valve added another cliffhanger in very recent update.
And yet, Crossover (which has an announcement a few articles down) has worked with Steam and Source Engine quite well. Half-Life, Half-Life 2 worked fine way back when I tried it (and bought it) on OS X. It was before OS X 10.5 when I tried it and it worked. I'd be shocked if it wasn't working anymore. Portal wasn't around when I tried it, but I'd guess it works.
Sure it's not native, but it worked well enough to be quite usable.
Officially Supported - http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=3424
Can't find it in the wiki, but here's the story--
We were logging into the wiki as backup/backup. There was a progress bar displayed on login, that increased slowly over a couple of days (in addition to spitting out images).
Once the progress bar filled up, the Portal 2 announcement on Steam went live, complete with underlined images. At that time, backup/backup started spitting out a BASIC program, and logging in with drattmann/h0nee spit out some data files. If you plugged the data files into the BASIC program, you got these images, which seem to imply that at least this phase of the ARG is over: http://portalwiki.net/index.php/Aperture_Image_Format
Quite possibly...
Wired article
A few interesting links in there.
Half-Lifes and Portal are already available on 360 and PS3 too.
Bingo. The gameplay wasn't anything amazing, it was just a clever take on the usual puzzle mechanics, but the context, the plot thread that ran throughout and the dark humour that went with it made it a great game.
So Valve, what ever happened to Half Life 2 Episode 3? Portal was fun and all but did not leave you with a cliffhanger ending like HL2 Episode 2. I am still patiently waiting.
1. Yes it did! Especially now that they updated the ending to portal!
2. The ending to HL2 episode 2 wasn't much of a cliffhanger if you ask me.
3. Half life1: 1998. Half life 2: 2004 (6 years later) Episode 1: 2006 (2 years later) Episode 2: 2007 (1 year later). It's now 2010, 3 years later. We've got another 3 years before we can really say "This is an unusually long for Valve." Granted, I wouldn't expect them to reinvent the wheel like they did from HL1 to HL2. So I don't think you're being patient. Neither am I though, I want them to hurry the hell up.
But where do all the calculators go?
Nowhere, they just die.
Learn something new.
The "Adjust radio frequency" update added a bunch of radios all over the place which, if dragged to the correct location (or if you extract the resource bundles), will produce some sounds which translate to an old ham-radio-style slow-scan TV signal which have a bunch of pictures which give you some sort of hashed version of the phone number of the BBS where you login with 'backup/backup' and watch a progress bar saying "backup restoring, ETA: next Thursday (except on weekends)" or other silly stuff, and get ASCII art pictures of scenes which involve robots.
I'm sure I'm missing something. Like the secret new game ending. Which is on Youtube somewhere.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I always wondered if they were going to try and tie Portal to Half Life. After all in Episode 2 Aperture Labs was mentioned and GLaDOS tells Chell that the world has changed since she last saw it. Maybe they are doing something very interesting story wise.
Portal is already tied to Half Life.
Aperture Labs is Black Mesas competitor.
The story takes place paralell to Half Life 1.
I love playing FPSes. Portal is a really cool game but I only played for about 15 minutes. I felt like throwing up afterward. I never bothered finishing the game. I watched the ending on Youtube. Qute. Only which I could have played it.
I understand that Valve tends to adjust the line of sight of the player slightly (like in Half-Life series) and for some people it makes them really dizzy and nauseous. There's a hack to readjust the line of sight. I have tried that as well and no luck.
In fact, while I enjoy Valve's games - I have played up to HL2, all their games, and really only Valve is the problem, make me really nauseous. I have not had any problem or significant problem with any other FPS or any other type of video game - COD, Modern Warfare, Solider Fortune, Delta Force, Operation Flashpoint have ALL been fine.
If Valve were to spend the money to develop for OSX, they'd never recoup it in profits because there's not a big enough installed base.
Did it ever occur to you, as you wrote this, to wonder how what you wrote could be true while there are plenty of successful Mac OS X games? Do you think Blizzard and ID (for example) run their Mac divisions at a loss?
They don't even have to develop the whole game, as the game itself already exists. All they have to do is port the engine over (or even just wrap it in Cider, although that would not be ideal). Porting an engine over takes a bit of effort, to be sure, but far less effort than it took to create the engine in the first place, or even to develop the story and art and levels, etc, for the game itself.
Then, of course, there's the fact that Steam is coming to Mac (by "fact", I mean there have been teasers from Valve which all point to this, although granted there hasn't been an "official" announcement). With Steam, the #1 hurdle to selling games for the Mac is surpassed, which is to connect the games to the gamers.
I don't know about androids, but Robot Hell is real, and it's in New Jersey.