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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?"
I am so wanting there to be more sections for "androids". I always thought the idea of "android hell is a real place" was such a mind screw and gave you so much understanding of how messed up this company was, that it needed a whole game through the eyes of the androids.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
...along with the rest of the ARG. They've already been quite solved, over there. http://portalwiki.net/
Password to a BBS which has files on there. Some ASCII art and some pictures in a custom format. Gotta run a tool in DOSBOX or real DOS to view them. It's full of random aperterture teaser crap.
More info in the reddit thread. Sadly, they know more about the situation than Slashdot.
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/b9qhb/portal_2_announced/
At this point, I'm far more interested in Vavle's Mac development that they seem to be doing. I'd love to know if I can finally ditch my Windows partition. I'd love to see Steam and the Source Engine on OS X.
Given their solid Direct3D stance, I'm a little worried... but a gamer can dream, right?
Still, Portal 2. Going to have to play that.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Copy/Paste doesn't copy the underlines, so I'll just bold the underlined t's.
Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike and Half-Life) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced Portal 2 for shipment this coming holiday season. Portal 2 is the sequel to 2007's Portal, which won 70 industry achievement awards.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
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.
From the reddit discussion:
World Net Daily says that they're trying to turn gamers into Socialists.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Did you play with sound enabled?
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
I don't know what I'm more surprised at, the clever way in which Valve announced Portal 2, or how quickly their obscure puzzle was crowd sourced and solved. Heck, I only noticed the achievement a view days ago, and now we have unencrypted images from sound bytes in the game. I wonder what would happen if Valve left a little teaser challenge: cure cancer and we'll give you episode 3.
Oh sweet they're announcing a new sequel to Koyaanisqatsi too, done by valve? Wild.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS
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.
The sad thing is that portal 2 will be a disappointment.
It may in fact be a fantastic game but it will be judged next to portal which is pretty much a perfect game.
Its worth remembering that this is valve, which consistently defies expectations. Team fortress classic was a fun little game: valve then took almost everything about that game and threw it out for team fortress 2. Usually that is a recipe for disappointment, but I think almost everyone who played both would agree that TF2 was much better. Half life 1 was also really great, but valve managed to improve on it for HL2. A lot of people were disappointed that they put out left 4 dead 2 so quickly, but I think it was an improvement.
And there are clear ways in which they could improve Portal. Here's one: LONGER. Another way to improve it? Bundle it with HL2 episode 3. I am having a hard time thinking of other ways they could make it better, but there are many reasons why I don't work at Valve.
I'm a little worried about multiplayer though.
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.
If you listen to the developer comment on Portal you will find out why Portal is more important to Valve than Half Like is at this point. Portal is probably the most popular "FPS" genre game for Women ever released. IIRC the lead developer at Valve was even a woman. Gabe makes the comment in the developer commentary with Portal that it opened their eyes to the potential to selling games to that other 50% of the population. Portal was a huge hit with the girls and from a business perspective Portal then became more important than Half Life.
As you noticed, the portal gun really can't work in HL2, the areas are just too open and people would end up outside of the map in no time (or it would have to only work in a handful of specific areas).
... ... ... ...
It seems more likely to me that Gordan will rescue Chell and she'll make prescripted portals for him while he escorts her past the combine and does all of the gravity gun stuff.
The dialog should be really interesting:
Gordan:
Chell:
Gordan:
Chell:
Although to be fair, Chell never talks in Portal because there is nobody to talk to.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
Although to be fair, Chell never talks in Portal because there is nobody to talk to.
Except the Weighted Companion Cube.