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.
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.
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
(....)
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.