Portal 2 has finally hit the streets, and despite a somewhat
rocky start with their controversial promotional ARG (
previously), it looks to be a huge success. Interestingly for such a critically-acclaimed blockbuster, the title's core ideas steam from a pair of concept projects from student design school
DigiPen: the original portal system from
Narbacular Drop (
video -
download -
previously) and the sequel's physics-altering gels from
Tag: The Power of Paint (
video -
download -
previously -
previouslier). Combine these innovative ideas with some
Lost-meets-
Life After People level design, excellent
voice acting, and top-notch writing, and it's easy to see why so many people
called in sick this past week. But playing the game is just the beginning -- look inside for a collection of easter eggs, story theories, videos, and other goodies from the post-mortem.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 21, 2011 -
425 comments
You say potato, Valve say... potato.
Just over a year after the
Portal 2 announcement ARG (previously) had people dialing up a mysterious BBS, on April 1st Valve pushed out updates to
thirteen indie games through Steam, under the tag #potatofoolsday. Some of the games
got a
little starchy straight away, but more interesting was the appearance of
cryptic glyphs, which seemed to link to other games in the set, and
nonsense phrases. Alongside a
cheeky coded shoutout to members of the
Facepunch forums, a hidden frame in the latest Aperture Science Investment Opportunity video
(1, 2, 3) appeared to confirm there are 16 glyph-and-letter sets, and 13 phrases to be found in and around the games.
But what to do with them even when the set's complete? And what of the uplifted
talking raccoon and the
blogger whose
boss's
brother has been kidnapped by
sentient potatoes?
[more inside]
posted by emmtee
on Apr 6, 2011 -
115 comments
The biggest literary influence on my approach to game design, however, was one of the writers I worshipped as a teenager: Alice Sheldon, aka James Tiptree, Jr. Tiptree had one particular recommendation for starting a story: “Start from the end and preferably 5,000 feet underground on a dark day and then don’t tell them.” This is precisely how we begin Half-Life. It was a deliberate antidote to the many game openings that involved pages and pages of backstory presented in scrolling text. - An
interview with Marc Laidlaw, writer for the Half Life series.
posted by Artw
on Oct 13, 2010 -
65 comments
If you don't mind installing
Steam and are running a version of Windows, you can download and play
Alien Swarm for free. It's a top-down shooter with four-player co-op of you and your friends against the aliens.
posted by demiurge
on Jul 19, 2010 -
72 comments
Ten years ago Valve released
Half Life, to the delight of gamers,
modders,
critics and people who hate cut scenes. Marc Laidlaw, writer for Valve,
talks about the genesis of
scientist turned crowbar wielding survivor, Gordon Freeman. Somehow avoided playing it in all these years? You can
buy it on Steam for less than a dollar until midnight November 21st.
posted by Artw
on Nov 20, 2008 -
86 comments
The Crossing is a new FPS game where single-player and multiplayer modes meld in one. At any point, any Non-Player-Character might not be an NPC at all, but another Player. It is likely that, as in a game of tag, players will just take turns to be "it" like Agents in the Matrix, but... wouldn't it be great if we could all be "it" at the same time?
Quantum Gaming might just be the way to model such a swarm of gamers.
[more inside]
posted by kandinski
on Sep 23, 2007 -
30 comments
