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
