Tech Olive

Whether you’ve beaten the game yourself or spent just about any time on the internet, you’ve heard Portal‘s face-meltingly awesome ending credits song “Still Alive” written by Jonathan Coulton. Well, during a phone interview with Ars Technica, Jonathan leaked a bit of information regarding his continued work with Valve on Portal 2:

“I will be doing music for Portal 2 as well, yeah. You know, I think Valve and I were both really happy with how ‘Still Alive’ turned out, and it was an overwhelmingly popular response to something we thought was maybe gonna be a bit weird and unusual,” Coulton explained. “We weren’t sure how it was gonna go. And so it’s gonna be hard to live up to that success, and it was sort of a surprise to everyone, us included, so … I don’t know, we’ll see. The sequel is always a troublesome thing, and sequels are rarely better than the original. Empire Strikes Back is the only exception that I can think of.”

So, if there was ever any doubt about Portal 2‘s upcoming greatness, this should remove any and all doubt. Is it October yet?

via [Ars Technica]

An interesting BSOD graced the screen of a projector at GDC this week (see above). It seemed completely harmless until gamers looked closer. It seems GLaDOS was behind it all and was offering to fill the area with deadly neurotoxins. Upon closer inspection, the BSOD had even more information to offer. When a dedicated gamer over at the Penny Arcade forums got ahold of the image, he had the following light to shed on the mystery:

“The hex converted to decimal: 226 228 226 : 215 197 213 196 228 213 227 ( 201 ) + 211 197 197 197
If it’s ASCII it’s extended ASCII. Could it be EBCDIC (common mainframe encoding)?
Edit: It IS EBCDIC. It spells: S U S : P E N D … U N T ( I ) L … E E E (colon, dots for spacing, and parens added to roughly locate them in the source image.)
Hey, being QSECOFR on an AS/400 many years ago finally pays off!”

So, there you have it. All that work and excitement and we get a simple message: “Suspended until E3.” Perhaps we’ll actually get some real, non-cryptic details come mid June?

via [Steam Forums]

According to Gamestop’s store listing for Portal 2, the upcoming game will feature online cooperative play and is scheduled for a release on October 26th. While it’s far from official details, I think we would be safe in assuming that Gamestop isn’t just making things up.  The boys over at Kotaku were quick enough to catch this nugget of info before Gamestop removed it from the product page. Follow the break for Gamestop’s unedited product description.

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It seems that Valve’s puzzle-filled games have led up to what we were all expecting: The official release of more Portal 2 details. Just announced through their website, Game Informer’s April cover story (pictured above; click for larger view) is all about Portal 2.

“Our 12-page cover story gives you the first details on Portal 2‘s new gameplay mechanics, storyline, and some surprising new twists.”

Unfortunately, that’s all we get pertaining to Portal 2. It seems we’ll have to eagerly await the delivery of the April issue. Am I the only gamer with tears of happiness starting to well up in my eyes?

After getting an update that “changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations,” Portal was given another update today with the following changelog:

“Added valuable asset retrieval.”

There is still no concrete information on what this update has really brought to the game. Perhaps the first one offered directions and this one unlocks the function? At this point, we can only speculate, but it’s clear to see that Valve loves watching their fans squirm.

UPDATE: Follow the break for a newly added (cliffhanger) ending to Portal.

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Looking through the news releases, one will find an update for Portal with the description simply reading “Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations.” In the hours since the news release, Valve’s community has gone crazy looking into this mysterious update. On the surface, it seems to only add some new noises to Portal‘s in-game radio and a new Steam achievement, but it is much more than that…

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