GLaDOS@Home

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

http://www.aperturescience.com/glados@home/

Yes, Portal 2 comes out on Tuesday, April 19th.

Or does it?

For the past few weeks, Valve has been running an ARG (Augmented Reality Game) that involved 13 independent games in a bundle they've called "The Potato Sack".
Today they've indicated that they'll launch Portal 2 early on PC based on how many of the games in the Potato Sack get played.

Won't you do it for GLaDOS? She may be completely insane and endlessly striving to kill us all with deadly neurotoxin, but she's really nice under that homicidal exterior.

(And no, I don't work for Valve. I just thought this was hilairous. And I own 3 of the 13 games in the bundle. They're a lot of fun, even if Super Meat Boy is insanely impossible.)

[Ohio Joe]

1. Other interesting news regarding Portal 2

It appears that it is going to bring Steam to the PS3 and also allow cross platform play.

http://www.itworld.com/personal-tech/155919/portal-2-brings-steam-playstation-3-video

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

2. *grins*

Yeah, Valve did a complete turn-around with Steam on the PS3. Gabe Newell didn't like the PS3 originally for development, but they figured out a way to make it work (and work well) and to have cross-platform play between the PS3 and PCs (and Macs, too)

I think...I think that Portal 2 will eventually get Move support, too. Unless it has it out of the box.

Oh, and it looks like we've done enough to launch the game a bit early. Looks like it comes out on PC tonight at midnight or a tad earlier.

[Occulus]

3. Oooo, I was gonna post on this last night.

I think (think) the exact time of release is based on the potatoes. For those who don't know, the Potato Sack games are part of the overall promotion; players can collect potatoes by playing the games in the Sack (regardless of whether they bought some of those games already). Collected potatoes are being used by GLaDOS to help power her reboot process.

Potatoes are collected by playing the games and finding clues to the locations of the potatoes. For example, in "Defense Grid", a new "Console" option appears at the main menu; opening the console reveals a mockup of a login screen for a unix-like file system. winning the text screen dot game requires playing a perfect game; you do this by opening another copy of Defense Grid and essentially forcing the computer to play against itself by playing both players at once, one in each copy running. Winning this gets you two new levels, one of which is Portal-themed. These themselves offer clues to other puzzles in other games.

Valve certainly went to a lot of effort and planning just to offer us a Portal 2 release a few hours early. I'm sure the $BANK the Potato Sack game devs are making didn't have a thing to do with it ;)

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

4. I already owned a few of those games, actually.

Super Meat Boy is made by the most sadistic jerks this side of the GOP. I can't get past the first boss fight.

Defense Grid is, by far, my favorite tower defense game. It also helps that it's one of the best-looking ones out there, too.

I think we trimmed the launch time by several hours, which isn't much, but it still was a blast. I didn't collect any potatoes, though.

(Slightly off-topic: one of these days we have to get around to playing some Left 4 Dead 2.)