f13.net

Portal patched today to add a new achievement that involves random radio messages. The Steam boards are already translating away:

Discovered images: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1169218

Morse code translations: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1169084

 :awesome_for_real:

The saga continues. The images all had a number in them. When rearranged in order the pictures gave another hex number. The number encoded a phone number for a BBS in Washington. The Steam crowd has connected to the machine, which calls itself GladOS and are trying to figure out how to login.

I enjoyed the part of one of the threads you linked that had a bunch of people not really even knowing wtf a BBS is or how they worked.

Old. :(

Gah. 

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/b7yx3/mystery_achievement_added_to_portal_patch_notes/ has links to the BBS interface and such.

Valve is awesome, and this is a giant "fuck you" to all those who say gaming rots your brain  :awesome_for_real:

That is surprisingly cool.

I fail to see why I should be excited by someone dialling a local US phone number to log into a BBS. Good to know Value is spending their time so productively.

Yea, I'm sure this really put a halt to their development.

Don't be stupid.

marvellous, just marvellous

It's true. Getting random ASCII art to pour over with tantalizing clues about one of the biggest PC games is just fucking stupid.   :oh_i_see:

Weird, all I could think is that it's something interesting and fun. Maybe Valve should just have released a boring video clip instead.

Kudos to them for challenging people s prt of the hype machine.

what we have here is a failure of the imagination.

Portal updated again with the patch notes of "Added valuable asset retrieval" that added a new ending. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyRjot212C4)

Eee!

I am embarrassingly in love with this whole thing.

I'm personally uninterested in this sort of viral marketing (I love bees?) but it does get people talking, so they've scored a win with it.

So they're announcing Portal 2.

I win!

I figured they'd be announcing that AND Episode 3 considering the Black Mesa/Aperture Science ties. Episodic gaming doesn't work on a multi-year hiatus between episodes :(

I don't play the Half Life games, but even I think the wait for Episode 3 has been completely ridiculous.

I just hope HL2:E3 doesn't make me fling fragile footballs at giant monsters while running away from hunters. And has much less Alyx doing exposition.

More Portal is Awesome though.

I dunno, I enjoyed that part of HL2: Ep2.  Unfortunately, at this point that's all I remember from the story of ep1 and 2.

(http://media1.gameinformer.com/images/site/pages/p2/portalcover2.jpg)

Let the Science continue.

I like "Portal 2: Portal Harder" but that's just me.

It's been so long since I've played the game that I can't see how the ending you linked has been changed.

If I recall correctly, you just black out to some noise in the original ending.

Yeah, you just black out rather than get dragged off by a robut.

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.

now please

Found this while skimming for portal porn hi-rez wallpapers.

(http://i241.photobucket.com/albums/ff26/stuabrtow/aperturetruck.jpg)

That definitely needs some explanation.

I've seen a lot of photoshops in my time, and I can tell by the pixels that I've just said the explanation you're looking for.

Edit: Seriously, huge pixels, like stricnine in my guacamole.

Maybe it was taken in the 90s. Or not.

Underlined letters in the announcement output this from the BBS:

http://pastebin.com/stHSgY2V

During a slideshow Gabe Newell was doing, he got bluescreened! OH NO!

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/12/valves-viral-plot-thickens-with-portal-blue-screen-of-death/