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Something Sequel This Way Comes…

There’s something not quite right in the very depths of videogame content delivery platform Steam today… apart from the occasional intermittent errors, community flame wars and of course the rumblings of the Control Point Podcast, there’s another small difference… and it goes beep beep beep.

Some of you Valve buddies may have noticed a rather obscure update to first person puzzler Portal (phew…), which rather innocuously states that they “Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations.”. Also, the ending changes a bit, with instead of fading to black, a short sequence shows the protagonist being dragged back towards the destroyed test lab at the game’s finale.

This update also contains some pretty whacky sound files, each contained in one of the game’s in-game radios. Most of the files are complex encoded messages which all certainly relate to some sort of puzzle. In fact, the guys over at Kotaku went so far as finding someone to translate these cryptic audio files to images, which themselves contained, of all things, the number to an old dial-up BBS dial service.

Upon dialing the number, one recieves a stream of bizarre ASCII pictures and a few text entries, which appear to have originated from one Cave Johnson,  the fictional founder of Aperture Science Labs, the game’s main setting. The files seem to be the last piece of the puzzle, but we’ll keep you posted on further developments. The ASCII pictures look a little jumbled, but when viewed sharpened and in colour, they seem to tell another story, one of them showing what looks like Half-Life protagonist Gordon Freeman stepping through one of the game’s iconic portals.

Could this herald a gigantic crossover between the Portal and Half-life storylines… probably, as Aperture Science was mentioned in the previous Half-Life title and vice-versa in the original Portal… only time will tell, and keep posted, as on March 11^th more will apparantly be revealed.

One final note, check out this website, at the bottom of the page both logos of Aperture Science Labs AND Black Mesa Research from Half-Life, as well as the Hanso Foundation from TV’s Lost… all tying in to another viral marketing scheme, What’s In The Box… could we expect a Valve/Lost collaborative project or movie soon?

www.babel-research.eu/

Link to findings at Kotaku.com

www.kotaku.com/5484157/valves-portal-puzzle-so-far-the-files-recovered-from-aperture-science

Playstation 3 PSN Network Explodes a Bit

Trust Sony to build a console that gets the millenium bug 10 years late. Recently this week, TWO MILLION older Playstation 3 models, affectionally known as ‘Phat’, have suffered quite a perplexing bug, which can potentially corrupt trophies and achievements, crash the console, remove acces to the PSN network and leaving owners wishing they’d bought an old PS2.

Sony engineers have reportedly been working around the clock (Maybe the PS3 is being sapped by wayward spies?) trying to fix the errors in what seems to be the internal clock, as those with the error report it changing to read either January 1^st ’00 or December 31^st ’99, just like what the millenium bug… sort of… didn’t do.

So anyway, good ‘ol Sony pledged to fix it within a 24 hour period so it should be cleared up by now for all you Playstation fans, but feel free to tell us if it doesn’t. Well, to wrap this one up, I guess the Xbox fanboys must be yuk-yukking a victory laugh right now… unless Microsoft decides to crash Xbox Live just to compete.

5 Reasons Why You Should Find Your Old Playstation 2 and Give it a Hug

Since the Playstation 3 is acting up so awfully lately, I thought I’d add here some reasons you should get back together with your ex-console, the PS2.

1. The game selection is huge – and still growing, since the console hasn’t officially died yet.
2. It’s all incredibly cheap – any game won’t cost you much more than twenty pounds in rare occasions, and most times less than 10.
3. It’s a rip-roaring, couch-busting fantastic multiplayer frenzy – With cheap controllers everywhere you go, it’s so easy to engage your mates in some decent offline multiplayer, with such classics as Killzone, Burnout: Revenge, Tekken, Dragon Ball Z, Black and the unholyness that is Mortal Kombat. Don’t forget DDR and Timesplitters along with Red Faction.
4. It’s the cheapest DVD and CD player combo on the market – it plays games too. The Controller won’t run out of batteries either.
5. The Console’s expansion bay – Probably the best place to hide money, keys, a wallet, phone, credit card, MP3 player, PSP (irony…) or any other smallish item you want hiding. It’s amazing, and totally invisible… who’s going to check your old  PS2, and nobody wants to steal one either, because they probably already have one. Bulletproof.

Notable new releases

There is only one big game this week and that’s the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 which is vying for a place between Halo and Call of Duty as the online multiplayer champion. The game is released on both PS3 and Xbox 360 and will be sure to pop up on your online friends lists for the next few weeks.

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