Plus XP

As you already know, Portal is one of those Xbox Live Arcade games that will never ever be wiped off my Xbox Hardrive. Even though the game itself isn’t that huge. The whole idea, game play and the very story telling is fantastic and something I have never come across before or since the games release.

So who can imagine my epic excitement when I heard about portal 2’s conformation yesterday. The beautiful people at Game Informer magazine gave us a nice slice of the Portal 2 cake and have given us some great information which I cannot help but be excited about.

All this started when the tech heads at Valve let loose some new content and patches for the original Portal on PC last week. There was one new achievement slapped onto the game and some weird new cryptic noises and sounds coming from the radio in your chamber when you start the game. These new additions to the game sparked off a lot of PC geeks out there in the vast universe that is the internet to decode these sounds, turns out they were some sort of morse code which could be subverted into images. Sounds blinking weird I know but, these were the images that were uncovered.

Confused much? I sure as hell am. But as I dug deeper into the wealth of information about these images, it turns out that these are images taken from the Aperture Science CCTV from the first Portal. I bet some of you are thinking, yeah? so what? Well these images contain vital equations and data that all of the portal geeks out there were hungry to find and solve. After slaving over a keyboard and staring at these images till their eyes bled, it turns out they all lead to a number that once dialed up would let you into Valve’s bulletin board system and then let the user download some more images. These images known as ASCII images are images that are made up of keyboard characters. Here is an example

These were the first ever images of Portal 2. A lot of hacking coding and problem solving boiled down to 3 of these images….

…Then valve went and confirmed that Portal 2 will be coming out and hitting shelves at the end of the year for Xbox 360 and PC. Game informer then scooped it up and hey presto we have a sequel to a truly awesome game.

So what is this next installment going to be like? I have been doing reasearch here and there and I have found a couple of things out. Whether they are true or not I don’t know but I am going to list them anyway.

1. This is going to be a full-blown title, unlike Portal 1 where it was an attachment to the orange box. This title will be a stand-alone. Meaning it will be a lot bigger. This make me think that Portal 1 was maybe testing the water for the actual main event which is portal 2

2. This title is going to be set way in the future. Meaning that the long abandon Aperture Science labs are going to overgrown with foliage and very forest like. But be rest assure that this will not stop GLaDOS one bit.

3. GLaDOS makes a welcome return. The next generation SHODAN is back Baby!!

4. You again play as Chell (the same woman you played as in Portal 1)

5. split screen and online co-op staring 2 biped robots. Apparently these robots like to hold hands alot…in teresting.

6. some of the games physics will be juggled about to make up for some interesting game play. An air vent can be combined with a portal. This in turn sucks the player into the portal and spits them out the other side. Sounds awesome.

7. there will be alot more interactive objects from things that fling you sky-high to cubes that will deflect lasers.

8. there will be some new characters and a bit more story. Meaning that Valve has probably going all out on this title.

And that’s about it so far, stay tuned to Plus XP for more Portal 2  info as I hear it. Untill then I may have another stint at 1. I love GLaDOS!

Garv