The Portal games have been beautiful, haven't they? The first one presented a simple, clean aesthetic that worked as a great backdrop to the clever gameplay and snarky humor of Chell's battle of wits against GLaDOS. Then, last year, Portal 2 took Aperture Science's glistening white test chambers and destroyed them, letting players roam through the innards of Cave Johnson's company. And lo, it was glorious.

Now, everyone can see how Valve executed this big visual shift in Dark Horse's upcoming The Art of Portal 2. Announced tonight at the Emerald City Comic-Con, the 184-page hardcover book will feature concept art and completed vision, along with character sketches and commentary from writers, artists and other developers.

It's out on October 31st and no price has been announced yet. But, based on the scintillating art above—click the Expand button to enlarge—I'm going to say that The Art of Portal 2 will be worth whatever the price tag is. It's got pictures of space. Spaaaace!

Last week I posted Chris DePrisco's fiber laser rendition of Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive", the ending theme from Portal, with an implied suggestion that Portal 2's "Want You Gone" receive similar treatment. Well it did. Twice. From two completely different types of lasers.

Late last night one David Grossman shared with me a different sort of laser singing. Instead of using the pitch of the laser to replicate sound the way DePrisco did with the fiber laser, Grossman transformed his 250 watt CO2 laser into a working speaker.

David explains: "In essence, the laser is firing at a fixed repetition rate - there's around 30k pulses hitting the material every second. Each of those pulses disrupts the material, and has an associated flash of light and plume of ejected material, which pushes air outwards, making a sound.

"The circuit that's driving the laser pulsing is using the audio signal to vary the energy of each of those pulses.
As such, each plume is ejecting a different amount of material, which is also pushing air differently, causing different sounds."

To put it simply, the music is being played by tiny explosions.

As I prepared to write up Grossman's video, I got another email, this time from the original laser Portal engineer.

Chris DePrisco was dropping me a line to let me know he had followed up on the :Still Alive" video with a two-track fiber laser version of "Want You Gone". Using his single laser he recorded two tracks and spliced them together into one slightly-off but still incredible impressive video.

I couldn't decide which to post, so I posted them both. That I live in a world where such decisions are necessary pleases me to no end.

Portal 2: Want You Gone - Played with Fiber Laser

Portal 2's 'Want You Gone' Played by CO2 Laser [YouTube]

Aperture: Lab Ratt is a fan film based on the Portal universe. And, as you'll see five seconds into this trailer, it's looking very professional.

Proper music, proper outfits, an expensive camera, good lighting...yes, it's looking lovely.

If it helps sell you on the quality behind this flick, it's being made by the same crew who put together last year's charming Aperture Science documentary.

This one, though, looks a lot more serious.

Oh, and bonus: the site of the production team also sells Aperture Science ID cards.

I've never played as a black video game character who's made me feel like he was cool. Worse yet, I've never played a black video game character who made me feel like I was cool. Instead, I've groaned and rolled my eyes at a parade of experiences that continue to tell me video games just don't get black people.

The faces that look like mine that I've encountered in video games have been, at best, too inconsequential to be memorable and offensively tone-deaf at worst. What about Barrett from Final Fantasy VII or Sazh from Final Fantasy XIII, you might ask? Or Cole Train from the Gears of War games? Wait, there's Sheva from Resident Evil 5, right? No, no and no. Too many elements of caricature in each, I'd say, and they're all sidekicks. Their stories aren't the focus of the adventure players go on.

But, hey, it's a given that video games tend to present exaggerated characters. Marcus Fenix isn't like any white guy I've ever met, after all. But he doesn't have to be. For every Marcus Fenix-type grunt hero, you can also get a witty Nathan Drake, a charming Ezio or a regretful John Marston. Enough white characters exist in video games for a variability of approach. That's simply not true of black characters.

In creating Half-Life 2's Alyx Vance, Valve gave players a woman who was feisty and fragile at the same time. Alyx ranks amongst the best black game characters of all time, but she's another sidekick. C.J. from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas comes closest to this pie-in-the-sky ideal I'm dreaming of. C.J. managed to hold a core contradiction inside of himself—an intense love of family balanced against the violence of thug life—that added depth to his characterization. And while he was the lead of the game he starred in, he was still a gang member. Rockstar found interesting things to do with him but C.J. still comes into being by virtue of another overused stereotype.

Does this stuff matter in video games? Yes. The thing to remember is that beneath all the comforting platitudes about a character's color not mattering lies a sticky web of stereotypes and cheap myths that can still insult and anger people playing a game. Even if I wanted to like Sam B from Dead Island, for example, I'm still running up against the fact that he's a hot-tempered thug rapper.

Stop leaning on this stereotype. Stop creating loud black soldiers who only know how to yell. Stop putting spear-carrying primitives in games.

What I want, basically, is Black Cool. It's a kind of cool that improvises around all the random stereotypes and facile understandings of black people that have accrued over centuries and subverts them. Black Cool says "I know what you might think about me, but I'm going to flip it." Dave Chappelle's comedy is Black Cool. Donald Glover is Black Cool. Aisha Tyler is Black Cool. Marvel Comics's Black Panther character is Black Cool. Their creativity is the energy I want video games to tap into.

There's a book about it. In the anthology Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, author Rebecca Walker assembles a crop of personal essays that talk about how Black Cool manifested in their lives. One of those writers is Mat Johnson, a professor in the University of Houston's creative writing program. Johnson's like me, a lifelong comics-reading, game-loving geek who continues to bump into jarring, awful portrayals of black people in video games.

"I played Dead Island when it came out last year and there's a point when you get the Natives Camp area. I was like, ‘Oh, OK, we're going to have an African-style primitive out here,'" he told me. "The bizarre thing is that the stereotypes you encounter in the games don't even match up timewise with our current culture. That's what's so odd about it. The mainstream culture at large has moved beyond the trope of the black primitive. You can't get away with that kind of thing in a movie."

Johnson's written prose along with graphic novels and when he compares video games' racial awareness to comic and he says "comics had a much more concerted effort to change images of minorities in the work. And part of that was a market-driven concern." There's a difference of scale, too, he continues. "If comics can access another 5,000 or 10,000 in their possible audience, it has a huge impact. Whereas video games have become a mass market phenomenon that have an even bigger scope than movies. So they're not as worried about minority concerns as comics are."

The importance of seeing a face that looks like yours when stepping into a fictional universe can't be overstated. I'm a big Superman fan, but it was DC Comics' Black Lightning that piqued my interest when I was growing up. Every black superhero face I saw growing up was another signpost that said "Hey, you're welcome here. You can be larger-than-life, too." The absence of such characters doesn't make fictional constructs hostile; it makes them indifferent, which can be far worse.

"Another difference with games is that, as a medium, they're about invoking our fears so that we can overcome them," Johnson speculates. "I think that's what happens in both Resident Evil 5 and also Dead Island. They're not just invoking fear of zombies, they are invoking fear of blackness, and offering the gamer an opportunity to challenge their racial fears as well as their other fears. What you're seeing here is a subconscious action. And the reason it becomes clear because it's not in one game, it's in several different games."

"There have been exceptions in games like Left 4 Dead," Johnson observes, "where you have an actual black nerd character in the game." "I honestly think the move away from this going to be generational, when it's so easy to produce a 3D video game that it's the equivalent of shooting a movie today with a digital camera. But, until then, when I see a game that clearly walks right into a racial dead-end, I know I'm seeing a room of developers talking out a story with not one black person, not one Latino person of power in that room. So I think the single biggest thing that many of these companies could do to make sure that they are being representative of the larger culture's ethos, would be to hire in a diverse way."

"It's not a question of [developers and publishers] pushing culture forward," Johnson said. "It's a question of them catching up to mainstream culture. Part of it, I think again, is market success. They haven't had to worry about that at this point, because they're still going to sell a ton of games if the basic gameplay is good. But being better about black characters and characters of other races would make the overall quality better, too."

In other mediums and creative pursuits, there've been the black people who pivoted the conversations, expanded the possibilities and deepened the portrayals about what black people are. In jazz, it was Charlie Parker. In literature, it was Ralph Ellison. In comics, I'd argue that it was Christopher Priest, followed by Dwayne McDuffie. For me, the work of the deceased McDuffie managed to create characters that communicated an easily approachable vein of black cool.

Video games need this kind of paradigm-shifting figure. Not an exec, mind you—sorry, Reggie—but a creative face who steers the ethos of a game. For example, you know what kind of game a Warren Spector or a Jenova Chen is going to deliver. With Spector, it's a game that'll spawn consequences from player action. With Chen, you'll get experiences that try to expand the emotional palette of the video game medium. I want someone to carry that flag for blackness, to tap into it as a well of ideas.

Blackness can be a sort of performance, a lifetime role informed by the ideas of how people see you and how you want to be seen. One thing I've heard over the years is some variation of the colorblind testimonial: "I don't see a black guy when I look at you. I just see you." Well, if you're not seeing a black guy, then you're not seeing all of me. And if you're seeing just a black guy, you're not seeing all of me in that instance either.

I'm not naïve: no one's going to buy a video game because it's less wince-worthy on matters of race or diversity. But, maybe if Black Cool found its way into video games, I wouldn't have to hear the word "nigger" during online multiplayer sessions so much. Or maybe I wouldn't have to listen to characters that sound like 18th-Century minstrels in cyberpunk games.

While I'm sick of video games stumbling around the same ol' stereotypes and being afraid of black lead characters—"they won't sell!," cries the panicked logic— I'm not going to love Starhawk or Prototype 2 more because they have black lead characters. But if Emmett Graves and James Heller tap into some kind of deeper, more surprising portrayal than Standard Gruff Black Guy #29 and feel more human as a result, I'd feel better about the creative possibilities of video games.

Any mode of creativity that wants to be called mature needs to grapple with the sociopolitical issues of its time and place, especially if it wants to hold onto future generations. If it doesn't, then said medium just remains stuck in its own adolescence. When it comes to the examining the realities of how race can be lived in the world, movies, books and TV all do it. I'm not saying video games won't or can't, but damn if it's not a long time coming. Getting black characters who don't make me grit my teeth would be a great sign that video games are growing up.

British artist Pinali sets our hearts aflutter with this animated take on Portal's Chell (in her Portal 2 outfit).

I keep thinking, if I watch it long enough, the "camera" will pan across and just follow her as she starts shooting the place up.

Portall [Pinalinet]

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Pixel artist Gas 13 gives the world a game it can only dream of: an isometric, pixellated Team Fortress 2.

You can see it at the original resolution below, pixel integrity maintained.

ISOMETRIC TF2: BADLANDS [PixelJoint]

Limited to just 5000 pieces and priced at $150, most of you will never get your hands on one of NECA's replica Portal guns. Ah well. You may as well do the next best thing and check out this video of one of the beasts in action.

It certainly looks the part, and the flashing lights are great, but those sound effects...I realise the price had to be kept down and you're never going to get the same POP like you do from the actual game, but still. It sounds a little weak.

The moment all Valve and Half-Life fans have been waiting for might be revealed at this year's E3, predicts YouTube user aekime. But will it be the big reveal everyone is sitting on the edge of their seats for?

At least Gabe will apparently make the most amazing entrance ever.

Fair warning: This video is only slightly creepy. That's if you consider a crazed Half-Life fan biting his friend's ear off to be creepy. Let's just say it seems like the creator took some inspiration from David Firth.

And for the record, I'd be very happy with a new Left 4 Dead.

Gabe Newell at E3 2012 [Reddit]

Whenever I visit an internet cafe in China, be it Shanghai, Beijing or wherever, it always surprises me how many of the games available are MMO's or bad rip-offs of western games. Normally I would scroll past the Chinese fare and move onto something a little more domestic like Call of Duty or Ages of Empires, but Final Combat caught and its colorful banner caught my eye and my attention.

At first glance, Final Combat looks exactly like a cheap Team Fortress 2 rip with two female classes. The characters look like uninspiring copies of Valve's own creations, and the game play looks like every other FPS to date.

Like many Chinese online games, FC is a free-to-play client based game. Most internet cafes have the game preinstalled on their servers, to date I've only ever been to three that didn't have the game.

The only problem I had was registering for an account. Unfortunately, for an American expatriate like myself, I couldn't register for the game because I didn't have a legal Chinese name or ID number. To get around this barrier, I swiped my colleague's ID and signed up an account under his identity.

With my assumed identity ready, I was ready to play some FC. Logging on and going through the menus were as easy as pie, anyone who's played online games before should be able to navigate it sans Chinese reading abilities and all. Finding a match took less than a minute.

The gameplay is broken down into the generic FPS game types such as team death match, free-for-all, and capture the flag. There are also some added game types which seem to be directly taken from TF2, such the boss battles.

For a free-to-play online game, I can say that FC plays very smoothly. It's graphically pleasing, and the gameplay is somewhat rewarding. Depending on the game type, when you shoot another player, you earn money points that can be used to upgrade and purchase new starting weapons and classes.

FC has a total of 16 playable classes, however since I just started out I was only allowed to choose from four basic classes. The classes I was allowed to go with were the Office Lady sniper, "Heavy gunning Mexican Fisherman", French Commando, and Fire Fighter. Like in TF2, each class has a set of special weapons and different perks. Throughout my time with the game, I played as the most time as the OL sniper and the French Commando.

I had a blast playing as the Commando running around with what looks like a FAMAS. The Office Lady sniper on the other hand didn't play as I expected—plus I'm not really much of a camper.

One aspect of the game that I did not get a chance to explore was the in game micro-transactions. Unfortunately I don't have a Chinese credit card, but from what the internet cafe employee tells me, there are loads of perks that you can purchase in game. Some of the perks listed on the FC homepage are items such as extra ammo and health packs, which to me are deal breakers. I am personally very against the pay to win model and FC like so many other Chinese made online game is "pay to win".

Final Thoughts

Apart from looking and playing pretty much exactly like a TF 2 rip, I am amazed at how smooth and clear FC is. The controls are the same easy-to-use ones found in pretty much every popular FPS. Despite the fact that the game has "play to win" elements, all in all, the draw for me was pretty much the fact that it was something slightly different from the regular games found in Chinese net cafes.

Final Combat [Official Site]

Fears of that Portal Gun replica gun being on infinite hold are hopefully vanished to infinity! Starting today, collectible toy maker NECA is kicking off pre-orders for its replica Aperture Science Handheld Portable Device.

So far, the following retailers have "approved allotments" that they will receive at the end of next month: Rockin Robot, Think Geek, Corner Store Comics, and Toynk. In the UK, it's available through Play.com.

The 1:1 scale Portal gun is limited to 5,000 pieces and priced at US$139.99.

At the time of writing, pre-orders were already closed at Rockin Robot and Think Geek. Corner Store Comics, Toynk, and Play.com still seemed to have units available for pre-order—though, expect that to change quickly.

According to NECA, a few other sites will carry the gun. Those will be announced within the next week. Moreover, a select number of brick and mortar retailers will carry the replica once it goes on sale.

NECA is asking customers to notify it directly if the Aperture Science Handheld Portable Device is either "scalped" or "bundled" with other items. More in the link below.

Approved Pre-Orders for Portal Replica Device Start Today [NECA]