Well, this perhaps goes some way towards making up for the whole over-priced robot hats thingy. Official word has just arrived in our inbox from Valve that the first full-on DLC for the lovely Portal 2 will be free (on all platforms), and promises “new test chambers for players, leaderboards, challenge mode for single and multiplayer modes, and more.” That news again: free. The list of planned content also suggests there’ll be something a little more challenging than in the main game (the arguable ease and signposting of which we had a slight but affectionate moan about in our verdict yesterday), and a chance to really push Portal 2′s crazy physics as far as they’ll go.

A smart move in terms of goodwill generation, I suspect, and hopefully it’ll be top-notch content too. No exact release date yet, but it’s “this Summer”. Doesn’t Summer start on Monday? Maybe it will be Monday! (It won’t be Monday).

Things that are good + LEGO = Happiness. It’s a sum we were all taught in school, and it’s as true today as it ever was. So when a clever person, Catsy [CSF], builds a customised GLaDOS and Chell out of LEGO, I’m so sold. Have a look at a couple of the splendid results below.

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In the week of Portal 2′s release, it seems apt that Valve’s games should dominate the mod scene’s output. While the range of titles you can mod these days is impressive, and so many of the tools are easy to learn, I’ve still yet to come across a moddable engine that’s quite as intuitive and flexible as Source. I can’t wait to see what people can do with Portal 2 when we’re able to mod that. It’s going to be very interesting to see the results. Onwards, then…
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Okay, what. All this diligent, web-wide meta-potato-harvesting to apparently> get Portal 2 unlocked early, and now something’s gone all weird, just when the end was in sight. The GLaDOS@home site is showing the work so far seeming being undone at a rate of knots. We don’t know why, we don’t know the result. But we damned well hope people haven’t spent money on a collection of indie games purely because they thought it would win them early access to Portal 2 that they now may not get.

On the other hand 1) the site now lists ’9 test subjects’ as having been found and 2) the chaps on the ValveARG site are claiming the G-Man can be seen in the background… No. C’mon. We’re being gamed, right? That one’s been removed already, which I take to mean it was trolling by someone. Unsurprising, given its lack of subtlety. Additional: the ’9′ appears to be the ARG’s most successful players being taken to Valve to play the game.

While the GLaDOS@Home distributed potato-collecting event is still ongoing, hints are emerging that there may be even more to come following its conclusion. Portal 2 being released early is the apparent plan, but could there be something more?

The latest Steamcast (an unofficial fan radio show) apparently aired with a brief Morse Code signal playing over the chatter, which the hosts claim to have been unaware of. You can hear it for yourself below and ponder upon its authenticity, but if it’s real this is what it says:” it’s not over the others have been compromised.”

Ah.
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It’s hard not to think that musical blocks weren’t added to Minecraft with the sole intention of ensuring a trillion new YouTube videos that we all can’t resist posting. Double that down with the internet’s endless love for Portal’s Still Alive (how will they ever compete with that in Portal 2?), and you’ve got a post that has to be there first thing on a Monday morning to correctly start your week. And this isn’t a half-arsed job. Incredibly only taking five or six hours to put together, this is a remarkable piano rendition of the Coulton song.

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The other day I was thinking about games in which you would occasionally fall out of the bottom of the map. San Francisco Rush was good for that, on the console toys. You could spill out of the map and race around in infinite pale green. “I remember when games used to be full of glitches,” I thought to myself. And then I saw Portal completed in ten minutes and realised that they still are. You just need to find them.

In other news: Why would you find them? > Unless you were playing Söldner! or something, where that was the point of playing it. Ten minutes of your life below. Imagine what that means in minutes of his> life. (more…)

Just clearing out my phone and found some footage and shots I took at the MCM Expo last weekend. It’s of a Portal cosplayer who caught my eye because she had a remote control Companion cube*, which is pretty fancy. Also, now I look again, looks a lot like a teen version of Ex-Edge Ed now-designer Margaret Robertson. Spooks! Click through for the full photo, and find the snippet of MOVING CUBE is below… (more…)

Last night at PAX, Valve released a new collection of co-op screenshots from Portal 2. I got to thinking that you might like to look at them. In response to this thought, I’ve put them up on popular PC gaming website Rock, Paper, Shotgun. They’re below. As usual, click on them for largess. And largeness.

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Delirium Wartner altered us to this fascinating snippet. Michael “Braingamer” Abbott’s day job is working at Wabash Liberal Arts college in Indiana. In the new (compulsory) Enduring Questions course they’ll be engaging with a variety texts with a general theme of humanity, across all ages. So we’ll have Gilgamesh rubbing shoulders with Poetics, Donne’s poetry, Hamlet, the Tao Te Ching and… Portal. The full story behind it is fascinating, but the core story is that a long-established (1832) college have decided that it’s worth putting a videogame on the syllabus for study. Abbott also talks about other games he considered – Planescape Torment and Bioshock – but decided on Glados’ star turn. Which does make me think… well, if you were in the same situation, what games would you put on a liberal arts reading list? I suspect I may have made the same call as Abbott. Or Robotron, obvs