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.

(more…)

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

O frabjous day. For the first time in some three years, we’re treated to brand new words from the world’s second-favourite homicidal AI (SHODAN still has the edge, right?), Portal’s GLaDOS. Her lilting synth-tones narrate a lovely animated ad pimping yesterday’s free release of the original Portal, returning us to the heady days of Aperture Science motivational videos. That’s not at all. The deceased (OR IS SHE? (she isn’t)) robocrazy slips in a little tease for Portal 2 at the end, confirming that co-op play will be front and centre in the next round of physics-abusing adventures. Welcome back, missus. (more…)

If I had my way, Portal guns would appear in all other games. Far Cry 2, Dragon Age, World Of Goo, Freecell, the lot. And they’d appear in real life. Imagine how great things would be if I had my way. However, if the modding project of one Pawn from 3-PG manages to escape some awkward obstacles, we could soon be seeing a mod that allows the Portal gun in Team Fortress 2. Called, rather wonderfully, Team Portress, the video below explains how the gun works in game, first demonstrating what it’s capable of, then showing you the weapon in a proper game. The catch? According to the poster, Valve has recently introduced a ban on custom items being given to players to prevent the anarchic distribution of hats.

(more…)