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Afternoon Valve Nonsense Round-Up

Written by John Walker on January 15, 2008.

It seems churlish not to link to all this madness.

First up, it’s TF2 in Lego!

Follow the link, as there’s lots more of these, and it’s obligatory that you look at them.

Next, how about a Weighted Companion Cube made of balloons?

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GlaDOS On Another OS

Written by Kieron Gillen on January 14, 2008.

Gaming SA have this, which is pretty cute. One Thrashbarg - we suspect not his given name - decided to actualise the end sequence and a suitably creaky old terminal to play the tune. The processor is a Intel 2Mhz 8080. The sound is a Commodore 64 Side. The Code is assembler. And the video of it can be seen here. One question remains - since it’s a YouTube link, why didn’t I just post the code linking to the video and save myself the effort of cropping and uploading a screenshot? I must have kidney beans for brains.

Thanks to Mr Purvis for the link.

Portal Post-mortem posted

Written by Kieron Gillen on January 10, 2008.

Well, a tease of it anyway.

Gamasutra have posted a little of a Portal post-mortem, written by RPS-crushes Kim Swift, Erik Wolpaw and Jeep Barnett. It’s taken from the January Issue of Game Developer, which can actually be bought in a PDF format for (er) money. Man, I wish people would give us money. Anyway, the two quoted sections involve the development of the game’s fiction and overcoming the technical stuff. Since I’m feigning ignorance of tech-stuff, let’s quote from the origins of GladOS bit. That sounds like an RPSy thing to do.

“Before the writing started, we met with Erik and discussed our list of narrative constraints. Since at the time we were using some Half-Life art assets, and because we wanted to leave ourselves the option of someday using the portal gun in a Half-Life game, we decided that the story should in some way connect to the Half-Life universe.

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Free Portal

Written by Alec Meer on January 9, 2008.

Good news for the 0.5 RPS readers that haven’t played it yet: “Portal: First Slice” has been released as a free download. Only for anyone toting an NVIDIA graphics card, however. It’s described as an “extended demo”, whatever that means. It doesn’t seem accessible if you own the full version of Portal already, so I can’t clarify exactly what’s in it as yet. “Some of Portal” would be a reasonable guess. Update - first third, apparently, which means around an hour of play - well before the omigosh stuff kicks in, but hopefully enough to entice new players into giving the full thing a crack. A Half-Life: Uplink affair, wherein there’s brand new content for the demo, would have been a thousand awesomes, but no matter.

It’s an interesting riposte to the existing ATI-Steam partnership, which offers up a free copy of Half-Life 2 Deathmatch and the Lost Coast to anyone owning a Radeon: a sign of Valve changing graphical alliegances, large amounts of money changing hands, or just of levelling the playing field? As has been observed, most people who want to play Portal have already played Portal, but it’s probably a handy incentive for GeForce distributors to slap on the boxes of new cards, in order to lure in less gaming-aware punters. If you have been dithering about playing what was most sane folks’ game of the year, here’s your chance to try it. Unless you’ve got a Radeon.

Portal Continues To Make Loons Of Us All

Written by John Walker on January 5, 2008.

What’s that you say? We haven’t posted some lunatic fan-made Portal madness in a while. Oh, ok then, have two.

The Rubik’s Companion Cube comes to us courtesy of Niki, tells us says, “My office had a Secret Santa and I got this hand-decorated Rubik’s cube. It was probably the best gift I got this holiday season.”

What fantastic, understanding fellow office peeps. The only thing that could possibly be better would be a fantastic, understanding girlfriend…

RPS reader Rogier linked us to some photos of a gift a colleague received from his girlfriend. A hand-made plush turret. Wow. Rogier explains, “It’s about 12″ tall, and cuddly as all hell.”

T-Cube

Written by John Walker on January 3, 2008.

We should probably know better than to get so carried away by the joy of Portal paraphenalia that we post links to Valve’s online store every time they update. I mean, they’re not even advertising with us. Man, we can’t even get being corporate shills right. But it’s hard to resist pointing out these new Portal-related t-shirts that have just gone on sale.

The shirts are designed by Portal developers Kim Swift and Realm Lovejoy, and don’t bear the usual horrible markings of game-related merchandise. I.e. you could actually wear them in public. There’s, of course, a Weighted Companion Cube shirt, with a madly scrawled love poem on the back, a long-sleeve Cake shirt, featuring the repeated insistence that “the cake is a lie” on the reverse, and a rather elegant t-shirt or hoodie with GLaDOS draped over the shoulder. Elegant hoodie? That sounds wrong.

They’re the featured items on the store front page just now.

Bargain Basement

Written by John Walker on December 30, 2007.

So, you wanted a Weighted Companion Cube plush toy, but never managed to get one in time for Christmas? Never fear! You can surely be one of the lucky few to pick one up from eBay for a snip!

That’s right, for only $290.00 you could be the owner of your very own soft cube from off of a videogame. Why delay? Buy today!

But wait, there’s more! If you buy a Weighted Companion Cube plush today, we’ll throw in this bar of gold bullion, and bag of diamonds!

Thanks to some guy or other called Jeep for pointing this out to us.

Lego Portal

Written by Jim Rossignol on December 26, 2007.

No, not some incredible hybrid game announcement, but an awesome piece of Lego modeling over on Brickshelf.

Today, incidentally, is Boxing Day, or the UK’s official “Day After Christmas Day”. It is traditionally the day that gamers spend the entire day locked in a room playing something awesome. (To be fair, we spent most of yesterday playing videogames too, but hey.) If gaming were a religion, this would probably be our holy day. So that’s what I’m going to to do, right now… But what to play? That copy of The Witcher is looking peculiarly tempting.

What did you get for Christmas, readers?

Seasons Greetings From Valve

Written by John Walker on December 23, 2007.

How can we not post this?

Merry Thankmas, Gametrailers

Did they get a choir to sing it, or is it magical digital music? I’m too inept to know. What matters is that they bothered.

“A Societal Problem”

Written by Jim Rossignol on November 30, 2007.

Jonathan ‘Braid’ Blow has posted a recording and illustrative slide show from his talk at the Montreal Games Summit. It’s stirring stuff. Blow attacks World of Warcraft, describing the grind of leveling and the reward system inherent in that as “lying to the players”, and even suggests that designers should be ashamed of exploiting illusory level-based mechanics. He argues that games are, like film and literature, becoming a powerful medium in which creators will be able to make choices they can be ashamed of. He wonders whether games as they are currently executed could lead to a “societal problem”. Gasps and nervous laughter rises from the audience as Blow delivers his ideas, an audience which reportedly included uncomfortable-looking reps from Blizzard. (Blow argues that some game rewards are like drugs, while others are more like food. Good and bad. But we at RPS love both food and drugs equally, so we were a little confused about what he meant.)

Anyway, Blow goes on to attack Bioshock’s Little Sister dilemma, and characterises the Big Daddy as the sympathetic character of the piece. He compares the emotional response created Bioshock’s “big choice” to the frustrations people felt when they were forced to incinerate their Weighted Companion Cube in Portal. Could Portal’s approach, of using mechanics rather than character-based empathy (think of our response to Alyx Vance, or freed Little Sisters) point a way to better, ultimately more rewarding game design?

Blow’s argument is a little wobbly in places, but I think it’s constructive. You should have a listen.

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