Portal 2: Now available for pre-loading.

The Game Room
1

Just sayin’.

For those of us who’ve pre-ordered the game, Portal 2 – all 10GB of it! – is now available to be pre-loaded. The game is currently due to launch on April 19. I say “currently” because… well, read on. :smiley:

Also, if you purchase the Potato Sack (13 indie games for ~$39), you’ll receive a special skin for the Portal 2 co-op bots.

Now the “currently” thing. Valve’s “PotatoFool’sDay” Alternate Reality Game, which was launched back on April 1 and involved those Potato Sack games in a whirlwind of inter-related puzzles being inserted into the indies, is still going. According to Gaijin, the dev of BIT.TRIP.BEAT (one of the Potato Sack games), the 19th is possibly not set in stone. And not in the usual, “Valve Time” kinda way… but as in an early release:

Considering one of the puzzles resulted in the solution that read “4/19/2011_7AM=4/15/2011_9AM,” current speculation is that April 15 is the big day. OTOH, the numbers “4” and “16” have been sprinkled throughout the ARG, so perhaps the 16th is the magic date.

Some videos to tide y’all over, in case you haven’t watched them yet. Enjoy!

Aperture Investment Opportunity commercials:
#1: Panels | #2: Bot Trust | #3: Turrets | #4: Boots

(that’s J.K. Simmons as Aperture Science founder Cave Johnson, btw)

This Device Has Been Modified - Victims of Science song from 2007, added today to Audiosurf (another of the Potato Sack games), and which GLaDOS apparently forces all players to play no matter what song you try to play.

Anyway, I bought a whole freakin’ new computer just to play this game, so I’m looking forward to its launch a wee bit, shall we say. I’m preloading now and considering I’m on amazingly slow DSL, it’s gonna take me about 7 hours to finish. Not that it matters since it’s not like I can play it yet.

Anyone else psyched?

2

I’m out of the new-game market currently, but damn, if I weren’t, those videos would’ve sold me.

3

Can’t wait. Preordered it for the PS3 on Amazon, so hopefully I’ll be wasting time on it next week at this time.

4

Got the two-pack. One for me and another for my wife. Just got to convince to her to play now…

5

Woo! I pre-ordered a while ago (only game I’ve ever done that with), and I’ve been following the promo bits with great anticipation. Also just bought a new GTX 460 to get my desktop up to the task.

6

BONUS: Steam is coming to the PS3 with Portal 2 and buying Portal 2 for PS3 nets you a free copy for PC as well.

7

Goddamnit! I just bought the PC version.

8

There’s also a nifty comic that bridges the gap between Portal 1 and 2.

9

It’s not really a “free” PC version. It’s a “steamplay” version. Just like when you buy a steam play game you can play it on PC or MAC.

But the game is tied to BOTH your steam and PS3 accounts. So you can’t gift it, or play both at the same time.

10

I ended up pre-ordering the XBox version, because the only person I know I’m likely to get to do the multiplayer bits with is on an XBox, and the cross-platform multiplayer stuff is not available on XBox, apparently because Microsoft sucks. But Amazon is giving $20 store credit for buying the XBox version, so it’s effectively cheaper to boot. I’m not going to love having to make complicated moves using the damn control pad, though.

11

I just happened to open Defense Grid again recently and noticed a new potato/portal map. Fun.

12

Amazon is giving the $20.00 credit for the PS3 version, as well.

Even if it is just a steamplay version, it’s pretty cool to get a free version on another platform. So, I am happy about that. And, the cross platform multiplayer option is really exciting. I wonder if they are going to allow for mapmaking? That would be really awesome. Make a puzzle on the PC and play it on the PS3? Neat! But, I have heard nothing of that. Just dreaming.

13

For those of you not following the ARG obsessively, there’s been a cool development.

Yesterday, several players were suddenly “infected” by GLaDOS and disappeared – while in the ARG’s IRC chat, a dozen or so people all simultaneously typed “There’s a hole in the sky… through which I can fly!” before quitting*. This led to a bunch of new clues and red herrings, naturally. And just now, people decoded a message that led to this hidden URL on the Aperture Science website:

http://www.aperturescience.com/a/b/c/d/g/h/abcdgh/

!!!

That’s leading to 9AM Seattle time, tomorrow. Something big’s gonna happen then. Game release? Demo? No one knows…

  • A reference to Portal’s original tagline, “there’s a hole in the sky, through which things can fly!”
14

It’s so much worse than that. Every game in the ‘potato sack bundle’ has several things buried into it related to Portal 2 in addition to the obvious maps, such as unlocking a login screen that spits out an encrypted snippet, or odd icons linking to other games in the bundle. The Ball’s portal level ended with a console that linked to a bitmap puzzle webpage based on a fibonacci spiral that was solved by linking it to the Aztec calendar, just to open up another encrypted puzzle. Super Meat Boy had a number series that turned out to be the address of a store named Couch Potato Discount Furniture in Santa Clara, CA, where they had a poster up, hinting at a password.

It’s like porn for conspiracy theorists.

15

Peggle Extreem has a Portal level today too.

Oh and, yep I pre-ordered a few days ago.

16

“Pre-loaded”? Never heard of that before. Is that like letting you install it on your system but you have to wait for an activation key to play? Seems like a tempting target for a hack.

17

I believe the way this works is that we get to download about 99% of the game, with certain small but important files unavailable until release day. The files we do get are encrypted and unable to be unlocked before launch. The advantage is that once the game is released, we can play right away without any of that pesky waiting thing. (And for those of us with slow download speeds, that’s a serious blessing. F’rex, my hapless DSL took 12 flippin’ hours to download all 9.8GB of Portal 2!)

I could be wrong, heaven knows I’m no expert here, but I don’t believe any Steam game available for preload has been hacked prior to release. (The stolen HL2 beta wasn’t a pre-load issue, but a guy who sneaked into Valve’s servers about a year prior to the game’s completion.) If the games could’ve been hacked, they would’ve… which I take it means that this system is very, very secure for Valve and the other game devs who use it.

18

Yeah, no one has hacked the valve pre-loads.

It’s not worth it, and likely not really possible since they usually aren’t up for more than a few days before release. It’s not easy to crack that sort of encryption in a few days.

19

I’m always wary about opening threads like these, and looking for clues that they’ve left behind. Much like the Matrix and the first Portal, I went in knowing nothing, and the experience was SOoooo much the better for it.

20

Hmmm… I think GLaDOS just left us a message:

http://www.aperturescience.com/a/b/c/d/g/h/abcdgh/

One final test… and possibly early Steam release for Saturday.