Update as of this post: -Portal gets surprise update yesterday afternoon -People see new mystery achievement -People play and see the radio in the beginning room now has a green light -Carry it around and notice it makes strange broadcast interference noises in certain places -Locate and place all 26 of these mystery radios for achievement -Smart people yank wav files out of game content folders and run them through steganography programs -Produces 26 weird cryptic image files in a numbered sequence -Some dude runs the number string through an md5 hash translator and gets a landline number -Internet traces it to Kirkland, WA (near Valve HQ) -People find out its not a phone/fax line but a data line hosting a BBS and telnet it -Use a clue from one of the files to figure out the BBS user/password login info -End up with a bunch of weird ASCII artwork -A collection of the ASCII artwork is posted: http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/6278/portalascii.png -People get to work on the ASCII and an ingame screenshot may very well have been found by turning one of the ASCII artworks: http://cdupload.com/files/123623_btxvo/rotate1.jpg -Speculation on another ASCII image, showing 2 robot like creatures starts. http://img706.yfrog.com/i/android.png/ Some believe they are connected, whilest other dispute it, claiming it shows the skeleton of a chicken and therefor they are not connected. Others speculate that this may be Combine Super Soldiers. (http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/File:Super_soldier.jpg and http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/File...er_Soldier.jpg) -Another new collection of ASCII is posted here: http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/930...sciilarge2.png and a blurred version is posted here: http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/9...ortalascii.png
Ok what I have decided this all means, which probably means it bares no relation what so ever to what it is actually trying to say; Valves announcement is March 11th HL2:Ep3 is on the way and will feature extensively Aperture Science and the portal gun as well as another AI entity. Co-Op will be a major selling point of the game. There will be cake.
How the hell can Co-Op be 'awful'? It's a value add thing that very rarely detracts from people playing single player unless the stand in AI is really terrible.
I'm still trying to figure out what a BBS is Fixed. I think we're all hoping for a combined Ep3/Portal 2 announcement on the 11th, but I'd probably be happy with either (given the circumstances, it would probably be the latter). I can't wait, whatever happens. EDIT: It's actually red to start with, it only turns green when you move it to the correct spot in the level and receive the transmission.
If it is going to be co-op i hope they paid attention to sven co-ops scalable rape factor it used for however many people joined, it upped the number of npc spawns.
fire a blue at the wall next to the radio and fire the yelllow on the wall behind you, reach in carfully and pluck it out, take it to where you got the upgrade to get the transmission, im stuck on 22 (i think)
Hidden Message in Portal Update - Viral Portal 2 Advertising This is pretty cool: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1499706 The crux of this is that there may be an announcement on Portal 2 on March 11th. Let the hype commence! (Oh and 11th March is during the Game Developers Conference).
Lots and lots and lots of speculation over at the Prtal forum. Really cool riddles and such. Well done Valve, your March 11th conference will be quite expected by some... (including me) I love this type of stuff. Got the achievement also.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3273954 http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=902479 both these sites are making good progress in solving it. Defo portal 2 no chance of half life ep 3?
Things seem to have pretty much come to a standstill. Most of the work was done on the Steam forums a few hours after release. All we have are the audio files which contain either Morse Code messages or images (as well as some background sounds), and a load of ASCII art from the BBS. Everything else seems to be purely speculation based on this evidence.
Yay, time to play Portal again. I already played though it twice yesterday -_- EDIT: 2 more radio-destruct sound files added: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVH75XVu5Go Now to find some clever people who can figure this **** out.
Man, Valve are really going for the 'teasing new products in obscure ways' at the moment! See also: http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/03/valve-teases-upcoming-half-life-release-for-mac/
