Portal received an innocuous-seeming patch today that turned out to be very interesting.

The patch introduced a new achievement, "Transmission Received." And the radios in the game have different colored power lights. It turns out that carrying those radios around to specific spots (26 in all) will allow you to hear some mysterious and hard-to-decipher radio transmissions.

But it gets even more interesting. Some brilliant folks decided to run the audio files for these new "transmissions" through SSTV programs, and it turns out the result is a set of poor-quality images, all bearing the Aperture Science logo. The images can be seen here: http://forums.steampowered.com...69218

Using the photos and an MD5 hash translator, the brilliant folks turned up a phone number from a region near Valve's WA headquarters. The number turns out to be a dataline for a BBS. Clues in the 26 photos help to reveal the login credentials for the BBS. The BBS access reveals a host of ASCII artwork.

Now, people have been working to clean up the ASCII artwork, producing some recognizable (and not-so-recognizable) images. The most recognizable things are the stick figures from the early Portal trailer and the egg-shaped turrets from Portal.

Someone has also cleaned up some of the "transmissions" from the game, and Kleiner and Barney seem to be audible.

Go boot up Portal and grab a radio. Join the party.And in case you want to cheat on the achievement, here are the radio "spots" to hit: http://forums.steampowered.com...69096

EDIT:Here's a text file showing the output from the BBS. Skip over the garble and scroll to near the bottom, where you'll find a hilariously horrible manual page detailing the viability of hobos, orphans, the mentally unstable, and the elderly as test subjects.http://xkeeper.net/private/output.txtAnd here's a version showing the ASCII images in a nice neat format:http://img63.imageshack.us/img...2.png

hmmmmm

Perhaps a horror survival game?

ScorchedNX2K wrote:Perhaps a horror survival game?

Wait, what? Are we talking about the same thing?

^^ Have you never played portal?

I wish valve would throw down a nice COD rival.

I f***in' hate using Punk Buster.

MORE NEW STUFF!!!!!

I just played through the game again to get the Transmission Received achievement. And I noticed something new at the end. After you kill GladOS and get sucked up to the surface, you hear a new male synthetic voice say "Thank you for assuming the party escort submission position." Then you hear some robotic noises and your body begins to be dragged backward.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzlAc2WwEI8

So it definitely looks like Portal is getting a sequel, soon. And it looks like we get to play as Chell again.

EDIT:Looks like Valve will soon be announcing Steam for Mac. They've released some images hinting at it, including Gordon in an Apple-shiny white/blue HEV suit, with an Apple logo, and my favorite of all, this one:

Double post for news.

Portal 2 has officially been announced. It is due out this holiday season. A now-edited Gamestop posting listed coop features, which makes you wonder.

GameInformer will have a 12-page story on Portal 2 in the next issue.http://gameinformer.com/b/news....aspx

http://store.steampowered.com/news/3559/

Yup I was going to post this yesterday,,,

I don't game on the PC so I have no idea what a portal 1 is or a steam but I hope it's awesome and that you guys enjoy it!

Portal came out for the Xbox 360, too. Both in the Orange Box and as a standalone Arcade title. I highly suggest getting the arcade version. It's only 1200 microsponge points.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/game...rcade/

There's even a demo of the Arcade version that has the first 10 test chambers.