Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

Portal 2 (the sequel to the simple but insanely fun Portal of a few years ago) was announced today. Should ship later this year.

But before the official announcement, clues of Portal 2's existence were embedded in a patch to Portal that Valve released a while back. What do I mean "embedded"? Well, the patch added a new episode of the game where you had to take an in-game radio to various in-game locations, and you would hear weird sounds. Some words were intelligible, but mostly is sounds like like noise.

However ...

• Some of the sounds were morse code which, when decoded, looked like messages from a computer restarting. (The premise of Portal was that you had to defeat an evil computer gone haywire - hence, sequel)
• One of the morse code messages was 9459C6CAC8C2Q3B8T28B7CC6306894FD, which is the md5 of "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
• Another of the morse code messages, when decoded, spelled out "beep beeeep beep beep beeeep beeeep beeeep beep beeeep beep beep", which, *when you interpret it as morse code* spells "LOL"
• If you converted the sounds to *images* (using SSTV, a standard for doing that. No, really.) you got hidden screenshots of (presumably) portal 2.
• One of the pictures included clues which led to another MD5 string, which could be reverse-hashed to a BBS phone number which, if you dialed in, you would get Portal-related ASCII art. I'm not kidding.

Apart from being possibly the coolest and geekiest patch for a game ever, it's amazing that fans of the game who downloaded and played the patch actually *found* this stuff without help from Valve. Anyway, I guess there's some in-game or real-world achievement at the end of it all. I don't know whether anyone has found it yet, though.

HBJ

One of the pictures included clues which led to another MD5 string, which could be reverse-hashed to a BBS phone number which, if you dialed in, you would get Portal-related ASCII art. I'm not kidding.

Valve is an awesome company and I can't wait for Portal 2, if it's as fun as Portal was!

Never heard of it. Sounds cool though and if I were about 20 to 25 years younger I would probably waste all my free time playing it.

spent an evening over at apjaks house this past year and he introduced the game, its a pretty wicked little game. Pretty tough puzzles, and have to have some serious understanding of Space relations. It was the console version, not sure if it made it to the PC but could play it and the sequel.

Yeah, it's actually way more fun than it sounds. Simple concept, challenging puzzles, cool physics and nice story-within-a-story.

And the cake is a lie.

HBJ

Great video!

I hated having to euthanize the poor cube, he had helped me through so many hard times!

Jeez, not sure that's big enough...

Caperture?

trang wrote:It was the console version, not sure if it made it to the PC but could play it and the sequel.

It actually started development on the PC and that was the primary platform, the console version(s) were ports.

I'd have a hard time playing Portal on a console I think, some of the puzzles(in the PC version anyway) required quite precise aiming, something I have a hard time getting with analog sticks.