Portal 2 Message Board older than one year ago

#watchthis Nice effect out of a paper-mâché portal gun, but where'd the car in the back go? (Thanks, Zach!) More »

#fanart As Jake is saying, "this is awesome". Via Gamefreaks. More »

It's good to (almost) have you back, PSN.

Our long national nightmare of being able to play Portal 2 co-op on PlayStation 3 is nearly over.

Sony has issued a press release detailing a "phased restoration" of PlayStation Network on a region-by-region basis, starting with the Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the Middle East. It's unknown if any functionality will be restored today. Sony expects to have PSN restored everywhere by month's end.

The "first phase" will include the following features, as reads the press release:

• Sign-in for PlayStation Network and Qriocity services, including the resetting of passwords
• Restoration of online game-play across PS3 and PSP
• Playback rental video content, if within rental period, of PlayStation Network Video Delivery Service on PS3, PSP and MediaGo
• Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity, for current subscribers, on PS3 and PC
• Access to 3rd party services such as Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and MLB.tv
• ‘Friends’ category on PS3, including Friends List, Chat Functionality, Trophy Comparison, etc
• PlayStation Home

As soon as there are more details on the roll-out, I'll let you know.

#ohyourealive Actor Stephen Merchant, who put in a masterful turn as Portal 2's Wheatley, found giving life to the crazy little metal ball a lot tougher than his roles in front of the camera. More »

#video Few people know how to handle a Portal 2 cube better than James, here—aka "Schrobot." Continuing his extremely impressive cube tossing and portaling techniques from his first video, we delve deeper into Aperture Science, finding new ways to blown away by Schrobot's cube-jockeying prowess. More »

The Mortal Kombat reboot rose up against franchise fatigue, a dead PSN, and space-time-tunneling competition to claim the top spot on the NPD's April sales charts. Turns out there's a big audience out there for seeing inside some dude's body as his bones are breaking. And also accessible, fast-paced fighting games. But mostly the X-ray bone breaks. Portal 2, of course, came in at No. 2.

Probably as a result of these two games, total US spending was up 20 percent year-over year, from $802.4 million in 2010 to $961.2 million in 2011. Microsoft can also claim some responsibility for the high numbers -- it informed us that the Xbox 360 was the top-selling console last month, moving 297,000 units (a year-over-year increase of 60 percent).

Sony helped too, by motivating some of those Xbox 360 purchases.

We were shocked by the things YouTube user Schrobotindisguise was able to accomplish in Portal 2 with nothing more than a cube and a steady aim -- again, we feel like the worst Portal players ever. Further evidence of his unparalleled cube skills can be seen in the video just past the break.

Levels don't look as pretty before they're done.

You may not have the talent to make a game like Portal 2, but Valve's not going to stop you from trying. The company released a beta version of their Portal 2 "Authoring Tools" last night, the same software used to produce the very levels you've been playing the last few weeks.

The news was announced on Valve's official Portal 2 blog, where Valve asked its community testers to submit any bugs they come across--the tools are not final. If you'd like to download the Authoring Tools for yourself, click over to the "Tools" tab in Steam.

More details, including some helpful mailing lists to keep tabs on, are available on the blog.

The tools are also, at the moment, Windows only. I've contacted Valve about possible Mac support.

Valve have announced on their official Portal 2 blog that they're opening up a beta of the Portal 2 Authoring Tools to everyone. If you own a PC version of Portal 2, you'll be able to download the tools for free today. You can find them under the 'Tools' tab in Steam...

#fanart Nolan North's greatest ever vocal performance is in Portal 2, where he plays Rick the Adventure Sphere, a character that appears only briefly in the game, but nearly manages to steal the whole show. More »

A really fantastic in-depth interview with Valve’s Erik Wolpaw has been posted by the NYU Game Center as part of their lecture series. During it Wolpaw plays Portal 2, talking about the process behind creating the game, the motivations behind many of the decisions, and a great deal of thought about how story and games interact. You can watch it below.

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#gameface The voice of evil supercomputer GLaDOS, Ellen McLain, and the face of test subject Chell, Alesia Glidewell, appear to get along just fine in real life—unlike their Portal counterparts—in this photo by Heather "makani" Campbell. More »

If you missed Valve writer Erik Wolpaw's talk on Portal 2 at New York University's Game Center lecture series event last Thursday, don't worry -- we've got you covered. NYU has uploaded the entirety of Wolpaw's massive, hour-plus talk and the Q&A session that followed in video form (which we've embedded below the break).

Grab a drink and relax -- you can put that notebook away. There won't be a test or anything.

#watchthis One of the writers of Portal 2, Erik Wolpaw, gave a talk last week at NYU's Game Center. You may have become aware of this because of the number of stories that ushered forth from the talk, like Wolpaw's passion for Rick the Adventure Sphere or why Chell doesn't speak. Or perhaps you were one of the dozens of people who were forced to stand outside the at-capacity lecture hall. More »

Chell and GLaDOS may not share much love for each other in the Portal series, but GLaDOS voice actress Ellen McLain (left) and Chell face model Alesia Glidewell (right) certainly seem to get along swimmingly, as evidenced in this photo tweeted by Ashley King.

#portal2 Congratulations, good people of Valve Software. You make terrific video games. Tell us how it's done! More »

#valve Practically anything said institutionally by Valve, or especially by its co-founder, Gabe Newell, is parsed for any potential meaning to the unannounced, eternally awaited Half-Life 2: Episode 3. So when Newell, in an all-access feature charting the development of Portal 2, said the game was "probably" the last one with any isolated single-player experience, Half-Life fans got really jumpy, given how story-driven that game is. More »

Contrarian Corner takes a critical look at recent games, with the intention of encouraging a broader discussion of titles which have been the recipient of either an abundance of single-minded praise, or an undue amount of criticism. If you're interested in joining that discussion, keep reading...

Erik Wolpaw doesn't read too much science fiction these days, so trying to find a modern sci-fi influence on Portal 2, the game he wrote alongside fellow Valve staffers Chet Faliszek and Jay Pinkerton, might prove difficult. In his past, he never worked in any depressingly bureaucratic jobs that might explain away the incredibly overwhelming banality that is so ingrained in the ethos of the game's zealously inept mega-corporation, Aperture Science. He doesn't really seem to think that Portal 2 necessarily transcends any known boundaries of gaming narrative--just that it tells the kind of story he wanted a game to tell.

Erik Wolpaw Over the course of his two-hour talk last night at New York University's Game Center, Wolpaw evaded just about every attempt by the talk's host, Game Center's Interim Director Frank Lantz, to perhaps pigeonhole his influences into tight, neat little references--apart from an acknowledged enjoyment of the works of Douglas Adams and Robert Sheckley--and seemed thoroughly uncomfortable with the notion of trying to dissect his game beyond the notion of it being a enjoyable entertainment. "Ultimately, I don't want to make games that are like modern art," he said at one point, "That only people who have studied modern art their whole lives, it only has meaning to them. Ideally, I'd like to make games that are entertaining for people."

Instead, much of the talk took on the tone of a kind of alternate commentary track for the game, with Wolpaw--who actually took time out of his vacation to give this talk to a room full of fans, NYU students, and the odd interloping journalist--quipping about various trials and tribulations of the game's production process, musing on his method for writing for games, and even dropping a few gems about some stuff that didn't quite make it into the final product. While there are a few mild spoilers peppered throughout this article, nothing is specific enough to inhibit any of the game's significant surprises.

On the Subject of Portals, and Why There Almost Weren't Any

It's been mentioned before around various corners of the Internet that Portal 2 almost didn't have any portals at all. Originally, the team spent the first six months of development time working on a clandestine new mechanic called "F-Stop." Wolpaw wouldn't elaborate on what F-Stop entailed (as he believes they may still use it someday down the road), but stated that early playtesting led to the removal of F-Stop and the return of the portal gun. Too many people were wondering what happened to GLaDOS, and why they couldn't shoot portals. "People didn't want a clean slate," said Wolpaw.

On the Story That Almost Was

With the development of F-Stop also came a fairly different script from what the final game ultimately turned out to be. "It took place in the 1950s," he said, "GLaDOS wasn't in it, Chell wasn't in it, it was Cave Johnson and the story of him getting put into a computer and realizing he was making a huge mistake." However, once the F-Stop mechanic was shelved, the story was rewritten to benefit the return of the portal mechanic. "After that we decided we were going to do this farther in the future, bring Chell back, and have everything be decrepit in a way that lets you see the results of what you did in Portal 1."

On the Game's Hotel Room Introduction

One of my absolute favorite portions of Portal 2 is actually its hysterical--and, apparently, fairly complicated--introductory scene. The scene features Chell waking up from a semi-lengthy slumber to a sort of " Jack Wagner in Disneyland" kind of computer voice and finding herself in a miserable-looking hotel room. Wolpaw says that this intro was actually born out of a bigger, kookier idea.

 The faux-hotel room, pre-destruction. "We were going to do this thing where we were going to try and visualize what it was actually like to be in suspended animation," he said, "Like it's actually this real-time simulation of you pacing back and forth in this shitty hotel room. It was just going to be the worst thing ever." Evidently, the transition between the perceived hotel environment and the real world just wasn't quite working, so someone simply said, "Why don't we make it an actual hotel room?"

At that point, the host of the evening piped up that it reminded him of the intro to the movie Oldboy, which Wolpaw confessed to having never seen. "Oh good," he added jokingly, "I hope this is just going to be a long series of 'Where I plagiarized from.'"

On British Comedians (Namely, Stephen Merchant)

Stephen Merchant's performance as Wheatley in Portal 2 is something pretty special. Maybe it's a little weird that his voice lacks the kind of vocoding effects so prominent in GLaDOS's persona, but in retrospect, altering his distinctive voice might have spoiled the top-notch comedic timing and seemingly improvised riffing that made Merchant's work so memorable.

Merchant's character, "Wheatley" As it happens, Merchant wasn't the first actor the team went after. Wolpaw had originally envisioned Wheatley as a slightly "more hectoring and annoying" character, and for that personality, he hoped to tap Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and The IT Crowd actor Richard Ayoade. IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan actually happened to be a fairly big Left 4 Dead fan, and had even sent the team letters in the past. So Wolpaw just asked if "his friend Richard" would want to be in their game. Regrettably, he was unavailable, due to his work on the Sundance darling indie comedy, Submarine, which he directed. Wolpaw assumes Ayoade doesn't regret the decision too heavily.

Wolpaw became familiar with Merchant through the BBC series Extras, and the actor became a factor during the game's writing process. "We'd been writing writing writing, and we'd been listening to this Stephen Merchant podcast. And, for lack of a voice, we kinda started writing in Stephen Merchant's voice."

Though the team didn't originally think he'd do it--they assumed he was probably "too rich," what with him owning 50% of The Office and its many different iterations--Merchant quickly signed on. Wolpaw was nothing if not effervescent about his work on the game. "He has this just awesome ability make things that are written down sound off-the-cuff," Wolpaw said, "I'm really really happy with the way this turned out, in the sense that it's a very natural-sounding performance, and it's just something that I hadn't seen a lot in games."

On Writing Dialogue for Games and Necessary Programming Experience

The subject of the Valve writing team's process came up at multiple points during the course of the night. Apart from an off-handed comment on their writer's room format being loosely based on a book that detailed the environment crafted by The Simpsons writers during the show's heyday, as well as something Wolpaw saw in a Deadwood DVD extra about that show's writing process, mostly Wolpaw spoke about how knowing a little bit of coding can only do any aspiring game writer some good.

He specifically mentioned that early on in the development process, he and co-writer Chet Faliszek would actually do all of the dialogue set-up work themselves. "Chet and I did this on Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress and I also did it on Psychonauts, which is we write all the dialogue, we record it, we cut it ourselves and we wire it into the game so that the timing's right." This process, he says, helps immensely with making sure the lines have the exact impact they hope for.

On Chell, and Her Utter Lack of Dialogue

Chell has always been of the silent protagonist ilk, which Wolpaw admits is often "a thing," but not exclusively "a Valve thing." When asked why Chell remains mute throughout both titles, Wolpaw cited it as being in service of the game's comedy.

The silent protagonist. "There's this thing with comedy, there's sort of two different patterns. One is, you're the straight man in a world gone mad, and the other one is you're a crazy person in a sort of straight world. Portal is definitely the world gone mad straight man, and the straight man is you. And again, because you have to write in the margins in a game, time is at a premium, so the fact that there's already this established thing where you have a silent protagonist, that saves us a lot of time. You may want to know Chell's backstory, you may want to hear her say things, but I guarantee, if she had to say her straight man lines at the expense of half of the other dialogue, it would suck."

While that might be of little solace to those who still want a little more out of Chell's character, Wolpaw feels the game is far more about your relationship to the world than Chell's. "I don't think people are super invested in the character of Chell... obviously because we haven't given her much character. But they're invested in the relationship they have as the player."

Just in case you were wondering, though, Chell isn't really a mute. "We always assumed she could talk," said Wolpaw, "She just chooses not to, what with the robots all being dicks. Why give them the satisfaction?"

So many fat jokes...

On GLaDOS, and Her Torrents of Insults

One audience question brought up GLaDOS and her at least passing resemblance to someone's verbally abusive mother. Wolpaw more or less confessed that some of GLaDOS's particular brand of chiding does come from a personal place. "I was a fat kid my whole life and I had this passive-aggressive grandmother who was always needling me about it. That's kind of where that came from."

Originally, though, GLaDOS was apparently written to be a good bit meaner than she ended up being in the final product. "We definitely took some stuff out that was hated [by playtesters]. We got a lot of feedback on the initial GlaDOS arc, after you wake her up, that she was just too vicious and mean and people were kind of getting ground down by how awful she was being to you. Even Ellen [McLain] in the studio, she was kind of nervous about reading some of the stuff. She was just like, 'Wow, that's harsh.'"

Sadly, Wolpaw wouldn't bust out with any specific lines, so we'll just have to imagine what horrible things she might have potentially hurled at us. I personally envision something involving lady beards.

On Playtesting, and Non-Gamers' Need to Read

Valve has always taken a "playtest early, and playtest often" stance with its products. As Wolpaw put it, doing so prevented people from getting too ridiculously attached to any one specific idea. If something keeps failing over and over again right in front of you, that idea becomes fairly difficult to defend without displaying a great deal of personal hubris.

One of the more interesting anecdotes that came out of the playtest process came largely from people who self-identified as not being much into games. Specifically, they would often take long, pained looks at each of the large signs that precedes each of the game's testing chambers, looking for instruction on how to play the level. This would be in direct contrast to how those who did play games on a regular basis would often just go straight to work. In Wolpaw's opinion, "People who play games have this intuitive sense that the designer is going to make it so you don't have to read this sign. That they'll leave the breadcrumb trail in there and I can ignore the sign as anything but flavor text."

On Jokes That Didn't Make the Cut

When asked about any especially memorable material that perhaps didn't find its way into the final game, Wolpaw did come up with one nifty little gem. You may recall some of the spheres that appear at the game's conclusion, including the ridiculous Fact Sphere and Rick the Adventure Sphere (who Wolpaw says can actually affect a slightly different outcome in the game's finale, provided you sit through Rick's entire dialogue spiel), and originally there was another one. The " Morgan Freeman Sphere."

Like this, but spherical. Recalling Freeman's character in The Shawshank Redemption, Wolpaw grinned as he described the bizarre concept. "There was this Morgan Freeman sphere, you find him in this little 10x10 room, and he was the wisest guy about this 10x10 space. He doesn't know anything about anything, he's blown away by the shit that's five feet outside his space, but has a lot of advice that all kind of relates to things that were in the 10x10 space."

"So he was gonna be pretty good," he added somberly. "I guess we can't use him now."

On Portal 2 as an Adventure Game

Throughout the evening, the host often attempted to chip away at Wolpaw's barrier toward pretension and over-self-analysis. But during one, brief moment, Wolpaw was willing to let his guard down and make a comparative statement regarding Portal 2's relevance to a bygone genre and how it could help make it better.

The future of adventure gaming? "So here's something pretentious!" he exclaimed, launching into a good-natured tirade on old school adventure games. "There are things I do like about adventure games. I used to play them when I a kid, I liked the writing, they tend to be very funny, but the puzzles were never very good, and there was a huge disconnect… just mechanically I was never a huge fan. I used to like to tell [Tim] Schafer that all the time when I was working there [at Double Fine Productions], about all the crappy games he made."

In Wolpaw's mind, "Portal is kind of an adventure game! You're not shooting people in the face, it requires some thinking--but the puzzles are very logical--and it's got a storyline through it." And as for anyone currently thinking about delving into the adventure genre? "I think if you were looking to make adventure games, and you wanted to reach a bigger audience, [you could do] something along this line."

On Crafting an Ending that Allows for a Future

All too often these days we find ourselves inadvertently trapped within proposed trilogies that may or may not actually ever be seen through to their conclusion. Cliffhanger endings are just too-frequently the norm. This is something Wolpaw wanted to avoid with Portal 2's conclusion, which he feels is "satisfying," were the story not to pick up again in a future sequel.

Were the series to pick back up, however, he feels there are "enough questions" leftover to create a solid starting point. And as for Chell's role in any possible sequel? Wolpaw seemed reluctant to again put her through the kind of torment she's endured over the last couple of games. "She's been through a lot," he said, "Let her have her day."

#portal2 The lead character of the Portal series is silent. For two games, Chell hasn't spoken, and one of the pesky robots that chatters away at her in Aperture Science even suggests there might be something wrong with her. More »

 Chell never looked so good. As much as we all love Portal 2, I know that every single one of you has, at one time or another, wished in your heart of hearts that the game were a little bit more like a Logan's Run-meets- Super Fly 1970s sci-fi action exploitation extravaganza. It's a story that's just begging for that kind of treatment.

While the folks at Valve are unlikely to grant you your greatest of wishes in playable form, one of the studio's artists, Tristan Reidford, whipped up a completely amazing '70s-style movie poster featuring the game's various characters. While your immediate reaction might just be to make it your desktop background, you can actually do yourself one better and put it on your real life, non-computerized wall, as the poster will be going on sale in the Steam store in a couple of weeks.

As our own Ryan Davis histrionically pointed out over Twitter this morning, yes, there are a few spoilers floating around inside that poster. We're going to drop the main poster below If you haven't played yet, so maybe don't stare at it too hard? As for me, I know I'll be grabbing one as soon as they go on sale. 

     

That’s me done for the day, but I saw this over at gaming.reddit and basically needed it to be on the RPS frontpage over the weekend.

Seattle-based artist Tristan Reidford has made a 1970s-style movie poster for Portal 2. It’s an absolutely stunning piece of work, and awaits you in full after the jump.(more…)

#lookatthis It's not, of course, but if it were, then maybe it would look like Tristan Reidford's stunning send-up. Reidford is an artist at Valve, where he does mainly modeling. He should do more movie posters. More »

#theyarestillthere Owning a 3D printer must be like owning magic. Because that's all they seem to do. Just...spit out magic. Like these custom Portal 2 turrets. More »

#relax I know you've been curious about video games for a little while now. And how could you not be? People around you talk about them all the time. More »

#blip Atlas and P-Body in all of their LEGO glory (Flickr, thanks James) More »

#space Reader Sean is moving into "an industrial-style condo" in the coming weeks, and felt like tailoring his home decor to match. So he's built himself a Portal 2-themed end table Cave Johnson himself would be happy to hurl lemons at. More »

#thewaterhole One of the unsung heroes of Portal 2 is the "Animal King". See here for reference. Here, artist Burton Durand gives us a look at the regal turret's beginnings. More »

This one appeared during our second weekend of yacht-hammocking, and is well worth a watch. It’s one of the first truly impressive Portal 2 trickshot videos I’ve seen, themed around the throwing of cubes. I love that there are people out there who see games completely differently to me. They see paths my mind would never think of. Take a look.

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As part of an attempt to find some sort of enlightenment, we've been attempting to free ourselves from the tyranny of earthly desire. Sadly, that's just been completely ruined by these handmade Portal 2 figures created by custom toy builder Sabretooth.

Well, we hope you all enjoy them. We'll be over here trying to regain all the built-up spiritual clarity we've just been robbed of.