Valve have confused me
So Steam's doing its wee updates, I check what they're updating and I see this
what?
Portal
Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations
what?
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Hmm... look at the bottom...
Exellent find! I smell Portal 2 on the horizon. I may just start playing through this now
Tell me about it, nobody else could get away with the stuff they pull
Old jokes aside, it's gotta be Portal 2. It could be Episode Three, but I'm not getting my hopes up that high.
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/19/game-informer-no-half-life-2-episode-3-for-you-in-2010/
Ah, sweet distractive scent of advertising.
That said I hadn't played the game in ageess and i'd forgotten how good it is (and considering I thought it was friggin excellent that's saying something)
This puts all that viral marketing that Lost and Alias done to shame
Oh man, oh man oh man. The possibility of Portal 2 has me excited, like a...well, like a imprisoned test subject promised cake. Anything remotely involved with Erik Wolpaw has me excited.
Damn you, Valve.
It's really freaking creepy. The audio files are freaky, the images freak me out, Portal is different and it makes a scary noise when you destroy a radio. It's cool, but freaky.
Valve you magnificent bastards!
Valve you magnificent bastards!
It's the best bit of marketing I've ever seen. Ever.
It's only the second day with the Valve thing, and there's been a lot of steps to it.
Weird Portal Update that adds radios and a new achievement, then 26 weird audio messages, some guys realize it's an old ham radio method for sending images over the radio, so they decode them into images.
The images are a cryptic code that eventually gives out a bunch of letters and numbers that (with the assistance of deciphering some morse code messages in the game) turn out to be a modem address, then people connect to the modem, hack into the site and retrieve a bunch of ASCII images.
It's required a shitload of insight and weird radio knowledge, The Joker was apparently a lot easier.
It's pretty obscure.
Maybe to you. Sorry but something figured out within two days like that can't be too obscure. It can be constituted as "easy".
This may last a while, however, the Joker virals lasted months. They had to to tie fans until the movie's release, or at least until the first real full length trailer.
Actually, know what, I concede. I'm not gonna argue over this; it's not a contest and it's not on topic.
You know how you could play an old video game's soundtrack on a CD, but the first track always sounded weird because it was actually trying to interpret the "game data" as audio? This reminded me of that, but again I was iffy on actual radio knowledge and I knew there was an army ready to figure this one out for me well before I would, so I wait.
I honestly thought it was just a scrambled audio file, though. I'm impressed by what we got. Still, it just took a guy with the right hobby to make the extremely easy connection between radios and radio codes.
Steam users are generally a lot smarter (when it comes to tecchie stuff) than movie fans, but it did take people awhile. This has been bigger than previous ARG's though, the main thread has had 1.25 million views and it's only been like 30 hours. I love bees has 3 million views and that was since it first came out. So it has a lot of user participation.
Come back in a few days, there'll be more content.
Also, 1.25 Million Views isn't User Participation, that's a measure of User Consumption. There very well could have been about 1.25 Million users reading to figure out how to get the achievement and what the message means without comprehending or attempting any of it. My guess is that more people are consuming it on the side than are actually PARTICIPATING in the event.
There's not that much left to do now, there's only the BBS server and about 20 people are accessing that, but most of the files have been retrieved. By participating, I meant people commenting on the images and watching the hackers. A bunch of them set up a live stream of them accessing the server, and when I was watching there was 300, but when the first guy went on 700 people were watching them.
What I liked about the first clue was it was such a big content patch to the game. The radio puzzle probably takes 30-45min to solve, but considering the game was only 2 hours long to begin with then it's a pretty decent addition. The only obscure bit was hacking the game and decoding the sound files, the code was relatively simple and people picked up it was a modem address pretty quickly.
Did you read about aperturesciencephotography? It's an unrelated website that has a fair few portal references (apparently they're all coincidences, and they're pretty random (like a photo having the word "Chel Pharmacy" and people linking that to the character Chell in portal)) and everyone saw it and became really suspiscious. The site owner got a couple hundred phone calls from randoms and had to shut down the website with a post saying it was unrelated to Valve. It was really funny.
Here's hoping there's a step 2.
Yeah, I got Morse Code as well. I think everyone got that, but you'd have to have access to the game's data files to decode it, as it just plays in a loop and you can't tell where to start.
I heard the sounds after reading about the images, but to me it just sounded like scrambled audio too. There's still that weird noise when you destroy a radio left to decode, but I think that's just a few music tracks played simulatensously and scrambled heaps. It's pretty freaky to hear it suddenly when playing late at night lol.
I expect as much yep.
I'd be participating too but somehow Portal hasn't updated properly and I can't even get the radios achievement to work properly.
BUT, there is a certain connection between "Aperture Science Technologies" (the Portal facility) and HL2: EP3, as Aperture supposedly created Borealis.
Coincidence? Vastly unlikely in my opinion.
Why would Valve go to all this trouble simply over Portal 2?
This ARG is actually a bit boring now. I mean barely anything has happened. There's 400 odd people connecting to the server, but pretty much everything has been taken off of the server.
Wait.. take that back. I think something is about to happen. The BBS server is giving weird messages apparently.
We will see...
I like the new ending more.