Portal 2 Message Board older than one year ago

- All Test Courses are always available in Offline Splitscreen.
- Fixed the Calibration Course sometimes not being selectable from the in-game pause menu.

#portal Well, file this USB Portal turret under "Things you can get me for Christmas that I'll only use once but will still totally love." More »

#portal Now that the world has moved on from making giant sharks float around by the magic of fancy air, we can move onto more interesting things like Portal personality cores. More »

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The Move-based 'In Motion' DLC for Portal 2 drops in 3, 2, 1 ... okay, not now, but on Tuesday, November 6 for $9.99. The full game also gets Move support on the same day.
The Sixense-developed DLC includes 20 new test chambers, as well as letting you play with the size of cubes, drag placed portals. and rotate objects. These motion-controlled features are specific to the DLC, but the patched-in Move support applies to the full game, both in single-player and co-op.

The DLC coincides with Portal 2 coming to PSN as a download, with Move support built in. The price hasn't yet been disclosed, but PlayStation Plus members can look forward to it and the In Motion DLC being 30 percent off at launch.

Until this weekend, I hadn’t revisited Portal 2 since the release of the Perpetual Testing Initiative. I vaguely assumed that user-built test chambers would fall, broadly speaking, into two types: so easy that they made me appreciate the complex genius of the originals, or so difficult that they made me appreciate the simple genius of the originals. Replaying Portal 2 at the end of 2011 also made me realise that the puzzles were the bits in between the prattling robots and the archaeological ascent through Aperture. I spent more time smiling than thinking with furrowed brow. Naturally, then, a set of user-made levels that form a story appeal more than standalone levels. Designed for Danger is such a thing and, from the little I’ve played of the eight levels, it’s high quality stuff.

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#portal Designed For Danger is a Portal 2 mini-campaign created by Patrick Murphy, which adds eight new levels and around 1-2 hours of gameplay to Valve's first-person puzzler. More »

#watchthis Cortana bickering with Wheatley: think about it. The two are strong personalities in their own rights, but put together they make for some hilarious banter. More »

Think Geek now sells a somewhat downsized version of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, which is good news for people that work in super cramped cubicles, as well as tiny baby children looking to perfectly accessorize a Halloween costume that was obviously their parents' idea.

At $60, the bite-sized gun features accurately colored lighting effects, portal-specific sounds and articulating zero-point energy manipulator claws, just like the bigger, sold-out versions. It also includes a display stand, which will be helpful if you're the first type of person we mentioned above. At just 12-inches, however, its cosplay potential is limited to children, as a standard ASHPD measures 30-inches long.

But hey, you know what they say: "It ain't the length of you Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, it's the momentum cancelling abilities of your Advanced Knee Replacements." Or something.

Sure, everyone and their mother has made a custom Portal gun at this point, but the fine folks at Hackaday have raised the bar into the stratosphere. The floating Companion Cube effect was accomplished by ripping out the magnets in a floating globe, and the cube itself was created to proper size and weight specifications.

The gun itself is not custom, however - it's store bought. The process of creating the Companion Cube and applying the magnetic housing to the Portal gun itself is pretty interesting, all of which you can check out in the video above and through the source link below.

A four-disc set collecting your favorite ditties from Portal and Portal 2 is set to test how high your speakers go on October 30. In addition to all of the Portal 2 numbers, this physical collectors edition set (the collection is available digitally for free) will make available 13 songs from the original Portal for the first time ever. There's also a mini-comic bundled in called "Turret Lullaby" but you can read that online right now if you want.

The full list of tunes is available after the break, including such favorites as Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive" and "Want You Gone," plus the remaining songs composed at Valve.

#watchthis We're pretty big fans of Zachariah Scott, a very talented cinematic designer at BioWare who likes to tinker quite a bit with Valve's Source Filmmaker. More »

A four-disc set collecting your favorite ditties from Portal and Portal 2 is set to test how high your speakers go on October 30. In addition to all of the Portal 2 numbers, this physical collectors edition set (the collection is available digitally for free) will make available 13 songs from the original Portal for the first time ever. There's also a mini-comic bundled in called "Turret Lullaby" but you can read that online right now if you want.

The full list of tunes is available after the break, including such favorites as Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive" and "Want You Gone," plus the remaining songs composed at Valve.

#portal Mark Oshiro does things. He has, in a sense, made a professional life out of being a fan. For several years, on his sites Mark Reads and Mark Watches, he has tackled fan favorite TV shows (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who) and novels (Harry Potter, His Dark Materials) one episode or chapter at a time. The catch is that he only reviews stories for which he is completely unspoiled. The results are generally hilarious, and Oshiro has developed a fan following of his own. More »

#fineart Realm Lovejoy is an artist currently working at Half-Life and Team Fortress developers Valve Software. Having helped create student title Narbacular Drop, which later evolved into what we now know as Portal, she's also interned at Nintendo. More »

#watchthis Wow. I have never been terrified of GLaDOS, but that human-looking version of her is quite creepy. I think it's the eyes. More »

- Fixed departure elevators not properly playing their informational videos.
- Fixed overly shiny ground in certain maps.
- Reduced development spew from previous updates now that the Workshop bug that affected a small number of users has been corrected.

#portal Valve artist Realm Lovejoy tweeted this video earlier in the week, saying "Look at what I helped unbox today at work". Which is a lot calmer than I've had said it. More »

Between imaginary cakes, talking potatoes and combustible lemons, you might think Portal couldn't get any stranger. Well, it could have gotten stranger - even stranger than Cave Johnson trapped in a computer - as Valve writer Eric Wolpaw revealed during a PAX panel. Wolpaw told the audience that, originally, Chell was going to marry a turret during Portal 2.

Chell was supposed to discover a lost tribe of turrets, help them out and eventually be married to one by the Animal King turret. After this, the turret would follow Chell, according to Game Informer, "in a similar fashion to Watson in Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis."

And that brings us to the sole reason for writing this post: An opportunity to post the Creepy Watson video after the break. For added fun, imagine that Watson is a turret.

#dayz Among the many highlights from the Erik Wolpaw/Tim Schafer panel at PAX this past weekend was a brief exchange where an audience member asked what Wolpaw thought about the disconnect between authored single-player games and games that allowed truly personal stories to emerge, like Notch's Minecraft and Dean Hall's DayZ. More »

#portal At PAX Prime in Seattle, Double Fine's Tim Schafer and Valve's Erik Wolpaw gave a panel called "Plot vs. Play" in which they discussed the ongoing debate about gameplay and story. The panel was co-hosted by Kotaku's own Jason Schreier. More »

Cave Johnson, the eccentric, unstable president of Aperture Science, was going to have a more purposeful role in Portal 2, writer Erik Wolpaw said during the Plot vs. Play panel (hosted by Joystiq's Ben Gilbert) at PAX Prime today.

Wolpaw described the following scene, which was cut from the final version of Portal 2 after Valve realized it was too vague mechanically for players to enjoy: Cave Johnson's voice said, "I'm Cave Johnson" over the intercom, followed by, "No, really, I'm Cave Johnson. Look down." Cave's personality was trapped in a computer and he begged to be unplugged, while players found use in his hardware and had to push him against a wall to jump on a ledge.

In the end, the gameplay didn't fly and the scene was removed entirely. We like to think that means Cave got his wish, and he's not still trapped inside a box, screaming about lemons and plugs.

- Fixed bug that was causing some users to have connection issues when attempting to use the quickplay feature in co-op.

#portal Portal 2's Wheatley doesn't really have a body. He's the robotic equivalent of a floating head in a jar. Which makes it easy for him to whizz about the game's levels, but makes it hard to craft a decent action figure out of the guy. More »

#portal2 Anyone who's played a Portal game knows that Aperture Science's charmingly neurotic turrets are full of bullets. And CEO Cave Johnson showed off their design in this teaser video last year. More »

#portal The fine folks at Jinx have rolled out a fresh batch of Valve products, featuring some amazing Portal 2 shirts and a pair of underwear that you'll need to incinerate to earn your freedom. More »

"You should sit down," the Portal 2 blog recommends, because there's big news in the world of science. Valve has added co-op to the Perpetual Testing Initiative - the company's fancy name for the hit game's level creator. Meaning, armchair designers can now publish co-op maps for users to consume.

Valve has also added a "Quick Play" feature that creates a "never-ending, auto-generated" playlist of the highest rated user-developed maps. "It has literally never been easier to figuratively jump in and literally play some Portal," the wordsmiths at Valve claim.

As an added treat, Valve is offering current owners of Portal 2 a 75% off coupon for a second copy of the game. Just the thing you'll need to get a friend in on the action. Who are we giving out copy to? American astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium Neil deGrasse Tyson, of course! He knows a thing or two about intricate bodies of work. As soon as he accepts our Steam friend request.

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#portal In the spirit of the many "Meet The" videos from Team Fortress 2 comes this fan-made video by Harry Callagan. Made mostly in Premiere Pro and Photoshop (not in Source Filmmaker!), it's an impressive showing, considering that Callagan describes it as something that "started as a very quick visual test, but grew into something a little bigger." More »