PORTAL TEAM TELLS TALE OF GLADOS’S BIRTH
Though by now the cake is a cliche, and we know every bar of Still Alive frontwards and back from repeat Rock Band playthroughs, the release of the standalone version of Portal on Xbox Live Arcade has given us delightful deja vu of just what was so exceptional about the game to begin with.
Helpfully, industry news site Gamasutra has reprinted its 2007 original postmortem from the development team themselves, giving us a behind the scenes look at how GlaDOS, one of the sharpest-written villains in the history of games, got her voice, courtesy some playful synthesized hacking from Valve writer Erik Wolpaw:
A week after the meeting, Erik came back with some sample dialog he’d recorded using a text-to-speech program. It was a series of announcements that played over the newly-christened “relaxation vault” that appears in Portal’s first room.
Everyone on the team liked the funny, sinister tone of the writing, and so Erik continued to write and record announcements for other chambers, while still searching for the story proper.
At some point, however, it became apparent that these announcements were providing playtesters with the incentive to keep playing that we’d been looking for all along.
Better yet, in the sterile, empty test chamber environment, players were actually becoming attached to the alternately soothing and menacing computer guide. We’d found the narrative voice of Portal.
[…]
Our hope was that by the end of the Portal, players would know GLaDOS better than any boss monster in the history of gaming. Though we knew at some point the player would have to meet and destroy her, we thought it would be even more satisfying if players got a chance to cause her some emotional pain along the way.
Thinking With Portals: Creating Valve’s New IP [Gamasutra]
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LLAMASOFT TAMING PC PORT OF SPACE GIRAFFE
Easily the most — let’s say misunderstood — game currently available on Xbox Live, Space Giraffe has also proved one of the most divisive, garnering both a dogpile of negative reviews on its release and later high praise and a cheeky comparison to James Joyce’s Ulysses by no less than Braid creator Jon Blow. (It also is the first and happy recipient of the Offworld Award for Video Games’ Best Use of Number Stations, for its fantastic opening menu.)
Though creator Jeff Minter — the very definition of cult figure across Europe for his decades of psychadelia and ungulato-philia inspired games — publicly cried foul as sales figures stagnated, Llamasoft developer Giles has announced that work is nearly wrapped on the PC version of the game, adding that it’s now been slightly retooled for those who found the original’s rainbow drips just a bit overwhelming. Says Giles of the contents of the new version:
Space Giraffe exactly as you seen it on the 360 PLUS an “expansion pack” with 100 NEW levels that “no one else has seen before”, some of them could be a bit more “vanilla” for those that found the SG original graphics maybe a bit “too blasting for their own taste” we wish this time to really manage to pleasure more and less psychedelic users :)
Meanwhile, for those of us who do like our games as eye-searingly hallucinogenic as possible, the ‘softies have also quietly announced that an updated version of their Xbox 360 music visualizer Nuon will be used for the forthcoming Xbox Live Arcade port of Taito’s fantastically re-imagined Space Invaders Extreme, which we have high hopes of being a true marriage in psychotropic heaven.
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SONY JAPAN THROWS PSP PLAYERS AN AD-HOC PARTY
With Thursday’s update to the PlayStation Network Stores, Sony has landed a major milestone in integrating its PSP and PS3 hardware — though currently in Japan only. Alongside its local Metal Gear Solid 4 demo and “Rare Week 1” LittleBigPlanet in-game T-shirt, the “Adhoc Party for PSP ϐVerison” is a free download which wirelessly links PSPs to a host PS3 and brings the majority of the PSP’s local-only multiplayer games properly online for the first time.
NeoGAF forum users have been scouring Japan’s message boards for compatibility lists, and are reporting that games like Phantasy Star Portable, Street Fighter Zero 3, Tekken Dark Resurrection and Final Fantasy Tactics have all made the online leap.
More importantly, Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G — consistently both Capcom and the PSP’s top selling title in Japan — has made the jump, coming just as Capcom makes its some-might-call-it-a-defection to the Wii for the third console volume of the Monster Hunter series. With online chat (a necessity for Hunter’s party-based tactical action) added to all games via the PS3s Bluetooth headsets, the update issure to breathe new life into that and a number of other since-neglected PSP games.
The catch? Apart from needing a Japanese PSN account to download the software (easily done with a little clever hacking about), Ad-Hoc Party requires both built-in wifi and a wired PS3 connection, so owners of the original 20 gig PS3 model, and anyone currently outside an ethernet cable’s reach of the nearest router are out of luck. Otherwise, U.S. and EU versions of PSP games have already been confirmed as working, so consult the demonstration video above and let us know how it’s working for you in the comments below.
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2D BOY’S WORLD OF GOO: THE COMMUNITY UPDATES
Like Valve’s instant-classic Portal, 2D Boy’s brilliant WiiWare/PC debut World of Goo wrapped what might otherwise be simple tests of physical derring-do into one of this year’s smartest and most subversive storylines — every bit as blackly comedic as the tar-balls themselves. But, also as with Portal, its carefully crafted structure somewhat dampens its replayability, retreading levels without that narrative grip.
And, short of forthcoming expansions from 2D Boy themselves, so it is that it’s the community to the rescue: on top of an open-source level editor currently in development, a group of enterprising Dutch have created an unofficial community site for Goo players.
Upping the ante on 2D Boy’s own automatically updated leaderboard site, uploading your PC/Mac/Linux save file to the community site not only stacks you against the competition, but lets players get a glimpse of your whole history with the game. Even better, the site automatically keeps a preview image updated of the top ten towers from the Tower of Goo meta-game, letting you marvel at the true engineering prowess at work.
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MEDIA MOLECULE SET UP THE LITTLEBIGWORKSHOP.
Apparently not content to have created one of the most charmingly transparent and inspiringly participatory games in recent memory, Sony and Media Molecule have revealed the LittleBigWorkshop, bringing social networking to the LBP community.
The Workshop includes the ‘workshop’ itself, which, it turns out, is a showcase for uploaded YouTube videos of player creations (or more commonly at the moment, inexplicably unrelated Legend of Zelda and Metal Gear Solid 4 videos), a photo collection ‘inspiration room’ (including duly inspiring photos of dolphins blowing bubble rings), and a Flash-based blueprint creator to flesh out ideas for future levels.
This on top of the requisite forums and profile pages with player Facebook and MySpace links, but, presumably, the workshop is just the first phase, with tighter PS3/web integration due as the LittleBigPlatform evolves — the site promises more tools and profile features are on their way.
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TIM SCHAFER RELEASES ORIGINAL GRIM FANDANGO DESIGN DOCS.
Though ‘classic LucasArts adventures’ is generally more synonymous with games like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Sam’n’Max, Double Fine (Psychonauts) founder Tim Schafer’s final — and, arguably, finest — game for the venerable publisher was Grim Fandango, his gritty muertos-noir gumshoe adventure that’s just past its 10 year anniversary this Halloween.
To celebrate, he’s uploaded all 72 pages of original documentation on the game as a pint sized PDF (direct link seems to be missing, but
). As he explains/apologizes upon reflection:
People said the puzzles in Grim were super hard, and I’ve always maintained that this was due to a deep character flaw or mental illness on the part of the player. But now, reading this again, I’ve realized that holy smokes–Some of them puzzles were nuts. Obscure. Mean, even.
[…]
Look how much stuff we had to cut just to get that game done in three years. The Pizza Demon! Giraffe Lady! Bernard, and my beloved Dillopede. And the five-puzzle action climax with Hector LeMans! If only we had one or two more years! Well, reading about them ten years later is just as good, right?
But, spoiler alert, the entire document is, by definition, one big spoiler. However, explains Schafer of the solution to the final act of the game:
We didn’t have the last puzzle designed when I wrote that document, so I wrote two nonsense paragraphs and then overlapped them in the file so it would look like the final puzzle description was in there, but obscured by a print formatting error. That way I could turn the document in by the deadline. As if anybody was going to read it all the way to the end anyway. Ha ha. Obfuscation triumphs again! I delight in Evil!
Just One More Grim Thing (Double Fine Action News)
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