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Portal 2

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Sweet. I was just doing my bit for the Portal 2 release (even though I currently don't have it pre-ordered) and loaded up AaAaA! They've added GladDOS quotes to the game. Nice touch!

I imagine all the Potato Sack games with have this kind of tweak.

Edit: Oh crap, they've added new levels and everything. :tup:

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who knows if this is true or not, but from RPS:

Update: Thanks to RPS readers Unaco and Hats Al Esman for sending the following in- we now have some specifics on how this works and what can be done to help.

“Remember the Potato Sack? GlaDOS is apparently drawing “power” from

computers playing games in the potato sack. For every collective 48 hours

for one particular game, that game’s “power bar” goes up by 1%. And Steam

needs to record you actually playing the game – just leaving something

idling in the background does not contribute.

The potatoes we all frantically collected can still be collected – in

fact, you are a major contributor if you even collect one potato in one

game. Potatoes multiply that game’s particular power, so if, say, you

gathered 5 potatoes in Audiosurf and one in Bit.TRIP BEAT, you’d be

multiplying EVERYONE’s efforts in Audiosurf by 6x and BIT.TRIP BEAT by 2x.

Some people seem to think that launching multiple games is a good idea.

This is in fact, not helping at all, because Steam only records keyboard

activity in games launched through Steam, not through external launching.”

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PORTAL TWO

Made me wonder if "Potato" / "Portal Two" was an inside reference (code name?) or something before the promo, or if someone came up with playing off that similarity just for the indie game pack.

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Haha.. that's great!

I remember when Telltale Games was teasing their second game with a character silhouette. Everybody was of course hoping it to be a Sam & Max game and some thought that it kind of looked like Max only without the ears and his skull crushed to a new shape. And I was the first one to notice the Bone site in the friends section of the site...

Which reminds me of another great arg. Bad Moon Entertainment's this-may-be-about-Sam-and-Max-but-we-didn't-say-that arg that never got anywhere (I think?). I wonder what Wolfgang Kierdorf is doing nowadays.

Anyways, Bit Trip Beat is magnificent!

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yeahhh i think they may have mis-estimated how much work it was going to take to get it done. if i were them i would have aimed for a < 24 hours window. right now we're looking at maybe monday?

unless they're trying to breed despair in us and this was all planned?

jeff.jpg

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yeahhh i think they may have mis-estimated how much work it was going to take to get it done. if i were them i would have aimed for a < 24 hours window. right now we're looking at maybe monday?

Well the original release date was the 19th. I honestly believe it'll be done by Sunday the 17th (note that the estimation keeps going down because of the "Potato multiplier" -- it's not a steady rate).

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Actually I'm a bit disappointed by the final "challenge" ; I was hoping for one final epic ARG - what with GladOS hijacking some ARG player steam accounts in the last hours of the countdown - a game that would unlock Portal 2 upon it being solved...

Hurray for indie promotion and all, but farming potatoes and leaving Super Meat Boy on in idle is really an underwhelming and non-sequitur conclusion to this affair, in my opinion.

Edited by vimes

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Hey guys, remember those thousands of hours over thousands of people we made you work? Well here's the reward! Idle in indie games for a barely-early release of Portal 2!

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Apparently sitting idle isn't enough. I read somewhere that they're actually making sure the games are being played. That might just be a myth though; I can't think of how they'd do it.

Does anyone have the Potato in Audiosurf? The websites I've seen say that you just need to get gold on the song that GlaDOS infected our computers with, but I've done that and received nothing.

EDIT: The slider for The Wonderful End of the World has turned blue and is marked 'COMPUTATIONS COMPLETE'. Any idea how they judge that?

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Apparently sitting idle isn't enough. I read somewhere that they're actually making sure the games are being played. That might just be a myth though; I can't think of how they'd do it.

Does anyone have the Potato in Audiosurf? The websites I've seen say that you just need to get gold on the song that GlaDOS infected our computers with, but I've done that and received nothing.

EDIT: The slider for The Wonderful End of the World has turned blue and is marked 'COMPUTATIONS COMPLETE'. Any idea how they judge that?

You do need to be active, it monitors keyboard input, I guess you could write a macro to do that for you if you wanted.

As for judging when a game's 'computations' are complete, they presumably have an arbitrary figure for how much each game needs to 'compute' and a figure for how much 'computation' each 'CPU' does over time.

6:46pm

~2 hours

8:39pm

1... 2... 3... KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby) is surely going to be next.

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So at this rate it'll release like... 1 hour ahead of schedule? :mock: Wish that shit would hurry up, especially since I saw a store that sold it for PS3 already!!

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You do need to be active, it monitors keyboard input, I guess you could write a macro to do that for you if you wanted.

I had just left SMB running, which apparently didn't count. So now I just plugged in my xbox controller and put a rubberband on the stick to make him run into the wall. Hopefully the game won't time out the level or something. I'm about to have the worst 1-1 time ever.

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So at this rate it'll release like... 1 hour ahead of schedule? :mock: Wish that shit would hurry up, especially since I saw a store that sold it for PS3 already!!
As of posting time, we appear to be 16 hours ahead of schedule.

Not sure how they're calculating it though: http://www.gamingmasters.co.uk/portal/

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I think it's pretty nifty because GlaDOS has "hacked" into these games -- FOR REAL. As in, these unrelated games have ACTUALLY been modified for this ARG. Everyone is working together to "reboot" GlaDOS which will, in turn, set the events rolling in Portal 2 (she'll no longer be dead).

I think it's pretty damn genius... making us willing pawns in her rising. Literally making us part of the story. It's the best ARG I've ever seen.

That said, they may have underestimated how much effort would be required from everyone :-/

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I suspect if it becomes apparent they've been way too ambitious they have subtle ways of accelerating things somewhat.

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Everyone is working together to "reboot" GlaDOS which will, in turn, set the events rolling in Portal 2 (she'll no longer be dead).

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It's too bad this doesn't seem to make it much earlier than the actual release date, but maybe their calculations take into account how many people were normally playing those potato sack games and the number of additional people who started playing them for this wasn't really that great?

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I can't stand any of this viral bs Valve spews constantly. It's really turning me away from the games. The only thing keeping me interested at all is that the actual games are bound to be terrific.

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Does anyone have the Potato in Audiosurf? The websites I've seen say that you just need to get gold on the song that GlaDOS infected our computers with, but I've done that and received nothing.

i got it last night. it's the <test> song. if you play it on easy (i'd recommend it), you have to get 180,000 points on it. it has to be with the portal graphics, if you beat it with regular audiosurf "themes" it won't count. it's actually pretty hard, it took me like 2 hours to beat it.

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I can't stand any of this viral bs Valve spews constantly. It's really turning me away from the games. The only thing keeping me interested at all is that the actual games are bound to be terrific.

Well I think you're in the minority that it actually bothers, because for most consumers, it's probably helping their sales.

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Wouldn't be very good marketing if it didn't. I'm just confused by how people get so excited about marketing.

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It's just a bit of fun for most people. Lots of people enjoy solving ingenious puzzles; lots of people enjoy getting games they're salivating for a few days early, especially if they feel partially responsible. Both requirements have been satisfied by Valve's marketing of Portal 2.

The fact it's marketing is obviously there, but marketing isn't exactly some kind of enemy. In fact we're usually the first to bitch when a game's marketing isn't good enough and a superb game fails to sell well. :fart:

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