Half-Life and other Valve related news
Our friends at Valve have announced that their new free Portal 2 DLC will allow players to easily create, share and play custom Portal 2 maps. The title of this DLC is typical of Aperture Science, it’s called the ‘Perpetual Testing Inititive’.
Unfortunately, co-operative mode will not be supported initially.
It will be available to download on May 8, 2012.
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The guide book opens with:
A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s there telling you what to do
And that pretty much sums up the philosophy of the Valve workplace.
Inside you will read about what is expected of a Valve employee including self motivation, task selection and peer evaluation. Some pretty Valve-esqe diagrams assist with some explanations.
Valve has a popped a page for Half-Life 3 up on Steam. A Spring 2013 release date is suggested. Check it out.
There is a reason that most games don’t allow cross-platform play. Playing with a keyboard and mouse is considerably different to playing with a controller.
Console games are given handicaps like auto-aim to make the gameplay run smoother and as a result tactics in any game can differ greatly depending on whether or not you are playing on console or desktop.
On the other hand, Portal 2 is one of the few games that could pull off cross platform play. Shooting a portal into a wall and jumping through it doesn’t require a whole lot of different coordination skills.
Additionally, according to both Games.On.Net and GameArena, if you buy a copy of the PS3 version and then link your PSN with your Steam ID you will be rewarded with a Mac or PC copy of the game free (to be downloaded of course). Looks like I better wipe the dust off my glorified DVD player of a PS3 and snatch me up a copy of Portal 2 on PS3.
All I can say is that Sony must have forked out some big dollars for this. This game had better be big.
If you were looking forward to falling through walls in Portal 2 next February you are going to have to hold on another couple of months.
The Valve press release writer has commented on this small delay being evidence of ‘Valve Time and Real Time converging’ seeing as this is the smallest delay Valve has made to one of it’s games til date.
Of course this delay could be the beginning of a series of delays. Lets keep our fingers crossed that it isn’t.
So, when is the release date you ask? April 20, 2011. It will be release for PC, Mac, Xbox 360 and PS3 (Nintendo = Fail, sorry). Most retailers are taking pre-orders already so you go confirm your copy today.
Oh and be sure to check out the teaser trailers over on the Portal 2 site. They are a giggle a minute.
Below is a video of the new co-op mode: