The highlight of my gaming year is undoubtedly the Steam Christmas sale. During the most recent celebration of this annual festival, I picked up the entire works of Frictional Games, specialists of the horror genre. It took me a couple of weeks to work my way through their Penumbra trilogy, and was impressed for the most part. The three games tell the story of Philip, who receives word from his not-as-dead-as-he-thought father about some mysterious discovery in the frozen wastes of Greenland. Naturally, Philip decides to go visit, and soon finds himself trapped in an underground complex, fending off an array of monsters in the dark. Or something. Amnesia has a similarly daft plot; the protagonist Daniel suffers from the titular condition, and he must make his way through the castle of a mad European baron (in the dark), piecing together his memories, while dealing with the monsters within the walls, and within himself. Pretty forgettable faire, but I'd like to think that its lack of depth serves a purpose; it stands to one side and lets the engine deliver a fulfilling experience in the place of an engaging narrative.

In order to communicate what I enjoyed about Amnesia, it's important to talk about its engine. The developers are definitely engine people, in that all of their games utilize a game engine of their own design called HPL, and Frictional are rightfully proud of it. I've recently discovered their development blog, which makes for interesting reading, and shows how enthusiastic they are about creating rich, believable worlds, and delivering emotionally intense experiences. Their entries are sometimes highly technical, but it is always satisfying to read the thoughts of a developer genuinely interested in their own work. The four games are rendered from a first-person perspective, an ancient technique for helping a player feel immersed in the world, but an important one when dealing with high emotions, like fear. The eye and the ear are well simulated, with subtle tricks such as the gradual adaptation of your perception when moving from a light area to dark one, and the utterly brilliant surround sound. But not only is reality simulated here, the same techniques and rules are bent to simulate the unreal with great effect. The game measures your health and your sanity, when the latter is spent, your vision warps, and you start to hear things which only may be there.

On top of the smart visuals and illustrative sound is a set of physics which encourages interaction with the world. Drawers must be pulled open with a mouse gesture; doors pushed; wheels turned and objects thrown. This may not sound especially exciting, but it is a vital ingredient in the way encounters with the castle's inhabitants are served. More than you'll find yourself hearing something enter the adjacent room in search of you, and knowing there is no way out, hiding in a wardrobe, peeking through a crack in the door at the shambling form, holding your breath and hoping it does not discover you. Amnesia is full of moments like these, and Frictional have made very good use of visual and audible cues to instruct the player, delivering just enough information to make them aware of a threat, just enough to suggest that there may be a chance of escape, just enough to make them afraid.

Amensia is literally the most scary game I've ever played. Frictional are true conductors of the senses, and masters of fear. Unlike so many horror series of film, each of their games is an improvement on the last, and the news that Amensia did well beyond their expectations is encouraging, as I eagerly look forward to their next title. I'd play it in the dark, with headphones on, and my feet in a bucket of ice cold water if they asked me to.

Sony Move: It's like the Wii, but with fewer wires

Xbox Kinect: It's like the Wii, but with fewer controllers

Nintendo 3DS: It's not like the Wii. It's not like anything we've ever seen before

New Zelda, new *Goldeneye*, new Kirby, new Mario, new Metroid, new Donkey Kong, new Pilotwings, new Kid Icarus

Nintendo win

Last night, Valve released a surprise update to their cult hit, Portal.

Under normal circumstances, an update to a two year-old game would probably not be worth noting. However, these are far from normal circumstances. The last piece of Portal-related news we saw was a minor update in June 2009. Due to its nature as a single-player puzzle adventure, Portal probably enjoyed the peak of its success and internet popularity during its first few months, while we were all telling each other the baked confections were false, that our endeavours were a success. In other words, it's been a while.

The text accompanying the update doesn't mention bug fixes, issue resolutions, or even hint at new content:

"Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations"

Oh really? How could any fan and internet-sleuth not immediately jump into the game, and see what Valve's playing at?

Completionists would notice very quickly that a new, description-less achivement, "Transmission Received", has been added. Astute observers would also pick up on the radio, a small prop sitting in your cell at the beginning of the game, which now features a red light. Grabbing it, one might discover that bringing it with you to the next room causes the light to turn green.

26 such radios have been added in total, and on repositioning each one, the player is rewarded with a short burst of static. Inside some of those noises, and this is where things really start to get cryptic, is a piece of morse code. Minutes after the update hits, and the Steam forums are rife with speculation. Before anyone announces they've secured the full achievement, someone has extracted the new sound assets from the game's content files.

dinosaur01.wav through to dinosaur26.wav, with 1, 5, 12, and 17 featuring morse code. An hour later, and they're decoded:

#1 - Dinosaur 1
=====================================
Interior transmission active
External data line active
Message digest active

#2 - Dinosaur 5
=====================================
9e107d9d372bb6826bd81d3542a419d6

#3 - Dinosaur 12
=====================================
System data dump active
User back up active
Password back up active

#4 - Dinosaur 17
=====================================
BEEP
BEEEEP
BEEP
BEEP
BEEEEP
BEEEEP
BEEEEP
BEEP
BEEEEP
BEEP
BEEP

The second message is googled, and discovered to be an MD5 hash, for the string "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". The fourth turns out to be double-encoded morse code, and spells "LOL". But what of the rest of the sound files? They sound a lot like... data.

A few attempts at steganography are made, but when one poster announces they've successfully extracted an image from the sound, using an ancient ham-radio image decoding method called SSTV, the thread explodes. It's difficult to make out the whole picture from all the noise, but the Aperture Science logo is clearly visible in the corner.

Individually, none of the images contain any clues about where this is all leading. Several feature letters and numbers, often as close-ups of computer keyboards. The text "BBS" is seen in one. Another has an array of pound-symbols (#), in a format suggesting a phone number. After a collected effort, fuzzy images are eventually clarified, and the lone characters and digits are strung together:

9459C6CAC8C203B8128B7CC63068D4FD

Hexadecimal. The clues from the morse code suggest another MD5 hash. Passing it to any MD5 decrypter site provides the following plaintext:

(425) 822-5251

God bless rainbow tables. Gabe Newell's home phone number? Not quite. Anyone remember what a BBS is? While the younger forumites express their ignorance for how the internet used to work, those with the knowledge of the ancient ways are scrabbling around in their attics for 56k modems. Someone dials in...

GLaDOS login:

Oh, to have been the first person to have seen that flashing cursor prompt! But how to get further? Usernames and passwords from another of Valve's old tease sites, aperturescience.com, don't work. The correct credentials were actually much closer, back in the first message extracted from the morse code. Just a few hours, and hundreds of pages of forum discussion after the original update was announced, the community hits paydirt. Entering "backup/backup" rewards the user with a host of ascii imagery, and message extracts from Aperture Science staff, such as this one:

jsow remind you that Aperture Science is built on three pillars.
Pillar one: Science without results is just witchcraft. Pillar two: Get
results or you're fired. Pillar three: if you suspect a coworker of bein' a
witch, report them immediately. I cannot stress that enough. Witchcraft will
not be tolerated.

So what does it all mean? The BBS MOTD greeting could be a hint:

---- APERTURE LABORATORIES GLaDOS v3.11 ----

3.11? Don't forget Valve are Amercian, and using their backward date format it isn't too much of a leap of logic to suggest it all points towards March 11th, which just happens to coincide with the GDC conference, Valve's next expected public appearance.

I'm not going to be the only one tuning in to the event news that day, eagerly waiting to hear something exciting. Well done, Valve.

Originally found here

Praise.

It's brilliant. Throughout the whole game, each story, recruitment, and loyalty mission was different. Even the randomly discovered side-quests and assignments, which used recycled environments and flat characters in ME1, all felt fresh and unique. A remarkable accomplishment, and one of the many signs that BW genuinely listened to and learned from the reactions of the players of the first game. ME2 is bigger, and better, in just about every possible way. The writing team deserve some kind of award, I've never been as entertained, for so long, by any other game, ever. I smiled, laughed, and nearly cried at several points. I was pumping my fists during the final mission. Sure it has its clangers, and occasionally the voice acting is sub-par, and every so often you notice some horrible clipping, or floating, or some other immersion-breaking 3D modelling blunder, but there is just so much greatness in the game, it would be petty to pick up on these rare occurrences. It's beautiful too, with superb surroundings and vibrant inhabitants. It may all be scripted, but Mass Effect 2 feels more alive than Oblivion, or Fallout 3, or any other game I've seen that attempts to simulate living worlds.

Remember the time before Bioshock came out? Remember the promises we were made, of the profound moral choices we'd have to make? Remember what a disappointment that was? ME2 lives up to those promises. One is forced to make some genuinely difficult decisions in ME2, decisions which would stump any normal person in real life. Mordin's loyalty quest I think is the best example of this. Having a planned trilogy has allowed a game (two now) where we won't learn of the outcomes of our actions, until years have passed. Much like things often are in real life, I find. There's no quick-saving and reloading just to see what would have happened had we decided not to help Liara, or to see what long-term outcome of our missions on Tuchanka. We'll just have to wait and see. Or play through the game multiple times, and keep multiple saves, I guess.

Now, criticism!

I appreciate the work BioWare have done in streamlining equipment and inventory, but it left very few customisation options. There seemed to be little point to the newer guns, which were for the most part existed only as "Upgrades the x". If they were superior weapons, then why let me choose an inferior one? Why not just roll them into the upgrade system? Maybe if they each had their own advantages and disadvantages, like a trade-off between fire rate and fire power, then the choice might make more sense. I'm just being picky though, as the combat was a vast improvement over the previous game's, and is comparable to other FPS games, but a little more choice would have been appreciated.