I was watching the TV show “Sliders” on Netflix, when I saw this scene… which immediately reminded me of Left4Dead:

‘Course, for it to work, Bill has to be a brilliant twenty-something quantum physicist with a wormhole generator built into his cellphone, but otherwise it’s pretty good.  Wade makes a really good Zoey, and I can so see Rembrant shouting “Reeeeloading!” with that shotgun!

The episode is “Rules of the Game,” the first episode of Season 3.  You can see it here if you have Netflix.

A year and a half after it’s release, Portal is no longer the “game that everyone talks about.”  But it’s joined the ranks of DOOM, Quake, Half-Life, Sim City, and Super Mario Brothers as one of those games that everyone seems to know.

Even “normal people” (read: non gamers who remember what sunlight looks like) can recognize Mario, Zelda, and Sonic.  And in order that the “normal people” would be able to understand the jokes that Programmers and Gamers make about Portal, I wrote this handy guide…

For the gaming/programmer community, Portal is THE GAME. Seemingly from nowhere, this game burst upon the scene and took the nerd world by storm. Excellent storyline, snappy dialog, challenging puzzles, and an awesome space-warping gun combine to create an incredibly memorable game.

Nearly overnight, the hacker lexicon got some new words and phrases. This guide will help you make sense of most hacker conversations you may hear that refer to Portal.

The Cake is a Lie

The artificially intelligent computer that runs the series of puzzles (known as the Aperture Science Computer Aided Enrichment Center) goads your character along by stating that “cake” will be served to you if you survive all the tests. However, graffiti on the walls of the center proclaim otherwise… stating that the cake being promised is a great, big lie.

Hackers generally use this phrase either as an icebreaker or as a description of a situation where somebody is motivated to do a difficult task for a promised but unverified reward.

I’m making a note here: Huge Success!

At the end of the game, the computer gives you your final review. At the beginning of the review, it says “This was a triumph. I’m making a note here: Huge Success!”

Like Trekkies shouting “Qua’pla!” (Klingon for “Success!”), programmers are now known to say that they are “making a note here: Huge Success!”

The Companion Cube

The Companion Cube is an inert storage cube imbued with a personality by the game programmers to trick game players into carrying this cube throughout a puzzle, but then requiring them to destroy it at the end. They did such a good job, however, that game players have become attached to this “Companion Cube,” going so far as to build little paper models or buy plushies of this “character.” Generally, you’ll hear a hacker talk about how they would never let go of their companion cube, or something along those lines.

Aperture Science Thing We Don’t Know What It Does

Programmers find long multi-word names for products to be humorous. The game developers played on this concept:

• It’s not the lab. It’s the Aperture Science Computer Aided Enrichment Center.
• It’s not a storage box. It’s an Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube.
• It’s not a button. It’s an Aperture Science 1500 Megawatt Superconducing Super Button.

The joke is to take, say, a mouse, and turn it into an “Aperture Science Rotational Axis 2 Dimensional Vector Detecting Peripheral”.

Now You’re Thinking in Portals

With this guide handy, you can start to understand the conversations of your Portal crazed coworkers. You will no longer be confused when a coworker bursts out laughing when holding a slice of cake. You won’t wonder why he has a background with little hearts all over it, displaying a strange box. You can now safely laugh at any name longer than 4 words, knowing that it’s most likely a joke. This won’t help with any of the other strange things developers say, but at least their conversations should be a little more transparent now.

 

Originally posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at http://theinnerlayer.softlayer.com/2008/companion-cube/

Saw a commercial for Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean Online, and because it’s free*, I thought it might be interesting to make a review on my sister site, Gamium.org.

So I went to their website, downloaded the surprisingly small installer (this is a stub installer! I told myself), and ran it. Well, installation was pretty quick as well, and I thought, neat! Well, it is a free* game, so perhaps it’s not graphics heavy, or something.

Started up the game, and it downloaded patches. OK, I thought, well, maybe the installer was a bit out of date, and this is a free* game, so I won’t complain too bad. Of course, like all games, it takes over the whole screen (I have dual monitors, so I play all games in windowed mode… however, I get the fun first run take-over-the-screen fight for screen resolution junk. Anyway, it patched the game, I updated game settings, and then it said I had to restart the game. Ok…

Restarted the game, and it downloaded MORE PATCHES. It is now 2 hours since I downloaded the game. Yeah, I’ve done a few things in between steps, but that’s because I ain’t going to breathlessly await patches… I mean, come on! Four rounds of downloading steps?

This is something that really annoys me about most of the online games I’ve sampled of. Their installers are only stub installers which download the rest of the code. But then they go through multiple rounds of patching (I’m thinking of WoW D: ) just to get to a real final install. A plea to game companies: fix your build processes, so that whenever you release big patches, you update the installer please! Please! I’ve already waited for the initial download… don’t keep suckering me along or I may decide to play TF2 instead!

Gamium.org is a game review website that attempts to review the “fun factor” of games, movies, snacks, etc.

The first beta version of the site used a really generic logo as we had not really sat down to decide of a serious logo.  This is the brainstorming sheet developed once we’d decided that we wanted to go with a “Periodic Table of the Elements” concept… the next part was to decide on the font for the “Element Name.”  Interestingly… EVERYONE liked the “12 Ton Goldfish” concept, and from there the final version of the logo was developed.

The logo concept names were taken straight from the names of the font that the “Ga” element was written in.  The fonts were all developed by Blambot; the “comic lettering” styles of their fonts had the “personality” we were looking for for the element symbol.  The rest of the logo was to be plain and square… very periodic table.  But the symbol was to be dynamic.