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Hey everyone! So what have I been up to over the past few days? I've not been playing Backyard Monsters anymore, so I've been having to find other games and such to occupy my time, and I have plenty to go through.
But what's actually caught my attention was Potato Fool's Day, which happened on April 1st. A strange set of games went up on sale at Valve's Steam system, called The Potato Sack. I didn't think anything of it really, until about a week later when ... I think it was Kotaku wrote up an article on strange potato-related items popping up.
It was a strange thing. Games in the Potato Sack had been updated to have these hidden potatoes, including a pair of games that I have, Audiosurf and Super Meat Boy. In Audiosurf you play MP3s to create a track the game plays on - by playing a specific song from the Super Meat Boy soundtrack, and not hitting any of the grey blocks, your ship would eventually come across a giant potato at the end of the level. In Super Meat Boy, when you had 20 bandages collected, "Super Meat World" opened up which allowed you to download "Super Potato Boy" which replaces your character with a spud.
So um, yeah. I started reading up on this, and found out that this was an Alternate Reality Game (or ARG) leading up to Portal Two (remove some letters from Portal Two and you get PO TA T O).
It was discovered that all the games in The Potato Sack had glyphs that connected the games to one another - in Super Meat Boy, for example, you found a glyph that linked to Audiosurf, and an associated letter with the glyph. I won't bore you with the details, but the companies behind the 13 games also started sending out strange e-mails with strange alliteration, which somehow corresponded to the glyphs and their positions in one game, unlocking DLC which gave up concept art for Portal 2 and strange soundfiles... it's been really strange.
This morning, I figured I would jump in a bit. I discovered you could get "potatoes" on your Steam Profile if you accessed certain things in the Potato Sack games, so I launched Audiosurf and SMB and played around, to their specifications, and got Aperture Science login pages. Inputting the passwords netted me the DLC (which had already been unlocked by others, too) and a Potato on my Steam Profile. I now have four, and this has been making me feel rather accomplished. ^^
Well, since the game comes out in less than a week, it appears things have been stepped up a bit. Today, around 11 in the morning, a slew of the most prominent ARGers suddenly disappeared. They all signed-off and haven't been heard from all day, and the developers have been reporting even odder responses, and from what I can tell, it appears that GLaDOS is behind it all - not really a surprise, but she appears to have taken over the companies' twitters, YouTube pages, e-mails, even the Wiki and IRC, and the players are getting nothing more than eerie Everything is fine replies with the random scary message. So a number of other ARGers are having to step in and take the reins, as it were, to figure out just what the heck is going on.
Rumours are flying around as to what this will all culminate down to. There was a hint dropped back in "Phase One" that the release date might be pushed forward to April 15th (this Friday!), but I have no idea. Based on how intense things are getting though, it can't possibly last over the weekend until next Tuesday, can it?
Can it? ^^
But what's actually caught my attention was Potato Fool's Day, which happened on April 1st. A strange set of games went up on sale at Valve's Steam system, called The Potato Sack. I didn't think anything of it really, until about a week later when ... I think it was Kotaku wrote up an article on strange potato-related items popping up.
It was a strange thing. Games in the Potato Sack had been updated to have these hidden potatoes, including a pair of games that I have, Audiosurf and Super Meat Boy. In Audiosurf you play MP3s to create a track the game plays on - by playing a specific song from the Super Meat Boy soundtrack, and not hitting any of the grey blocks, your ship would eventually come across a giant potato at the end of the level. In Super Meat Boy, when you had 20 bandages collected, "Super Meat World" opened up which allowed you to download "Super Potato Boy" which replaces your character with a spud.
So um, yeah. I started reading up on this, and found out that this was an Alternate Reality Game (or ARG) leading up to Portal Two (remove some letters from Portal Two and you get PO TA T O).
It was discovered that all the games in The Potato Sack had glyphs that connected the games to one another - in Super Meat Boy, for example, you found a glyph that linked to Audiosurf, and an associated letter with the glyph. I won't bore you with the details, but the companies behind the 13 games also started sending out strange e-mails with strange alliteration, which somehow corresponded to the glyphs and their positions in one game, unlocking DLC which gave up concept art for Portal 2 and strange soundfiles... it's been really strange.
This morning, I figured I would jump in a bit. I discovered you could get "potatoes" on your Steam Profile if you accessed certain things in the Potato Sack games, so I launched Audiosurf and SMB and played around, to their specifications, and got Aperture Science login pages. Inputting the passwords netted me the DLC (which had already been unlocked by others, too) and a Potato on my Steam Profile. I now have four, and this has been making me feel rather accomplished. ^^Well, since the game comes out in less than a week, it appears things have been stepped up a bit. Today, around 11 in the morning, a slew of the most prominent ARGers suddenly disappeared. They all signed-off and haven't been heard from all day, and the developers have been reporting even odder responses, and from what I can tell, it appears that GLaDOS is behind it all - not really a surprise, but she appears to have taken over the companies' twitters, YouTube pages, e-mails, even the Wiki and IRC, and the players are getting nothing more than eerie Everything is fine replies with the random scary message. So a number of other ARGers are having to step in and take the reins, as it were, to figure out just what the heck is going on.
Rumours are flying around as to what this will all culminate down to. There was a hint dropped back in "Phase One" that the release date might be pushed forward to April 15th (this Friday!), but I have no idea. Based on how intense things are getting though, it can't possibly last over the weekend until next Tuesday, can it?
Can it? ^^