Who is this writing a news post on the front page!? Damn you Rupert!!

Anyways, as most of us know Portal 2 came out just yesterday at a midnight, well 12:30 AM EST, early release. Valve had the entire Steam gaming community playing a dozen games from their April Fool's prank release and people were starting to think whether they were being trolled because it took an eternity to complete a game. I do believe that Valve planned to do a midnight release all along, but just used this to play with the community. During the final minutes of the countdown GLaDOS had cheated her way into insta-finishing the last two games (Killing Floor and Super Meat Boy) required to restart her systems and initiate the release. You can view everything about the April Fool's event they did and view the countdown page below:

[http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1824635]
[http://www.aperturescience.com/glados@home/]

A good batch of us started to play and have been quite pleased over all with the gameplay and story. I have completed both the Single Player and Multiplayer (Coop) campaigns and can fully say that it was overall much more invigorating and exciting than Portal 1. I was a little disappointed with the Coop being too easy and a bit short, but it was still good regardless. The ending for the Single Player campaign was extremely well done, the credits song was decent but still not as good as Portal 1's. The total amount of gameplay to complete everything is about 10 hours, 5 hours each for Single Player and Multiplayer depending on who your partner is.

A well known feature to Team Fortress 2 is hats, and Valve did not waste any time adding this feature to Portal 2. You can buy in-game clothing (hats, flags, etc.) to modify your Cooperative Testing robots. There are a variety of items to buy from, but you can buy everything in the store currently for about $30-$40 with the discount package they have (a money grab I know, but who cares it's Valve). I guess you could call it Portal 2's Limited Edition *harhar*. There is also a trading option available, but it is currently unavailable and will probably be added later on as well as other store items. Another little feature they added to the main menu was an interactive trailer for the movie "Super 8", I had no idea what this was but the scenes were outstanding, the Source engine has come a really long way.

Let's see...what else can I ramble on about...As everyone knows, Valve is a leading supporter of Mods and Indie development. The SDK for Portal 2 has not yet been released yet but it will be later on. We can expect a lot of mods from the gaming community and get even more, challenging, puzzles. If you haven't grabbed it, you can get it for $35 at Amazon or a few other places that are doing discounts. The PS3 version of the game is pretty much a 2 in 1 deal, one for your PS3 and one for your computer. So that wraps it up for the Portal 2 segment.

In other news:

• Minecraft 1.5 was released with many new features
• Minecraft will be phasing out of beta in November this year
• Duke Nukem Forever was delayed another month and will release June 14th (NA), June 11th (INT)
• AMD/ATI released its Dual Chip video card 6990 this month, fan is loud but still packs a punch
• nVidia also released its Dual Chip video card GTX590, packs a punch as well, but there is little room for OCing (nVidia removed key parts to not allow voltage OCing)
• Diablo 3 will have more content overall than Diable 2 period [Interview Clickeh]
• Crysis 2 ends up being a slap in the face for PC gamers, no DX11 on release only DX9 [Patch supposedly coming with DX11]
  - Also, no sandbox editor
• Battlefield 3 looking amazing, but we'll have to wait till November to see if it is or not
• Elder Scrolls: Skyrim still in development
• Nintendo released the 3DS
• Call of Duty: Black Ops to be releasing Mod tools in May (Good news?)
• Dragon Age II releases, a lot excited about hidden DRM and shorter than expected campaign
• Rumors about Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo preparing next-generation console dev teams

On a side note: I saw that Portal 2 was nicely sponsored by ATI, was getting excellent 300 FPS while playing in Windowed Mode.w

Troop Dr.Phil was here. Secretly.