8 Ways to Sunday

Caught by my spam filter today: “Bush Averts Albanian Uprising by Invading Alabama”

Seems the spammers stole the headline from this satirical “news” article, but it still made me giggle.

One of the most interesting announcements to come out of Microsoft’s E3 press conference was was the upcoming release of Portal: Still Alive in the fall of this year. This is great news. In fact, one might even say that this is a triumph.

Don’t just take my word for it; here’s the scoop from GLaDOS herself, courtesy of GameTrailers.com:

But what’s this about an Xbox 360 exclusive? No love for PC gamers like myself? Well, like most statements from GLaDOS, the devil is in the details. Here’s exactly what she said:

Hello. We hope you’ve enjoyed your brief detention in the press event room. The Aperture Science Enrichment Center is pleased to announce the worldwide debut of Portal: Still Alive, a 2008 exclusive for the Xbox 360. Due to the previous tests being solvable, we are currently manufacturing new test chambers for only the most highly qualified test subjects. Good Luck.

“A 2008 exclusive” for Xbox almost certainly means an early 2009 release for other platforms. Joystiq places the release in the fall of this year, and claims that the game will continue the original story rather than just being a pack of new levels.

It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction at this announcement.

Update: Like a lot of people, I got the wrong idea from this announcement and the blog hype that followed. The official word from Valve’s Doug Lombardi is that Portal: Still Alive is just the original game with some bonus levels and no new story content. Hopefully PC gamers will still get a shot at the new maps in 2009 as a cheap add-on via Valve’s Steam service.

My favorite WordPress anti-spam plugin is now open source software. Dr. Dave, Spam Karma’s original author, is bowing out and releasing the code for maintenance by the WP user community. I sincerely hope the project succeeds, because I’ve always found Akismet completely inadequate.

You can read Dave’s announcement here. He’s already set up a project on Google Code to track future development, and a Google Group for discussion.