Portal's been fantastically successful in one aspect, without a doubt: having a theme song that is irrevocably lodged in your brain. This is not the first time Jonathan Coulton, the man behind "Still Alive," has made catchy tunes As it turns out this "Geek Troubadour" is a veteran songwriter and gamer, which he discussed with MTV's Multiplayer Blog:

Quote:
Later in the year Valve invited Coulton to the company's offices in Kirkland, Washington. "They flew me out there at Kim's urging," Coulton said. "During the visit they sat me down and I did a little play-testing on an unfinished version of 'Portal' and just loved it. We sat down with Eric Wolpaw, the writer...Eric said, 'I always wanted to do a musical number in a game,' and I said, 'Oooh, that sounds juicy.'

He also has talked about Portal on his blog before:

"The character is this hilarious passive aggressive personality, which is obviously a perfect subject for me. I write about that sort of thing all the time. I got an advance copy of the game when it was nearly finished, played through it, talked with the writers, and tried to get inside this character's head as best I could. I bought my first ukulele specifically to record this song, it just seemed right for it. (Or maybe I wrote the song that way so I could buy a ukulele, hard to say.)"

And just as the ThinkingWithPortals community has started imitating the Portal mappers, the Victims of Science have imitated Jonathan Coulton (sort of) with their new song "The Device Has Been Modified." I only say sort of because they've replaced Coulton's guitar with a synthesizer for a nice stroll down Synth Street. It's the sort of thing you'll like, if you like these kinds of things.

(Hat tip: Rock, Paper, Shotgun)

A new edition to ThinkingWithPortals is the reviews page.

The reviews page will hold reviews on maps and perhaps in the future other custom stuff released by you lot here at TWP. The first review is by yours truly on Lost Chamber Zero, so be sure to check that out and drop me a line.

I review every spotlight map and have freewill to review anything else I want to review. I don't have 20 internets so if you guys want me to check something out for a review, make sure you contact me via PM.

I will notice any good awesome spectacular maps that get posted, but in the event I graze over them be sure to let me know about 'em. I wont get the wedgies at you if you keep bugging me, I need some sort of motivation to do my job.

The site is going through server migrations. Please bear with us in these periods of very short downtime.

EDIT The move was a complete success, welcome to our new home on a much more powerful f0rkznet!

Now that the community is really up and running, with our first mapping contest almost to its conclusion, we've got a lot to offer. Check out our forums for discussions on all things Portal, or join us in #thinkingwithportals on the efnet IRC network.

Also, if you want to learn how to map in Portal, check out our wiki for some mapping tutorials as well as our up-and-coming entities guide. But if all you want is some more hours out of your copy of Portal, we've got some downloads for you. We have some polished, finished maps, as well as some still on the way to being done.

So stick around, leave some feedback, and be sure to come back in time for the judging of the October Mapping Contest. It'll be a tough fight for the winner.

This email comes from the HLCoders mailing list from Valve programmer, Mike Durand.

Quote:
On 10/15/07, Mike Durand wrote: I'm shooting for an update that includes the updated tools this week or early next. After that I will work on an update that includes the new game DLL code and I am hoping that it will be available in beta by the end of the month.

I'll let you guys know if I run into any problems that invalidate these timeframes.

. . .

It's a little bit complicated, but hopefully I can explain it well. CS:S (along with DoD:S and HL2MP) are going to be migrated to the new engine over the next couple of months. Until then you should not merge in the new SDK code as it will not work with the old engine. Once we convert the three MP games you will want to create a new version of the mod using the updated SDK source code. Makes sense? Sorry I can't be more specific about exactly when the games will be converted to the new engine. Mike

. . .

You will have the option of still using SDK Base which will still be linkedto the Ep1 engine or you can base your mod on the new app IDs for Ep2, Portal, or TF. We will probably make a new SDK Base that uses the Orange Box engine too.

What does this mean for us mappers? Not much at this point. The editing portion SDK is still slated to be updated within a week or so, so we won't have to be using the workaround for much longer (we hope!). What Mike is talking about is the SDK Base, which applies to the older games that are still using the older version of Source - not the Source 2007 engine that Episode 2, Portal, and TF2 use. When the older games are fully updated, then the full SDK Base update will be released, and newer mods will be able to use the new technologies - including Portals.

Here's hoping they're on time!