RPGs: Stop Making Bad First Impressions 
Is Hitman's Next Target Assassin's Creed? 
Why Kotaku Australia Should Never Work With Children... Or Robots 
Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I'll Never Say Again 
New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land No this isn’t an early April Fool’s joke. Harmonix, MTV Games and Valve have teamed up to release Portal endsong Still Alive on Rock Band tomorrow for free. That’s free for the Xbox 360 and free for the Playstation 3.
“While the cake may be a lie, the free download of “Still Alive” is confirmed truth,” said Greg LoPiccolo, VP of product development at Harmonix. “‘Still Alive’ is an awesome song that brings together great gaming and great music. We’ve teamed up with Valve to deliver a free download of “Still Alive” as a “thank you” to our fans for their incredible support.”
“Rock Band has lit the industry on fire by opening a new market for cooperative musical gaming,” said Doug Lombardi, VP of marketing at Valve. “We’re delighted Harmonix has selected the track for inclusion in the growing library of tracks available for this phenomenal title.”
With the suspicious timing I actually emailed the publisher’s back just to make sure they weren’t pulling a fast one, but they say it’s 100 percent true.
So a funny thing happened at last week’s Valve party.
As I’m sure you’re all aware Valve threw a little party during last week’s big show (We weren’t invited. I blame our butchering of their song.) and during the tail end of it they brought up Jonathan Coulton to play a set. At the end of his last song he invited the Rock Band folks up on the stage to play Still Alive on their game, a really neat way to announce that the song was coming to the game.
I got a chance to check out Portal’s famous credit song Still Alive today on Rock Band in the Harmonix hotel suite.
While the bass is a little bit on the easy side, the lead guitar, drums, and of course, singing are all the perfect level of challenging to make it fun. I’m already a HUGE fan of the song so playing it on Rock Band was a real treat. I can’t imagine a single person with the game not wanting to pick this up when it hits the consoles.
I was a little bummed to discover that while the original singing is there and can be cranked up enough to cover your truly awful singing voice, there is no modulation for your voice while you are singing. So you can harmonize with a computer, but you can’t sound like one… and we all know how awful that is.
Last night Valve held their GDC party at the lovely and white Temple Nightclub in beautiful downtown San Francisco, and a group from Harmonix were on the scene to catch a special performance by Jonathan Coulton, who you may remember as the writer behind the Portal ending song, “Still Alive”. Towards the end of his set, Coulton and the Harmonix boys pulled out a surprise. That is when we jumped on-stage and pulled out our Rock Band equipment piece by piece…When they got to the song list they scrolled through an almost infinite amount of DLC until eventually they stopped on one- “Still Alive” by GLaDOS
Remember the future Rock Band DLC found in file story from last Wednesday? Might wanna start paying it a bit more attention, cause this is one long shot that came true. Hell yes!
Valve Party at GDC + Special Preview of an Upcoming DLC Song [HMXSean's Rockband.com Blog - Thanks BatDan!]
A Japanese friend of mine on Second Life (currently an employee of Unicorn Sexxings R’ Us) pointed me towards this video she uploaded of Portal’s “digging itself inside your brain to live” ending theme “Still Alive”, translated into Japanese and completely computer generated, voice and all. It’s amazing the sorts of things you run across while shopping for fake clothes with arguably real money while chatting with a girl dressed up as an anthropomorphic horse, isn’t it?
Caek is Delishas [S.K.Y.]
