Portal has been updated. Again.

This mid-afternoon, very much like on Monday, Valve updated Portal with yet another nugget of joy.

Monday’s was much more cryptic that today’s is…to begin with. It unleashed a new achievement where you carry around radios (26 of them) to detect interference in the various test chambers, and finding the exact point on the map of this interference causes the light on the radio to change from red to green. Achievement progress! The internet swarmed like locusts on this, decoding the intereference(some of it morse code) into ASCII pictures of large-scale, Portal-themed art.

Today’s update, however, starts off by giving the answers first and creating questions second– They changed the ending. The ending after you disassemble GLaDOS, after the building explodes, after you’re left lying on a street amongst the rubble and shrapnel of Apeture Sciences. They changed that final scene.

I’m playing through the game from scratch to complete both the achievement and the viewing of this changed ending. I truly admire what Valve’s doing here with Portal. The game came out in December of 2007, and just over two years after they’re changing main parts of the game. The same could be said for Team Fortress 2, but then again, TF2 doesn’t have much of a solid, detailed storyline behind it.