Mysterious Portal update is mysterious

Not to be outdone by a worldwide PS3 outage, the original catastrophically malfunctioning 'bot, GlaDOS, is back in the news today. Or at least, her game is.

Valve's quietly released a new update for smash-hit brain-bender Portal that includes one new achievement and an incalcuable amount of mystery.

Oddly enough, Valve didn't even acknowledge the achievement in its patch notes, instead justifying the update by saying that it "changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations."

And that's only the beginning. Using Portal's in-game radios, players can unlock an achievement called "Transmission Received." On top of that, curious Steam users took a peek under the game's hood, which led to the excavation of a series of new Morse Code-encoded sound files. As of now, translation efforts are ongoing.

Sorry, people who are lost at sea or stranded in the middle of nowhere. Your only lifeline's busy with a videogame at the moment. Pretty awful time to forget your cell phone/have it eaten by a whale, huh?

If you'd like to grab a string and help unravel Valve's mysterious mystery, there's a Steam thread you might be interested in.

Our guess? Well, we're just going to go with the most logical assumption and say that it's probably a Left 4 Dead 3 announcement. What else could it be?

Thanks, Kotaku.