Lots of developers have been having problems with 2011’s summer season – Serious Sam 3, for example, has gone from “summer” to “22nd November” in no more than a few months. L4D2’s Cold Stream DLC went from “summer” to “around Halloween” in also just a couple of months. As for Portal 2? “Summer”, then “mid-September”, then… nothing. Has the entire DLC been lost into the sinister swirling vortex that is Valve Time? Apparently, and surprisingly, not really.

Surprise blog post time!

We were chatting with Portal 2 Lead Composer Mike Morasky the other day, and he casually mentioned that Songs to Test By Volumes One and Two have, to date, been downloaded close to two million times. We said that was nice, even though it didn’t have anything to do with what we’d been talking about (bass fishing), and we asked him if we could go back to talking about that. Mike said okay. Then he asked us if we’d ever been bass fishing a million times, because if we had that would mean we’d fished for bass half as much as the Portal 2 soundtrack’s been downloaded. This is why we don’t talk to Mike.

Yeah, but Kelly Bailey can not only fish for some mean bass, but he also made Triage at Dawn. Still, that’s an awesome record for an awesome soundtrack – one million downloads per volume? Hot momma.

Oh yeah, by the way, before we forget, the first Portal 2 DLC, “Peer Review” will be out next Wednesday. For free.

Oh, lord! At last! They gave it a name, too. An interesting one, at that. Does that mean it might have a story to it? Well… I think it might. Let’s check out the official press release:

In “Peer Review”, you and a friend will continue the story of loyal bots P-Body and Atlas as you puzzle your way through a mysterious new co-op test track and once again match wits with GLaDOS. The DLC also features a single player and co-op Challenge Mode, and leaderboards to compare Challenge Mode scores with friends and the Portal community.

Mysterious? What, did it just pop out of the ground or something? Will there be new testing elements? I assume so, since it can be pretty hard for a DLC pack that’s taken nearly half a year to come out, to impress, if it has no new gameplay mechanics. And will there be any advanced chambers, or will we only be seeing Challenge maps? But the most important question of all is – will it be released on the 4th or 5th? The blog post says “next Wednesday”, and that’s the 5th. But the press release explicitly points out the 4th of October on several occasions. Well, let’s hope it’s the 4th!

Moving on, Volume 3 of the Portal 2 soundtrack has finally been released. It might be the first time they’ve released something with the number 3 in it – really big step. In any case, this brings the series to an end, and this means we now have the full Portal 2 soundtrack. All of it. “Portal 2 Official Soundtrack: Songs to Test By”. All 64 tracks of it. That’s like, what, a mega-album? A super-album? I’d call it an ultra-album or a turbo-album, but it does NOT have “Exile Vilify” (or Yanni’s Santorini, or the Smooth Jazz song, though those are of far less importance than Exile Vilify), so it’ll have to make do with super-album or something. So if you’ve got the previous volumes, head over to the Music page, download Volume 3, and add it to your collection. Alternatively, you could download the complete soundtrack, but the tracks seem to be arranged in some strange order that, in my opinion, isn’t as good as the arrangement of the tracks if you download the Volumes consecutively.

But I bet you’re more excited about the new comic – “Turret Lullaby”! It’s pretty small – just 6 pages, but it’s great! It explains how testing for the consumer version of the Sentry Turrets went – how does one go about ensuring the Turret wards off would-be baby snatchers, but does not get the baby crying? It also explains how Turrets can somehow sing. Sadly, it does not explain how the babby in question is formed, and that’s just not good. All jokes aside, I loved it.

It’s gonna be a long couple of days, friends. But at the end, we’ll finally have Peer Review on our hard-drives. It had better be good – it’s been in development for almost half a year. And then we can start waiting for the second DLC.