If you happen to be one of those few people who call themselves a gamer but is yet to play the award winning Portal by Valve, we have some good news for you. Steam News tell us that Portal is now available for $9.99 i.e. INR 437.50 on the PC, which means Valve is giving the game away at a hefty 50% off.

Before the procastination bug bites you again, we would like to add that the offer is valid only for this weekend i.e. till September 1st. Take out your credit cards and get this game before the offer expires. Seems like Christmas has come early for PC gamers!

Back in 2007, Penny Arcade released their “We’re Right” Awards, stating the best writing, soundtrack and new game mechanic awards. Predictably, the winner for all of them was Portal – something that we and many other gamers agreed on back then.

However despite this, it is in my opinion that at the very least, I have made a grave error. Portal’s story, despite being an amazing adventure with a compelling story and some of the best characters around (not to mention being responsible for spawning quite a few internet memes) was NOT the best story of 2007. It was NOT the best writing of the year, surprisingly.

So you may ask, what pray tell was the best story of 2007? What game could be better than GLaDOS or those incredibly cute turrets that let out the innocent “Whyyyyy?” whenever you toppled them over? Was it Bioshock? Andrew Ryan and Rapture were awesome after all. Was it maybe C&C 3? If those were your guesses, then I’m afraid your dead wrong. Hit the jump to find out just which game managed to trump GLaDOS and was an even bigger lie than the cake.

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Yes, yes, we all knew this was coming, but now we have pictures, straight from the Steam Update News. Delivering on their promise of giving us all our own lil’ fluffy Weighted Companion Cube for Christmas, Valve has announced that it will soon be taking orders for the plush toy, along with fluffy Companion Cube dice for your car’s rear-view mirror. There’s no mention on the pricing yet, but it should sell for about $30 - around the same price all their plush toys seem to retail for. As for me, I shall call mine Fuzzy and he shall be mine… at least, until they start preorders for the Portal turret toy…

We all love Portal and think its the best thing since people discovered that the Internet could be used for stuff other than boring research papers. So quickly, before you question about how perverse we are, let us tell you that we did not make this. There isn’t much to say about this lil’ slash-fiction doodle, so I won’t say it.

But the real deal is, Portal is for lesbians! Or that’s what Heroine Sheik says. Obviously being as sarcastic as GLaDOS herself (we hope), the article looks at a number of in-game imagery that apparently point to such a conclusion - including the presence of an all-female cast and the “reshaping” of guns to fire orifices (or vaginas, for you purists) instead of bullets. Hmm, I always thought guns were just guns, but I guess I should start looking at everything in terms of sex. Not that I already don’t, but just saying…

After stumbling on the fact that the Weighted Companion Cube is indeed a male (hello, the achievement is called “fratricide”. Also, picture! ^^^ ) which kinda puts a lil’ ding in her argument, she pulls a Freud on the usefulness of men - “They’re cute, but they’re a burden.” Strange, that’s exactly how we men feel about women at times.

I suppose I could just as well look at Portal and start dragging religion and politics into the whole mess. Or I could just look at a set of blueprints and see a drinking bird. But I think I’ll go do what I do best. Run up behind a turret and grab it, chuckling as it panics and starts saying stuff that are eerily reminescent of what my girlfriend says if I do the same thing to her.

The world seems to be a really weird place. And no, we don’t mean otakus and tentacle pr0n, but really bad reviews for Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Sure, we may not (and probably never will) have given it bad scores, but some people apparently think it doesn’t deserve all those lofty numbers attached to it.

In a review in the Mumbai Mirror newspaper earlier this week, infuriatingly titled “A Half-Lived Experience”, the game was granted a measly 2/5 stars, giving fans like ourselves a reason to direct a lot of hatemail their way. Sure, the guy’s got a point - the story does seem to be hopelessly LOST (get it?) and a lot of gameplay elements have been generously borrowed from its predecessors, but that’s like saying Twilight Princess sucks because not a lot has changed from Ocarina of Time. With confusing references to Combines and outright bewildering sentences like

This combo package of five games, being offered for Rs 999, is a steal. The distributors, Electronic Arts, aren’t planning on making the PC version available in India, and I simply can’t understand why.

when the 999 buck package IS the PC version don’t really help lend a lot of credibility to the review. Especially when the footnote specifically mentions the PC version’s pricing. We’ll also just assume that the chap has a great reason (which we’d love to hear) for recommending a Steam purchase, considering it costs twice as much as the retail version here.

Wonder what happens when this guy gets his grubby mittens on the hundred other AAA titles launching soon. In the meantime, stay tuned for our own, better (?) reviews of Team Fortress 2 and Portal, assuming I can manage to pull myself away from GLaDOS’ experiments for 20 minutes to write the damned thing.

Right, so y’all already know how I’m completely head over heels in love with Portal, GLaDOS, Jonathan Coulton and Ellen McLain after that great “Still Alive” ditty. And, obviously, I’m not the only one. Jonathan Coulton, the genius behind the best damn end credits song ever made, reveals the inside scoop on how the song came about and how Valve might be planning to make it officially available through Steam - maybe even with a version of him singing it. Hey, don’t look at me. I’m just as eagerly waiting for the Weighted Companion Cube paperweight and the Portal turret toy to end up on the Valve Store. Or I could just lose patience and make one of my own from all these cardboard boxes that I, strangely, seem to have lying around…

The jury’s been out on Portal for some good time now, and we’re all pretty much convinced that the cake was the truth all along. Not to mention it was spankin’ tasty to boot! But after living the experience and sharing them with your message board mates, there might be a slight chance that you’re asking for a little more. Primotech’s Alex Petraglia has just the prescription for you: implementing the Portal Gun in other Source-engined games! Follow the instructions step-by-step, and you’ll be raring to go.

It should be mentioned that this experimenting isn’t without its kinks. You can’t have NPCs or enemies go through the portals you make, but other weapons and their accompanying ammunition effects should be a-okay. Alex also adds that “it may take some time to figure out which surfaces work and which don’t, since obviously this is no longer clearly indicated by the textures.” Hopefully, prospective modders are working ways to have the gun better utilized in games that weren’t built around the weapon’s concept. Or even better, make their own Portal spin-offs! Like, whoa.