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#gamemusic2011 Kotaku's "Best Game Music of 2011" is a multi-part series in which we'll be discussing the best video game soundtracks of the year. Today, we'll be looking at and listening to the interactive robo-crunch beats of Portal 2. More »

#halflife This one's a bit of a stretch… but then, what am I talking about? It's never a stretch when it comes to Valve. More »

Who fancies a mystery? Valve prepared what must have been an incredibly expensive video for the VGAs’ best character category, starring Wheatley, complete with Stephen Merchant’s voice, floating in space and begging for help getting home. So, that’s nice and fun, if lacking in the big laughs. (He didn’t win.) But of course Valve being Valve, they’ve filled it with more details. Not many, but there’s Russian text, star constellations in the background and weird numbers, which of course means those with a mind for such things are tearing it to pieces. Of course, it might have just been filler to make the image more interesting. But Valve MUST know by now that anything they add is going to be analysed to pieces, and they’re clearly the sorts to troll their community in every imaginable way. What do you make of it?

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Ellen McClain, the voice of none other than Portal 2's GlaDOS, was probably the most charming celebrity to stroll down the red carpet at the Spike Video Game Awards. Sure, the reality show stars and athletes may have attracted more attention, but McClain was all smiles as she used her operatic voice to talk about how great the limo ride to the show was. "This is so funny," she laughed, "the last time I was in a limo was in LA in 1981 with Rex Harrison! So only thirty years later, I have my second limo ride!"

McClain said she too has been charmed, by the fan response to her popular character. "I love the way the fans are wondering who is Chell, is Chell the offspring of GlaDOS and Cave Johnson, all this stuff. And I also think that the Portal games have drawn a lot of young women into gaming." She said that she and husband John Patrick Lowrie, who also does voices for Valve's games, have "gone to some fancons, and the women are so excited, they come in and they're either dressed up like Chell or they're dressed up like GlaDOS."

And we haven't heard the last of McClain yet. "Eric Wolpaw told me in the limo," she said, "that it has been announced, John and I have both done voices for Dota 2. So we're going to be in there."

"There are a lot of characters in Dota 2," confirmed Lowrie. "There are like 100 characters, so we've done quite a few of them."

After ruminating on the things we're thankful for, spending days acting courteous and compassionate with family and friends, we're about due for some good, old-fashioned envy. Little Vector Farr has possibly the coolest bedroom a kid could ask for -- It's Portal-themed, complete with companion-cube plushies, propulsion gel on his mat, portal panels and a GLaDOS camera above his bed.

But why stop there? We're not only envious of this kid's stuff, we covet his inclusion in a family that is obviously way radder than our own, and a father who is teaching him the truly important things in life, such as physics and how to treat our future robot overlords. His name is Vector. We want that too.

And if all that jealousy weren't enough, Vector has a Portal-themed bathroom as well, attached directly to his Portal-themed room. Yeah. Happy holidays, everyone.

#culturesmash Every year since 1957, the Good Design Award (aka "G Mark") has been awarded to a standout Japanese product. The award marks excellence in Japanese design. A committee of sixty designers is given in a broad category of products that enter in the selection process, whether that be home electronics, apartment buildings or apparel. More »

#portal Portal's Aperture Science got its start in 1953 producing shower curtains for the US Army. So it's poignant that in 2011 the company goes back to its roots, and produces shower curtains for...your bathroom. More »

#portal Vector doesn't only have a customized bedroom, he has a Portal bedroom, complete with Companion Cubes and an Aperture-branded toilet. Ah, to be a kid! More »

#nolannorth Any way you slice it, it's been a good year for Nolan North. At this time last year, the ever-present voice actor had become something of a go-to joke—people had cottoned to the fact that his voice was featured in 50% of the video games that had been released that year (slight exaggeration), and had started to give him some good-natured jibes. More »

“Level with Me” is a series of conversations about level design between modder Robert Yang and a level designer of a first person game. At the end of each interview, they collaborate on a Portal 2 level shared across all the sessions – and at the very end of the series, you’ll get to download and play this “roundtable level.” This is Part 3 of 7.

Of everyone I spoke to, Magnar Jenssen is the only one still actively working in the game industry as a lead level designer at Avalanche Studios. Before, he also worked on Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 (GRAW2) and Bionic Commando at GRIN, up until the studio’s demise. When he isn’t raking in all that sweet map-stamp money from arena_offblast for Team Fortress 2, he tinkers with some less profitable but absurdly polished single player Half-Life 2 mods.

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Valve announced today that the second add-on for Portal 2 is coming out in 2012. The update will add on an "easy-to-use in-game map editor that will let users design, build and share their own single-player and co-op test chambers with the community." Effectively, this means that knowledge of the Source engine is no longer required to make custom maps...

Soon, you too will be able to make your own Portal 2 levels full of weird goo!

The next piece of content for Portal 2 is something slightly unexpected: an in-game map editor.

Valve says the editor will allow users to create both single and co-op stages, and will be “easy to use,” which suggests an interface much simpler than what is usually used to build levels for games.

Players will also apparently be able to “view, play and vote on them [levels] with a simple click.”

What that will end up looking like, however, isn’t known, as the update isn’t coming until next year.

The second big update to Portal 2 will feature "an easy to use in-game map editor that will let users design, build and share their own single-player and co-op test chambers with the community, who will be able to view, play and vote on them with a simple click," Valve revealed today. It will be out in early 2012. We shared more details earlier this week (time warp!). More »

Valve has just unveiled plans for the second downloadable content package coming to this year's big sequel, Portal 2: an "in-game editor!" According to a PR statement from the company, the next DLC is currently "in development and targeted for release early next year."

Apparently some form of community functionality will be attached to player creations, allowing other users to "view, play, and vote" on various levels. Outside of some cursory details -- the editor will allow players to create and share both single-player and co-op levels -- little is known about how editing will work, or if the DLC will arrive on both PC/Mac and consoles.

With Steam support on all but one console, the Xbox 360, we wouldn't be surprised if the second Portal 2 DLC doesn't arrive everywhere. But then Valve head Gabe Newell indicated differently in a recent interview, so we just can't be sure. We've reached out to Valve for some clarity.

#fanart Comics artist Alex Garner whipped this Portal 2 tribute up in his spare time. It feels strange calling it fan art. There should be a better name than that for pieces like this. More »

We've seen our share of homemade Portal turrets, even huggable ones. What we haven't seen, until today, is an official (and huggable) Portal turret that doesn't require crafting skills and a significant time investment. Enter ThinkGeek, which will exclusively offer its plushie Portal turret this December.

The adorable menace comes complete with a glowing red eye and motion detector, and will spout its trademark lines when someone (or an unsuspecting pet) saunters by. The turret even has context appropriate quotes when it is picked up or knocked over ("critical error," etc). The plushie goes on sale in mid-December. Interested test subjects can sign up for an email notification of its availability over at ThinkGeek.

Unlike real Aperture Science turrets, it appears the plush model only comes in one color.

#portal The people who made Portal 2 want to make it easier for you to make more Portal 2, according to a new report about the making of the game's Peer Review expansion written by GTTV host Geoff Keighley. More »

#portal This Portal 2 turret stands 14.5" tall. It's soft. It's cuddly. And it talks. More »

#portal Yesterday during a writer's roundtable at the Game Developers Conference Online, Valve's Erik Wolpaw, Marc Laidlaw, and Ted Kosmatka opened up on some of the processes - and problems - they had writing Portal 2. More »

Updates to Portal 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

- Fixed the Talent Show achievement not being awarded properly

Again! Again! It’s our theoretically regular comparison of Steam’s top ten best-selling games over the last week with the same at UK retail. Will Rage have stormed its way to the top despite the outrage and buck-passing surrounding its technically-troubled PC launch? Or will foot-to-ball have conclusively proven that an Englishman’s national sport is more important to him than pretending to be a time-lost survivor of a planet-wide apocalypse? And will retail be a mess of Sims games while Steam is a confusing muddle of pre-orders, deeply discounted returning titles and new entries? Take my hand. Where we’re going, there be tables.(more…)

In many ways, Aldous Huxley was right -- our entertainment technology has made us a happily complacent species, imprisoned by our own electronic conformity mechanisms. George Orwell was also correct on a few theories of invasive government control. No one was more correct, however, than the great modern philosopher Erik Wolpaw and his overarching theses on Portal theory and lemons. Now, all of these dystopias have merged into one: GLaDOSiri on the iPhone 4S.

Apple's Siri system enables natural-language voice control for a myriad of uses on the iPhone 4S, and GLaDOSiri makes all of those so much more masochistic, just the way we like it. If this were a real thing, we'd be all over it like children on Soma.

Updates to Portal 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

- Fixed exploits where cheats could go undetected in Challenge Mode
- Modifying gravity is now marked as a cheat
- Fixed crosshair not showing on extra wide resolutions
- Fixed rare case where a phantom laser would be stuck emitting from a redirection cube
- Peer Review localization updates from the community

Portal 2's cooperative mode is great because it not only gives you the chance to play Portal with a friend, but also continues the story of GlaDOS after the conclusion of the single-player campaign. Moreover it brings a completely different dynamic to the puzzler, challenging you to not only think about what you have to do, but how to work in conjunction with another person; two people operating independently will never get through the levels...

Portal 2's cooperative mode is great because it not only gives you the chance to play Portal with a friend, but also continues the story of GlaDOS after the conclusion of the single-player campaign. Moreover it brings a completely different dynamic to the puzzler, challenging you to not only think about what you have to do, but how to work in conjunction with another person; two people operating independently will never get through the levels...

There's new stuff on PSN today, most prominently that freebie Portal 2 DLC. But there's also an absurd wealth of old stuff! There's a new version of Crysis, HD Dreamcast ports (Sega Bass Fishing and Space Channel 5 Part 2), the PSOne port of Chrono Trigger, and five PS2 games -- including Clover Studio's brutally difficult, equally strange cult hit God Hand.

Choose your platform to view the corresponding release list:
(Note: Continue past the break to view both release lists.)

Continue the story of P-Body and Atlas in the free new DLC for Portal 2. Today's new content includes a new single player and co-op challenge mode, as well as a new series of tests that put you up against the malicious A.I., GLaDOS. And for the competitive players among you, the new modes also have ...

Aha! In rather happier news from the land of big-name gaming, the Peer Review DLC pack for Portal 2 landed on Steam earlier today. Its cost? £0. $0. €0.

Your game should already have updated with it, if all is well. I uninstalled the game but two days ago to make room for Rage, because I’m a bloody idiot, but have any of you lot given the new adventures of Peabody and Atlas a spin?

Is the price right, or would you have paid real money for it?

#portal These kids (and adults!) have invested what looks like a ridiculous amount of time and energy creating a documentary on Portal's Aperture Science. Not a short five-minute web clip. Like, a 21-minute documentary. More »