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#portal Last week, my misidentification of a laser engraving on a space part suggested the wrong personality core from Portal 2 was symbolically being flown to space (a fate echoing the game's story.) A team of 18 teenagers from Nevada stepped in to restore order, and properly send the Space Core—or, well, a plushy version of him, anyway—to near space. More »

#portal You're about to see what happens when a team of "speed-runners" knows enough about the progress and timing of a game that they can finish something that normally takes hours in just over eight minutes. More »

Wheatley, the adorably dumb and delightfully devious space core in Portal 2, is making a real-life trip to space. Kind of.

An anonymous tech at NASA got away with laser-engraving the above image of Wheatley with the quote "In spaaaaaaace!" on the Japanese HTV-3 resupply craft to the ISS. Wheatley and the craft are set to launch on Friday, July 27, at 10:06 EST. You can watch the launch beginning at 9:15 EST on Friday at the NASA TV website.

"NASA in no way officially endorses secretly laser-engraving characters from Portal onto their spacecraft," the Portal 2 blog writes. "Believe it or not, they don't even officially endorse Portal 2, despite the fact that it's a really excellent game." But someone (or some robot) at NASA obviously respects quality entertainment.

Update: As many readers have pointed out, the image is likely not referring to Wheatley as the official Portal 2 blog states, but probably referring to Portal 2's "space core" instead. Or it could be the space core's text below an intended image of Wheatley. Only the stars will know now.

Wheatley, the adorably dumb and delightfully devious Space Core in Portal 2, is making a real-life trip to space. Kind of.

An anonymous tech at NASA got away with laser-engraving the above image of Wheatley with the quote "In spaaaaaaace!" on the Japanese HTV-3 resupply craft to the ISS. Wheatley and the craft are set to launch on Friday, July 27, at 10:06 EST. You can watch the launch beginning at 9:15 EST on Friday at the NASA TV website.

"NASA in no way officially endorses secretly laser-engraving characters from Portal onto their spacecraft," the Portal 2 blog writes. "Believe it or not, they don't even officially endorse Portal 2, despite the fact that it's a really excellent game." But someone (or some robot) at NASA obviously respects quality entertainment.

#watchthis This montage of Portal 2's ATLAS and P-body raising hell in Liberty City comes to you from the same guy who commissioned the insane death-dealing R2-D2 mod for Grand Theft Auto IV. It is outstanding. Just sit back and enjoy. More »

Congratulations, everyone: If you read our post about the prototype Portal 2 Lego set and threw your vote on Cuusoo to have it become reality, you've succeeded. Go get yourself an ice cream sundae, champ. You deserve it.

The Portal-themed Lego set has received 10,000 votes of support on Lego's crowd-sourced idea incubator, Cuusoo, and is now off to be examined by the proper authorities. A "Lego jury" will review the idea, building concept models and testing them for playability, safety and fit with the Lego brand. Lego's Cuusoo quarterly review begins in September and will include the Portal set and any others that reach 10,000 votes. Reviews can, we should warn you, take several months.

NECA is beginning a bold new behavioral experiment, to determine whether the addition of a logo will render plain orange jumpsuits desirable enough for consumers to purchase them in high quantities and for $100 each. The company's hypothesis is that it will, and we tend to agree.

In order to get one of NECA's official Portal 2 Chell Jumpsuits (in women's and men's sizes) from ThinkGeek, you need to get on a mailing list. ThinkGeek will alert its "Test Subjects" about the product's availability when it arrives in October. This is the only way the retailer plans to sell these, so if you want that testy look go sign up now.

Pre-orders are available from a variety of other retailers, some of which have their own restrictions - like only offering reservations during the weekend of Comic-Con (i.e. now). Given the response to other Portal memorabilia, you're better off pre-ordering immediately from your retailer of choice.

You've played Portal and Portal 2, you've used the editor to build your own test chambers and you bought the replica portal gun. Your life is almost complete -- almost.

All you need now is this Portal Lego set that's starting to gain traction on Cuusoo, Lego's crowd-sourcing platform that got the Minecraft set made. The Portal pitch includes GLaDOS' Chamber (complete with 12-inch-tall GLaDOS) and a Modular Testing Chamber complete with turrets, cubes, a portal gun and more accessories. Check out the specs and add your vote to the Portal Lego set right here, or check out this other, equally compelling idea.

#portal Gaming Heads, the creators of fine Team Fortress 2 statuary, opens the valve on its new Portal 2 line with this gorgeous 16-inch turret replica, ready to fill speaking and non-speaking roles in your home security regime, depending on how much you're willing to invest. More »

The latest Valve-licensed replica from Gaming Heads is a mini model of the Aperture Sentry Turret. The turret is 16 inches tall (including base and antenna) and features a sound module, which will play samples of the turret's "activation, search, auto search, disabled and tipped over sounds."

The company is only making 350 turrets and they'll be "cast in high quality poly-stone," then painted and finished by hand. Pre-orders are available now and the item will ship in Q4 2012 for $324.99.

We'd mock the price, but then we think about the cost of making a real (or realest yet) Portal Turret with a Penn State education and now a few hundred dollars doesn't seem so unreasonable.

#cosplay Oh, GLaDOS. Cruel, cruel GLaDOS. Here, the villain from the Portal games comes to life, in costume and utterly free of cake. More »

#gravityrush "This isn't flying. This is falling with style." More »

#portal There's already at least one Portal cartoon in production. That one, however, looks like something Dreamworks would come up with. If you'd rather a Portal cartoon look more like something Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi would dream up, though, you might want to take a look at these. More »

New puzzle mechanics will challenge your perception even further with the In Motion DLC for Portal 2.

#portal Portal 2 on the PS3 is getting Move support and some "new" levels. It's also playable at Sony's E3 booth, so we popped on over to take a look, see how the Move actually worked with the game. More »

Portal 2 players who opted for the PS3 version will get some bonus DLC later this year. Available on the E3 show floor, Portal 2 In Motion is a DLC pack featuring the same missions previously exclusive to the Razer Hydra peripheral now optimized for PlayStation Move, Polygon reports. We've inquired with Valve for more information and will update as soon as we hear back.

#portal Developers Sixense have announced that a bunch of new Portal content is coming to the PlayStation 3. It's called Portal 2 In Motion, and is DLC for the existing game that takes full advantage of Sony's PlayStation Move peripheral. More »

An update to the Portal 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

- Allow queues to be larger than 50 maps, ditto with history logs.
- Fixed the coop ping tool getting stuck on when using a 360 controller on PC.
- Fixed instances where crossplay between PS3 and PC/Mac would not work.
- Fixed performance issue with lasers.
- Added a player clip brush around the item dropper model. This prevents cases where the player can go through the dropper when creating portals very close to the dropper
- Made the clips for the glass/grating a little smaller so that they are a tighter fit to the actual brushes/frames that get exported. This prevents a weird bug where cubes placed on buttons next to glass would get pushed away from the glass.
- Fixed flip panels getting activated with only 1 input activated even if there were many inputs connected.
- Fixed two of the entrance hallway instances being a little too big and having some of their nodraw show if the voxels surrounding the entrance were void. Cleaned up some of the textures the these instances as well.
- Lowered brush count in the light strips from five to two.
- Fixed items having incorrect collision data immediately after creating a new chamber. We now make all items update immediately after a new item is created.
- Made angled panels, stairs and piston platforms only block antlines on the surfaces they embed onto.
- Fixing incorred English subtitles.
- Always write the error.p2c even if the export failed.
- Adding solution for resolving orphaned Workshop puzzles on a user's disk. (Set cm_fix_orphaned_files to 1 to enable this).
- Fixed items sometimes staying in their exploded animation even after the context menu is dismissed.
- Fixed repeatedly clicking on the same item creating redundant actions that made Undo/Redo sometimes feel like it wasn't doing anything.
- Fixed items rendering as pickable when doing surface selection. Previously, if your mouse went over an item while doing a surface selection the carat would jump to the position of the item, rather than the surface behind the item.
- Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y dismisses the context menu if it's up. This prevents weird behavior where Undo or Redo deletes an item but the context menu for that item would remain up.
- Fixed bug that was disallowing users deleting saved games through the save/load dialog.
- Handle cases where the user is trying to quit the program while in the puzzlemaker. You will now be prompted to save your work in these cases.
- Glass no longer export their frames twice.
- Added a func_brush in the exit door that gets enabled when the door closes and disabled when the door opens. This prevents tbeams from creeping in under the door and leeching off all your skin.
- Added more connection points to stairs.

An update to the Portal 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

- Added more descriptive error messages to common publishing failures.
- Optimizations and rendering improvements for the Puzzle Maker.
- Fixed compile error from fizzlers in certain orientations.
- Fixed stacked goo creating kill triggers that spanned between the two levels of goo.
- Fixed connection symbols potentially leaking outside the map, causing maps to fail compiling.
- Fixed some lightboards not showing their map titles and tags properly
- Fixed compiler error when trying to compile certain very large maps.
- Localization fixes and additions.
- Autosaves made while playing workshop/puzzlemaker maps no longer conflict with singleplayer saves.
- Fixed glass not having collision before being moved after being dropped in.
- Fixed paint dropper arc becoming weird while extruding.
- Fixed going through portals on angled platforms in goo killing the player.
- A loading screen will always show up when playing puzzlemaker/workshop maps and dying or restarting the maps.
- Using puzzlemaker_export to export a custom vmf will make the player start in the elevators and not spawn the triggers that restart the map when walking in the exit hallway
- Better progress indication for compiling puzzles.
- Paint is valid on goo and buttons now.
- Fixed a crash on completing the preview puzzle.
- Fixed the first item in the map list not always showing valid information.
- Fix a variety of bugs (some Mac-specific, mostly platform-independent) which made the texture filter setting in the Advanced Video Options act incorrectly.
- Fixed bug with light strips and fizzlers sometimes changing the portalability of the surface they were on during export.
- Fizzlers are now properly sorted when a portal shot hits a fizzler. This makes the correct fizzler light up when there are multiple fizzlers along the portal shot.
- Better item handle interactions.
- The catapult target is now copyable. Copying the target will drop a catapult on the spot and attach a target to your cursor.
- Fixed the box dropper and paint dropper disappearing if you did Undo past their creation, then Redo back through it.
- Fixed hitting "Undo" while dragging causing weird behaviors.
- "Bendy" player model appears in all community map chambers now
- Right mouse button clicking on a solid volume selection boundary surface no longer clears selection.
- Bound 'view reset' to H as well as Home, for Mac users without a Home key
- Removed bad keyvalues from elevator_exit instance
- Fixed a crash due to deleted items not removing their collision entries
- Fixed glass and rail platforms computing the wrong extents just after being undeleted.

#watchthis Portal 2 Spoilers ahead. More »

#watchthis A single button push takes a Portal 2 cube on an incredible journey through Ben Perry's astounding Rube Goldberg-inspired custom level. More »

We looked at Portal 2′s puzzle creating Perpetual Testing Initiative, a streamlined, user-friendly application for making your own Portal 2 rooms, and then cried. So instead we got Craig “Fearless” Pearson to take a look, because we knew without a doubt that no one else can create a box with some boxes in it like him.

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#portal Portal 2's latest DLC doesn't just include the chance to create your own maps, it includes the chance to run around them hearing the delightful JK Simmons - aka Cave Johnson - command, dictate and berate you senselessly with almost half an hour's worth of new content recorded just for the level creator. More »

#portal Man. I do like a good Portal 2 remix. This one, however, is on another level. More »

An update to the Portal 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

- Fixed issues causing bad lighting in some puzzles

This shooting, talking, laser-pointing Portal turret made by a Penn State University Advanced Mechatronics student is pretty impressive, even without its final casing. The turret tracks the position of a specific pink shirt and asks innocently after potential victims if it goes without stimulation for too long, eventually locking on and shooting foam darts at the rosy intruder.

We say it's pretty impressive in the sense that we want a dozen and we're astounded at the level of detail and care put into such a project, but at first we read the title too quickly and thought this guy had created working portals, which would be way cooler. The lesson here: However awesome your final university project may be, the things we make up in our heads will forever be more awesome. Sorry, dude.

We'll still take 12 of those turrets. Thanks.

An update to the Portal 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

- Fixed glass and grating items causing maps to fail compiling in some configurations
- Fixed Puzzle Maker UI menus sometimes dismissing themselves just after opening
- Fixed Puzzle Maker autosaves not being deleted properly on Macs
- Multiple localization fixes

All right, maybe we didn't really notice that the Portal gun used by P-body in Portal 2 co-op looked different. But NECA did, and designed a replica of that attractive, striped gun. The lights for this one, of course, are different from the original (we noticed that much!), glowing in orange and red.

NECA plans to make 5,000 of these, "and we'll do our best to make sure it reaches those who were not able to purchase the [previous] replica," the company said. Retailers will be announced next week.

#portal We've seen some ridiculous creations in games where level editors are involved. Portal's version of this that was released yesterday is already beginning to show some interesting level designs of its own. More »