The work of custom toy creator Christian Hooton is no stranger to Kotaku. Whether it's StarCraft or Portal, Hooton's craftsmanship dazzles. Check out his latest creation: a 7-inch Portal 2 Wheatley light-up toy.

Hooton worked about a month to finish the Wheatley, which is made from lightweight plastic and has a moveable center "eye" that also lights up. According to the sculptor, "The weird thing about this one is that it's dangerously close to able to be used as a puppet. The eye is mounted on a gyrroscopesque [SIC] hinged in the center of the ball, and there are thin fishing line like strings keeping it a neutral position."

More photos on his blog in the link below.

PORTAL 2 Wheatley 7" custom light up toy [Sabretooth's Workshop via SuperPunch]

Reader Adam is rightfully very proud of his new Portal-themed room, which doesn't just look like a part of the series' Aperture Science, it acts like it as well.

That Cave Johnson portrait? It's not a print, it's actually a hand-painted original. That test chamber panel? It's not just a picture, it lights up, just like the real thing. There are even a few lemon grenades on the shelf, just in case life wants to throw something at you.

You can read more about the project, and check out a massive gallery of the room under construction, below.

My Portal Room Project [Telnets]

Welcome everyone to week 3 of the Kotaku Game Club's look back at Portal 2. In our third meeting we'll be talking about the game's story and characters.

Gameplay aside, the world of Portal 2 plays such a large role in making Portal 2 a rich experience, and I'm sure you all have something to say about the game's memorable story moments.

As with our past two meetings, the discussion today isn't chronological. There will be spoilers from the entire game, including the ending. Since today's discussion focuses on the plot, today's meeting will be especially jam-packed with spoilers.

If you're joining us for the first time, Our goal at Kotaku Game Club is to play games as a community so that we can share our thoughts as we're experiencing the game. We meet each week in the Game Club's comments section to discuss our experiences with our game of the month.

Our meetings generally start at 4pm Eastern every Thursday, and last an hour or so after the post is published. The Game Club is here to get everybody talking with each other, so don't be afraid to speak your mind and to start a dialogue with other posters.

As for our question of the week: Is there such a thing as too much GLaDOS?

In the original Portal GLaDOS accounted for 100% of your character interaction. (No, I don't count the turrets.) She was your guide and your nemesis for a few sentences between each puzzle. In Portal 2, her presence has grown, but her role has not. In fact, it's shrunk—GLaDOS never plays that double-role the same way. Shrunk into her personal story, GLaDOS, once an instrument of narrative utility, is now a superfluous flourish to the player's experience. So here's the larger question: Can a story that's compelling but tangential to your experience be as compelling as one that effects you directly?

Don't miss our last meeting about Portal 2 next Thursday! We'll be looking at the co-op levels and what makes them special. That's Thursday, February 2nd, at 4pm Eastern.

Remember that round three of Kotaku Game Club's Portal 2 discussion series starts tomorrow at 4pm Eastern!

Nanotechnology engineering student TheObviousTrap created a 300 nanometer thick Aperture logo in an undergrad class. Bravo!

"Obtaining the image using scanning electron microscopy is probably overkill but that was only equipment I had access to," TheObviousTrap wrote on Reddit.

Portal players will be familiar with Aperture—the in-game scientific corporation. Nanotechnology students will be familiar 300 nm thick creations.

Engineers make small things in class [Reddit Thanks C W!]

Creating orange and blue teleportation...hole...things like those found in Valve's Portal series sounds awesome, but remember: in the real world, everything awesome is ultimately corrupted by assholes.

Roommates and Portals [neatorama]

The nominees for the 2012 Game Developers Choice awards have been announced. The awards, which will be held at March's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, are one (if not the) most prestigious awards ceremonies in gaming. They occur the same night and location as the Independent Games Festival (IGF) awards.

Both Bethesda's Skyrim and Valve's Portal 2 (best known as Kotaku's game of the year) received a bunch of nominations. In something of a surprise, XBLA downloadable darling Bastion grabbed an equal number of nominations. This is why I love the GDC awards!

We can only hope that Mr. Tim Schafer will be there again, and that he will once more make a series of meme-worthy facial expressions.

The full list of nominees is as follows:

Best Game Design
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios)
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Nintendo)
Portal 2 (Valve)
Batman: Arkham City (Rocksteady Studios)
Dark Souls (FromSoftware)

Innovation
Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure (Toys For Bob)
Portal 2 (Valve)
Bastion (Supergiant Games)
Johann Sebastian Joust (Die Gute Fabrik)
L.A. Noire (Team Bondi)

Best Technology
Battlefield 3 (DICE)
L.A. Noire (Team Bondi)
Crysis 2 (Crytek Frankfurt/UK)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios)
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (Naughty Dog)

Best Handheld/Mobile Game
Tiny Tower (NimbleBit)
Super Mario 3D Land (Nintendo)
Jetpack Joyride (Halfbrick)
Infinity Blade II (Chair Entertainment)
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (Capy Games/Superbrothers)

Best Audio
Bastion (Supergiant Games)
LittleBigPlanet 2 (Media Molecule)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios)
Dead Space 2 (Visceral Games)
Portal 2 (Valve)

Best Downloadable Game
Stacking (Double Fine)
From Dust (Ubisoft Montpellier)
Bastion (Supergiant Games)
Outland (Housemarque)
Frozen Synapse (Mode 7)

Best Narrative
Portal 2 (Valve)
The Witcher 2 (CD Projekt RED)
Bastion (Supergiant Games)
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (Naughty Dog)
Saints Row: The Third (Volition)

Best Debut
Supergiant Games (Bastion)
Team Bondi (L.A. Noire)
Re-Logic (Terraria)
BioWare Austin (Star Wars: The Old Republic)
Eidos Montreal (Deus Ex: Human Revolution)

Best Visual Arts
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (Naughty Dog)
Rayman Origins (Ubisoft Montpellier)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios)
El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (Ignition Japan)
Battlefield 3 (DICE)

Game of the Year
Batman: Arkham City (Rocksteady Studios)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios)
Portal 2 (Valve)
Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Eidos Montreal)
Dark Souls (FromSoftware)

After several weeks of debate, discussion, and deliberation, Kotaku's 2011 Game of the Year Award came down to a simple vote, and the majority voted for science.

We voted for Wheatley, the delightfully ditzy but well-meaning artificial intelligence that unwittingly guided us to our potential doom. We voted for GLaDOS, the power-hungry robot with a heart of solid gold spite, with whom our relationship grew closer and stranger than ever before. We voted for Cave Johnson, founder and CEO of Aperture Science, whose words of wisdom will guide us til the end of our days. We voted for Atlas and P-Body, a mechanical consciousness built for two. We voted for Chell, history's most resilient guinea pig.

We voted for the team at Valve that delivered such a solid and entertaining experience, building an extremely clever puzzle game into something far greater. We voted for Erik Wolpaw, Jay Pinkerton and Chet Faliszek, the writers that kept us in stiches at every turn.

We voted for Portal 2.

Not all of us, mind you, but enough that it would take the assassination of at least two of our editors to make the voting a tie.

The outcome came as a surprise to many of our editors, especially with a powerhouse like Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim hitting hard and deep so late in the year. Indeed Skyrim was my original pick for Game of the Year (Luke Plunkett's as well), but then it took an arrow in the knee (I am so sorry).

That arrow was Evan Narcisse's impassioned argument for Valve's Portal 2. Game's released towards the front end of the year (Portal 2 hit in April) are often at a disadvantage when it comes time for Game of the Year arguments, but Evan's nomination and subsequent explanation reminded many of us how nearly perfect Portal 2 was.

Of course this doesn't mean that the other three games (nothing doesn't count) we nominated this year are failures. They still represent the very best titles we played this year. Portal 2 was just better than that.

Be sure to check out the stories below to experience the process we went through to get to where we did today, and if you see anyone from Valve's Portal 2 team today, be sure to give them a vigorous face licking for us.

Who Will Win Kotaku's Game of the Year 2011 Debate?

What was the best game of the year, according to those of us here at Kotaku?
We don't know.
We don't know... yet.
Throughout the week of December 26, we will present five Game of the Year arguments. More »

Is Skyrim Kotaku's Game of the Year?

Oh look. Somebody is voting for Skyrim as Game of the Year. How shocking.
Truth be told, I very nearly voted for something else. Total War: Shogun 2 had me hooked for most of the year, and its near perfection of the series' blend of strategic planning and real-time tactics seemed to make it, for... More »

Is Sword & Sworcery EP Kotaku's Game of the Year?

I played a ton of games in 2011. More, probably, than any other year of my life. So when it came time to choose the best from among them, I spent a lot of time thinking back, sifting through the triumphs and the frustrations, the unexpected joys and the unfortunate disappointments.
Arkham City and... More »

Is Nothing Kotaku's Game of the Year?

This may sound off-key coming from the guy who nominated the 12th edition of annual sports franchise for overall GOTY last year. But I'm inclined to say "None of the above," this year. More »

Is Portal 2 Kotaku's Game of the Year?

What Valve did this year seemed impossible: they improved on the perfection that was the first Portal. That feat was accomplished, surprisingly, by making everything about players' return to Aperture Science less perfect. More »

Is L.A. Noire Kotaku's Game of the Year?

The hardest thing at the end of the year is to parse yourself from the hype you're experiencing and think back to the games you played during the summer, the spring, and yes, 2011's early months. More »

Once again, Volpin Props knocks it out of the park. Though in this case, they've knocked themselves out of the park. And fallen a great height, only to land safely, thanks to these Portal Long Fall Boots.

Master prop builder Harrison Krix's efforts continue to amaze, these boots looking like they jumped straight out of the game and landed squarely amongst the rest of us in the real world.

Which, since these are real boots, I guess they have.

Chell's Heelsprings (Portal) [Volpin @ Flickr, via Super Punch]

Here's further proof that basically everything goes better with Portal. Check out Ryan Kelly and his coworkers' Portal-fied Christmas tree, which certainly beats the hell out of the 20 years' worth of musty tinsel I festooned all over my folks' Tannenbaum this very evening. Also, learn how to make this Aperture Science-infused arbor for next year.

Kelly broke down the construction process for io9 as such:

Basically, it's our artificial tree which comes apart in three sections. The top section is suspended from the ceiling by an adhesive hook so it simply hangs downwards. The other two sections are connected and placed upside down on the floor - the tricky part is that the branches are meant to be kept extended out by gravity, so there is fishing line attached between each branch and what is usually the base of the tree, pulling the branches up towards the ceiling.

We then got two sets of rope lights (blue and red as we couldn't find orange). We laid the red out in a tight circle around the tree on the floor. The blue was wrapped in a circle, scotch taped to hold together, and then hung on to more adhesive hooks on the ceiling. Then we cut two circles of black poster board and placed these beneath the rope light rings to give them the feeling of holes. You barely see the black with all the branches and the portals lit up so it plays fairly well.

Finally, the hanging top piece didn't have branches that extended all the way up to the ceiling, so to cover the obvious gap we bought some artificial garland and wrapped that around it to match up with the ceiling. That way it looks like the tree continues up into the surface.

With a little bit of finessing, you can hide any of the obvious gaps and have one seamless tree.

Rad! You can see some more photos of the tree below, including a photo of Kelly's friend Jason entering the portal. For more Portal-inspired sculpture, see New York City's giant Companion Cube.

[Tymykal via Reddit/hat tip to Precious Roy]