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

Due out in mid-December, it's an officially-licensed product available at ThinkGeek, and will go on sale for only US$30. While the plush's product listing doesn't specify which phrases the little darlings will utter, they do say the turrets will know all "the phrases all proper sentry turrets should know".

While Portal devotees are the initial targets, I can see a lucrative secondary market opening up for people who make internet videos about cats.

Plush Portal Turret [ThinkGeek, via Tomopop]

Has it already been a full year since Valve launched the Team Fortress 2 Mann Co. Store, the in-game shop in which people trade cold hard cash for hats, weapons and hats? Yes, it has. Valve is therefore celebrating the shop's birthday and $2,000,000 in profits(!) for item creators with a high five-filled update.

Today, the "Manniversary Update" comes to Team Fortress 2, bringing with it a slew of changes: new hats and other non-hat items, load-out presets for your class of choice, a weeklong item "try before you buy" option, decals, slow-mo and shaky cam options for movie making, high five taunts and much much more.

Equally interesting is the launch of the Steam Workshop, "an improved item submission system" which lets item-creators submit, review and rate Team Fortress 2 items. "Rate items highly and you just might see them become available in-game," Valve says. "If your creation is accepted for distribution in-game, you can even earn a percentage of sales." With Steam Workshop, ou could be a percentage-of-a-millionaire!

There's a big old virtual goods sale to go along with the Manniversary Update (it runs until Monday), so if you've been eyeballing that new Engineer hat, now's the time to strike.

Manniversary Update [Team Fortress]

At the end of August, we brought you Mari0, which showed everyone how our favorite plumber would navigate the standard World 1-1 with aid of Portal gun. It was pretty friggin' easy.

Now the mod's developers are back to show us Mari0 as an actually challenging video game, applying Portal's unique puzzle dynamic to the classic platformer.

Since this video went up to YouTube the Mari0 modders have shown off examples of how speed and bouncy gel work in the game with dispensers. Go run check it out.

Mari0 [StabYourself]

Team Fortress 2 used to be about guns. Now it's all about hats. Fancy, ridiculous, elaborate hats. Ever wonder how those hats are made?

Let Bay Raitt, formerly of WETA (he's responsible for Gollum's face in Lord of the Rings) but currently of Valve Software, explain.

In this step-by-step guide he shows people how a professional Team Fortress 2 hat goes from the drawing board to the game in just three easy steps. Well, OK, it's more than three. And they don't look easy at all.

Still, if you're into this kind of stuff, it's an interesting read, especially towards the end where Raitt starts talking about the game's improved item submission process.

Making of a Skull Hat [Valve]

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.

First up, problems! Wolpaw says that, originally, the idea was to have the player and GLaDOS team up in a "buddy cop" situation, ala Lethal Weapon.

"We had envisioned it as this buddy cop thing, where you'd be together and you'd be bickering and it would be awesome. It honest to God did not occur to us that the buddy cop thing doesn't work if one of you is quiet. It's funny now, everybody's laughing, but it was a true moment of incredible panic for us when we realized we'd painted ourselves into a corner."

How'd they get around this? They turned lemons into Cave Johnson.

"And that's when we decided we need to give her some external thing to deal with. She has a relationship with Cave, realizes she was another person, and then there's the bird and other stuff. We run into that a lot with the silent protagonist, even at this point."

The other interesting topic revolved around a bananas theory some crackpot Portal 2 fans have that, based on a single line of unused Cave Johnson dialogue, there was intended to be some kind of scene where the Aperture boss rapes his former assistant. Um. Yeah.

"There's some piece of dialogue in there where Carolyn is saying 'No, no, no, I don't want this. I don't want this", says Wolpaw. "And there's some kind of story on the Internet that apparently people think has been verified that there was a scene where Cave Johnson was raping Carolyn, and that J.K. Simmons wouldn't read the dialogue, so that's why we don't have it [in the game]."

"Apparently these are people who never saw [prison drama] Oz. J.K. Simmons will do anything if you pay him. But that is absolutely not true. It's like they played the rest of the game and thought we wrote a rape scene in there and had that in there for a while and thought, 'Well maybe we'll ship that.' It's insane."

Writing Valve's silent protagonists [GameSpot]

Trendy Entertainment's tower defense action role-playing game Dungeon Defenders hits Steam next week, and Valve has packed the game a little care package, filled with tiny Team Fortress 2 dudes and an Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. What, no snacks?

Built especially for Dungeon Defender's Huntress class, this special version of Valve's Portal gun functions exactly as advertised, linking two different areas with those familiar blue and orange glowing circles. Players can use these nifty portals to send enemies careening into pits, refocus firepower where it's needed most, and just have a generally fun time screwing around.

Won't a Portal gun break the game? Trendy assures players that it won't, as the player will have to channel all of their mana into keeping portals open. It's just a fun new way to play the game that's already charmed the pants off mobile gamers everywhere.

And then there's the Team Fortress 2 familiars, a set of four tiny TF2 characters that follow your character about, doing stuff. What sort of stuff? How about repairing towers (Engineer), healing allies (Medic), setting things on fire (Pyro), and filling dungeon invaders with lead (Heavy)?

Those of you wondering why you should buy Dungeon Defenders on PC instead of Xbox Live Arcade or the PlayStation Network, there's your answer.

Dungeon Defenders [Steam Page]

NECA, specialists in action figures and props based on video games, will be bringing out lines of figures based on Valve properties in 2012. While we haven't yet seen the finished versions of these toys, we do today have some work-in-progress shots of Team Fortress 2's Demoman.

What's more interesting than the pictures themselves is the fact there's a Professor Layton Revoltech piece in the frame, as NECA say the TF2 figures are aiming for a similar level of articulation as Kaiyodo's famous toys.

As a bonus, the gallery above also includes a work-in-progress shot of Gordon Freeman's gravity gun from Half-Life 2, whose figure is also expected next year.

If you'd like to see some very rough pics of Freeman's figure, you can see them here.

Sculptor's Corner – Team Fortress, Rocky and a Surprise [PICS] [NECA]

Once Apple introduced the Siri AI personal assistant, it was only a matter of time until someone mashed up the introductory video so that it was GLaDOS living inside of Cupertino's new smartphone.

That someone is YouTuber bamfer23, a.ka. filmmaker Jeff Heimbuch, and he achieves a high level of hilarity by having GLaDOS be the bitchily helpful stand-in for Siri. Now, someone do a Wheatley one, okay?

(Thanks to tipster Chris Hansen!)

Apple – Introducing GLaDOSiri on iPhone 4S [Bamfer Productions]

Developer Brandon Jones has, after some tinkering and hard work, managed to import a map from online shooter Team Fortress 2 into WebGL. It's not playable, but it's there.

This means that in practical terms it's largely useless, but think big for a second, OK? This is one guy, working on this unofficially. You put a team of guys working on this, and give them time and money, and they just might be able to do more.

Which team? Oh, I don't know. Valve recently made Team Fortress 2 free-to-play. Seems the only place left to go after that is to get the thing running in a browser. And if Unreal Engine 3 can do it, Team Fortress 2 can do it.

You can see a vid of the map in action above. Note that, according to Jones, the sluggish frame rate is a result of his capture software; he says performance is "smooth" in the flesh.

Source Engine Levels in WebGL: Video + Source [TojiCode, via NeoGAF]

The first downloadable add-on for Portal 2, the free cooperative missions known as "Peer Review" is now out for PC, Mac, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (or will be any minute now). And if you don't already own Portal 2...

Steam is selling Portal 2 at the very reasonable asking price of $14.99 USD for the next couple days. You have until October 6 to get that 50% deal, so if you're still procrastinating on one of the best games of the year, procrastinate no more.

Today's downloadable add-on for the game continues the co-op adventures of Aperture Science bots P-Body and Atlas in a new test track. "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," says Valve.

Portal 2 [Steam]