In Pac-Man if you were trapped by two ghosts, all you could do was jiggle the joystick and hope the pattern backed one off at the last minute. In PacMan Portal, you can just fire at the wall, slip through, and get back to chompin'.

Created by Russian programmer Dj_smart, the game was updated about a month ago and is available for free at this link. It works only on Windows machines (sorry, Mac gamers), but testimonials say PacMan Portal pulls off the concept very well. Keyboard arrows move Pac, the mouse aims his portal gun, and the two mouse buttons select whether he fires red or blue.

Freeware Game Pick: PacMan Portal (Dj_smart) [IndieGames]

Valve artist Realm Lovejoy tweeted this video earlier in the week, saying "Look at what I helped unbox today at work". Which is a lot calmer than how I would've said it.

"Oh my GOD look at this just LOOK AT THIS" is all I'd be able to manage, before ducking behind a couch for cover. Just in case.

Realm Lovejoy [Twitter, via Venus Patrol]

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That is no lie. Sculptor Duncan Shirah uses wood and metal to create his stunning—and sometimes geeky—works of art.

"I think everyone has had that 'wouldn't it be cool if this existed' feeling," the 24 year-old Shirah recently told Kotaku. "I love being able to turn those ideas into actual objects."

While studying sculpting in 2008, Shirah began making his wood and metal works. Now working in art foundry, he creates at his home woodworking shop—or heads over to a mill or a furnace to cast his own bronze and iron parts.

Each piece takes between two to three weeks. However, Shirah says he spends months and months before that obsessively thinking about what he wants to make and how he wants to pull off his latest creation.

"Building something functional from scratch isn't a very straight forward process," says the artist, who adds that it's difficult to predict how the creative process will unfold. "There's lots of trying and failing." And by the looks of his art, lots of succeeding, too.

Check out more of Shirah's work on his official site.

Click each image's lower corner to expand to full size.

Open Source Filmmaker, a community bringing together some of Steam's best movie creators, recently held a themed event called "Turret Week". Members had to create short, original films about Portal's turrets.

While most Source Filmmaker clips are still rough, unoriginal affairs using Team Fortress 2 models, these are wonderful, capitalising on the short timeframe and source material to produce some great results.

You can watch all 22 in the playlist below, which you really should, as many contain running gags.

Turret Week [SFM]

What the hell did I just watch, you ask? Why, the most adorable squees of delight you've ever heard, I respond!

Look at that twinkle in the engineer's eyes. He's like a proud, excited parent, ready to embrace the possibilities of a new future and...

Oh. Oh, my.

The Calcium (Source Filmmaker) [YouTube via Reddit]

You might have to wait for part 2 to see what this animator's vision on who would win this fight is, but I'm leaning towards the witch. Everyone knows once the witch has you down, there's no getting back up. You can't even fight from under her!

BioWare cinematic designer Zachariah Scott tinkers around with Source Filmmaker quite a bit on his personal YouTube channel.

But this week, it's turret week. And he's already made a bunch of really short videos of turrets being really adorable. Enjoy the released ones all rounded up for you below.

BioWare cinematic designer Zachariah Scott tinkers around with Source Filmmaker quite a bit on his personal YouTube channel.

But this week, it's turret week. And he's already made a bunch of really short videos of turrets being really adorable. Enjoy the released ones all rounded up for you below.

Among the many highlights from the Erik Wolpaw/Tim Schafer panel at PAX this past weekend was a brief exchange where an audience member asked what Wolpaw thought about the disconnect between authored single-player games and games that allowed truly personal stories to emerge, like Notch's Minecraft and Dean Hall's DayZ.

"It's not [about] single-player vs multiplayer," Wolpaw said, "it's more, can you have an authored story in that situation? It gets tough. I look at stories coming out of Minecraft or something like DayZ, and honestly… it makes me just despair. If I had any guts or honor, I'd leave the industry." The audience started laughing. "It seems like it's the promise of games. It's like, 'I have full agency. Total, total agency.'"

Wolpaw paused. "I'm not actually quitting my job," he clarified, and smiled.

Schafer picked up the joke: "He'll be pulling a paycheck, but he's not going to care anymore. Because DayZ and Minecraft are so good… and they have better stories than Portal. He was off-mic, and I just wanted to make sure everyone heard that." More laughter.

When co-host Jason Schreier (you may know him from such publications as: this one) asked Wolpaw if he thinks there will always be room for narrative-driven games, The Portal 2 and Psychonauts writer said, "Oh, I think there will be. But, at some point, you're going to go into the kinda 'artisan cheese-maker' model." He then nodded to Schafer, half-jokingly. "Like Tim. You're going to be making these games that directly appeal to a [specific audience]. It may not be one of these 20 million dollar massive productions."

Schafer contributed his own thought on the matter: "I think [that kind of player-driven experience] is maybe the promise of games. But not everybody wants the same thing from games. There are definitely people who like something carefully crafted for them, cheese or games."

At PAX Prime in Seattle, Double Fine's Tim Schafer and Valve's Erik Wolpaw gave a panel called "Plot vs. Play" in which they discussed the ongoing debate about gameplay and story. The panel was co-hosted by Kotaku's own Jason Schreier.

The whole thing was as much fun as you'd imagine. At one point Wolpaw, who tends to be something of a fount of hilarious unrealized Portal ideas at these sorts of panels, recounted an eventually canned sequence in Portal 2 in which players find (and kill) Aperture founder Cave Johnson. Well... they kill his brain, anyway. See, his consciousness is trapped inside a computer.

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"There was something in Portal 2 where originally, for a while, you were going to find Cave Johnson.' He would be like, 'Hi, this is Cave Johnson. No really, this is Cave Johnson, look down here.'

And then we'd put him in this crummy box that was plugged into the wall. And the whole thing was that he'd been put into this computer, and he just hated it, and he just wanted to die. And so he wants you to unplug him, and meanwhile there's a ledge that you can't quite jump onto… and you have to stand on Cave Johnson, you have to unplug him and carry him across the room.

But it was hard to communicate what was going on—we maybe could have eventually worked it out, but that was something where it seemed like a good fictional idea and we just never quite worked the gameplay out to where it actually got where it needed to be—it didn't work out."

A while back, a Steam forum poster pulled out some unused dialogue from the game and posted it here, where you can find some lines that seem to reference the sequence Wolpaw was talking about.

"Now, before you say no, I want you to remember that I've lived a full life. Also, if this helps seal the deal, livin' in a computer this long's made me crazy. That's right: I am insane.

"Wait. I suppose tellin' you I'm not in my right mind could sway you to not unplugging me. Let me round back on the important parts: in a computer. Ceaseless torture. Monster in the eyes of god. So why don't you get on over here and unplug ol' Cave."

Ha. File that all under "Things I really wish had made it into Portal 2."