Portal gags are usually overplayed, we know, but this tattoo-inspired piece was too pretty to ignore. By Jimiyo, available later today on Teefury.

Can touchscreen controls ever replace—or even closely match—control input from a gamepad or keyboard and mouse? This demonstration of Valve's Portal and Microsoft Flight Simulator played on Microsoft's experimental Surface platform offers hope that it might.

Building on Mark Micire's DREAM (Dynamically Resizing Ergonomic and Multi-touch) Controller, University of Massachusetts Lowell Robotics Lab student Eric McCann hacked together an on-screen joystick driver that makes touch-based controls feasible for flight sims and first-person shooters. A perfect replacement? Not exactly. Even at double the playback speed, it's clear that Surface controls could easily be outperformed by more familiar interfaces.

But hardly shabby for a week's worth of adapting the already impressive DREAM Controller's touchscreen-based interface. Cooler still is that the DREAM interface dynamically re-sizes itself to a user's hands and can be moved anywhere on the Surface's screen.

The UMass Lowell Robotics Lab folks are teasing "more fun to come" that's likely StarCraft related on their YouTube channel. Can't wait to see what they come up with next.

Joystick Emulation using the DREAM Controller on the Microsoft Surface [YouTube - thanks, Justin!]

You may think that both Portal and Left 4 Dead are recent games, developed for contemporary game machines. Nope. Both are actually remakes of games from the 1980s!

Or, that's what these great fake ads would have you believe, which get both the hammy acting and grainy VHS-o-rama effect down perfectly.

Retro Game Ad Discovery [Gamervision]

Custom-made Portal shelf art, spied by reader martinf1 via Bob's House of Video Games.

Internet funny man David Thorne received an abnormally hefty gas bill earlier this month. He blames two portals, a PlayStation 3 and Prince Adam of Eternia.

Or, he does in this email conversation with the surprisingly up-front Allison Hayes from Aussie gas provider AGL, who first provided Thorne with days of fun before he finished up and shared that fun with the internet.

From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 16 August 2010 8.12pm
To: sales@agl.com.au
Subject: Ref. 28941739

Dear Sir/Madam,

I have just received an account for the amount of $766.05. Up until this moment, my accounts have, on average, been around the one hundred and sixty dollar mark and I doubt the Holtzman field portal experiments I am conducting in my spare room would account for this discrepancy.

Please correct this error immediately by typing in my reference number, clicking on the alarmingly large number, and moving the decimal point to the left. I don't care how many places.

Regards, David.

From: Allison Hayes
Date: Tuesday 17 August 2010 9.26am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Ref. 28941739

Hello David

I have checked your account and the amount of $766.05 correctly corresponds with your usage of 3262 kWh peak and 1982 kWh off peak for the indicated supply period. I dont know what portal experiments are but perhaps it is why you are using more electricity than previously. Please call our toll free number on 1300 133 245 should you have any further enquiries about your account.

Sincerely, Allison Hayes

That's just the start. She may come across as both stubborn and a little dim, but you have to appreciate Allison's honesty. That and the fact she's a human being, which is more than I can say for most other forms of customer service we have to deal with these days.

Grab a cup of tea and head below for the full thing

[27b/6, thanks Ben!]

Portal was a singleplayer game. Portal 2 adds co-op, but did you know it was at one stage also going to add competitive multiplayer?

"Along with co-op, [we had] the idea of sort of a competitive Portal multiplayer," Valve's Erik "Old Man Murray" Wolpaw told 1UP.

"We went down that path, actually, for a little while and had something up and running — the best way to describe it is sort of Speedball meets Portal. You know, a sports analogy. And it quickly became apparent that while it's fun for about two seconds to drop portals under people and things like that, it quickly just devolves into pure chaos. It lost a lot of the stuff that was really entertaining about Portal, which was puzzle-solving. Cooperative puzzle-solving was just a much more rewarding path."

Wolpaw says this game mode, which had you shifting a ball around, was a "hot mess".

Speedball meets Portal was a bad thing? Just goes to show, dreams don't always come true.

Valve Cut Portal 2 Competitive Multiplayer [1UP]

Two new all-gameplay videos from Valve show a couple of tools you'll be using in Portal 2, both of which launch you through the air. Some creative use, in conjunction with the portal gun, is required. Isn't it always?

Repulsion gel (above) looks like it works like silly putty in reverse. Instead of it bouncing everywhere, it bounces you (and associated objects).

The Aerial faith plate (at bottom) is a kind of angled trampoline that can get you where you want to go, and get others where they don't want to be.

Portal 2 is coming out next year on PC, PS3, Xbox 360 and Mac, but the videos done tole you that. Twice.

Freshmen at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana this year will be required to read Gilgamesh, Aristotle's Politics, the poetry of John Donne, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Valve's Portal.

Michael Abbott, the proprietor of video game blog The Brainy Gamer and a teacher at the small liberal arts college found himself part of a committee last year tasked with creating a new all-college course devoted to "engaging students with fundamental questions of humanity from multiple perspectives and fostering a sense of community." The course would gather together classic and contemporary works across multiple disciplines in order to have students "confront what it means to be human and how we understand ourselves, our relationships, and our world."

Being The Brainy Gamer, Abbott's mind immediately went to gaming, specifically Portal, and even more specifically to a recent essay by Daniel Johnson on Portal and its connections to Erving Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

Abbott merged the ideas together and decided to propose that students read Goffman's work and then play through Portal. Now he only had to get the idea through committee.

I pitched the idea to my colleagues on the committee (decidedly not a collection of gamers), and they agreed to try Portal and read selections from Goffman's book. After plowing through some installation issues ("What does this Steam do? Will it expose me to viruses?"), we enjoyed the first meaningful discussion about a video game I've ever had with a group of colleagues across disciplines. They got it. They made the connections, and they enjoyed the game. Most importantly, they saw how Portal could provoke thoughtful reflection and vigorous conversation on questions germane to the course.

So now Portal will be required "reading" at Wabash College, rolled out slowly as the teachers figure out how to deal with licensing, installation, making sure educators who had never touched a video game knew what they were doing.

Is it too late for me to go back to college?

Portal on the booklist [The Brainy Gamer]