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]

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]

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]

These kids (and adults!) have invested what looks like a ridiculous amount of time and energy creating a documentary on Portal's Aperture Science. Not a short five-minute web clip. Like, a 21-minute documentary.

Don't worry, it's not serious. It's not a Valve neckbeard convention agonising over easter eggs and links to Half-Life 2. It's just a bunch of people, some mildly funny, some genuinely funny, talking about their jobs at the world's worst/best tech company.

Also, he may not have the face, but that Cave Johnson certainly gets the spirit of the man right.

Aperture: A Triumph of Science [Aperture, via TDW]

Switzerland's public broadcasting company this week released that advertisement below—"The Phony Wars"—to tout the service's new iOS and Android apps. And, Swiss to the last, they declare their neutrality between those two platforms.

They're also, as evidenced by that framegrab at 0:24, agnostic in the gamer bar argument of which is the baddest-assed AI, SHODAN from System Shock or GLaDOS from Portal.

Merci beaucoup to reader Chris M. in Switzerland for spotting and sending along.

Hot on the heels of the game's "Peer Review" DLC, Valve has made available the third and final volume of "Songs to Test By," free of charge (as usual) through the game's official publicity site. There are 24 tracks, including the closing credits theme "Want You Gone," plus another six snippets for ringtones. The Volume 3 .zip file is 141 megabytes.

Soundtrack: Volume 3 [Portal 2]