Portal gun available in Half-Life 2

Loop-hole in the code

Those of you presently enjoying the various treats of The Orange Box (review very soon), will be pleased to know that the much lauded Portal gun can also be accessed in Half-Life 2 as well as other Source-based game offerings from Valve.

A spot of PC trickery is needed to get the gun working, as you merge your Half-Life 2 maps and scenes with Portal content, before re-booting the game and using the developer console to pull up a map to use with the Portal gun. As you can imagine, this weapon gives more than a few enhancements, as you leap around levels, dropping objects on foes and the like.

Given that this is something of a hack you'll need to be sure you back-up your files and the like, as Valve don't support this particularly entertaining evolution, though simple instructions should make the process fairly straightforward.

Valve have previously denied that the Portal gun will enter future episodes of Half-Life, though given how well it has been received so far we'd be surprised if it isn't expanded in some form.

By Luke Guttridge