ValentinesDay posts

Valve isn't just cutting prices at its Steam PC game download site. It's mail order online merchandise store is getting into the holiday spirit with a selection of items (t-shirts. mouse pads, coffee mugs, etc) on sale for between 10 percent and 80 percent.

There's also a handful of new items on sale in the online store including a Portal 2 co-op poster. Plus sometime in December Valve plans to add the two above plush toys showing the Hunter and the Tank from the Left 4 Dead series. Valve already released a Boomer plush toy from the game; it's the perfect holiday gift for those folks who think stuffed animals are for kids or for girls.

Developer Valve has a reputation of bringing in both people and games that it likes and turning the titles into full commercial games. It did so with the Counter-Strike mod and also bought both the team and the concept of the team's game Narbacular Drop that eventually formed the basis of the first Portal game. That title, a small two-hour game that was released in 2007 in Valve's Orange Box collection, combined innovative gameplay with humor. That was enough for Portal to become a cult hit and win a ton of :Game of the Year" awards.

So what do you do next with such a concept? If you are Valve you not only make a more fully fleshed out sequel in Portal 2 but you also bring in yet another amateur game team to expand on the original's portal-based gameplay. We got to see a presentation of Portal 2's gameplay at Valve's E3 2010 meeting room. It was the only game we saw at E3 that wasn't an example of live gameplay but we did get some commentary on what we were seeing from Valve's Erik Johnson.