Valves "Portal" Game is Free, Sure its not the Latest Title, But its Still Fun!

It would appear that the geniuses over at Valve have come up with another fantastic viral marketing campaign to sell more games... giving the old ones away! Until September 20th (and maybe a little later) you can get some Portal goodness on your Mac or Windows machine for FREE. Now I am sure you are thinking "didn't I just hear about portal 2?" Well yeah, the Sequel is out, but the original is still good! Valve is, after all, the company behind such games as Half-Life, Counterstrike and Left 4 Dead. Sound familiar, they should, they were all games of the year when they came out. As a matter of fact the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are some of the only games that I have played multiple times, The former would probably run on a graphing calculator with the right mods!

For the first-person-shooter fans out there, Portal is a different take on the genre. You still wield a gun, but it does not shoot bullets, it shoots portals... which are like wormholes in the game that allow you to travel from one place to another. Levels are designed a bit like MC Escher drawings, and you have to use your wormhole gun to shoot a path to the end!

Now, of course, I am sure you are thinking, "well nothing is truly free". Well there is one catch. To get the free copy of Portal you will have to sign up for a Steam account, which is free. If you have played any Valve title since Half-Life 2, you probably have one already. Also the giveaway is only for computers, console players are out of luck... you will have to head down to the local book exchange and pick up an old copy of the Orange Box for that!

If one episode of portal is not enough, you can pick up the second edition for any system (consoles too) Here.