"It's about giving gamers more choices, more points of entry to get to the party, open more gates to the theme park as it were," he said. "It makes a lot of sense for us.

"The main idea is that this is Portal available as a download, and there is additional content as advanced challenges that will be available to you after you finish the critical path of the game."

But will we be seeing more of GlaDOS this time around, or perhaps an extended storyline?

"No," he said, breaking hearts everywhere. "That's for a game to be named later perhaps."

To check out our full interview with Lombardi and hear him pontificate on everything from Left 4 Dead Machinima to Steam as an archive for games hit up the link below.

Left 4 Dead May Get Machinima Maker Post Launch [Kotaku]

According to Valve's marketing director Doug Lombardi Half-Life 2: Episode Three won't be making an appearance at E3 this year, with the listing chalked up to a "misprint (or something)." We would assume that if Valve is showcasing anything at E3 this year, it will be Left 4 Dead which is planned for a November 4 release.

There's a lot of people at Valve who are parents and would love to make a game for kids.

We all play the Wii a lot and we think that the proper way for Valve to approach the Wii would be to make something cool designed specifically for it.

If we ever get a game that fits that, we'd love to do that. I'd love to have a game that we gave away saying 'however much you want to invest in this, this is yours'.

I'd love to sell Portal on Xbox live. [But] the platform holders aren't doing that right now. There's a size limit and all kinds of other things.

We've asked them, we said we were open to it. So it's a decision for the platform holder and how they want to make the games available and how much bandwidth they want to [allow].

Or is the real concern the "all kinds of other things" that Lombardi mentioned—maybe that Microsoft takes a bigger cut of digital distribution profits than Valve would like?

Portal was offered to XBLA, but rejected [GamesIndustry]

We contacted Valve to clarify and their VP of marketing Doug Lombardi informed us that, "The platform holder owns the final call." So just as we'd suspected, whether or not we see these maps for free is indeed up to Sony and Microsoft.

Fortunately, Lombardi does throw himself a blue portal through which to escape, punctuating his denial to CVG with a "not yet, anyway." Consider your heartstrings toyed with, Wii owners!

No Portal on Wii, says Valve [CVG]

Of course, those products will also be available via the company's Steam platform, meaning users won't need to buy any boxed product at all.

However, if you're attached to holding a physical product, Doug Lombardi of Valve told IGN's PC group that:

Those who purchase the PC version of The Orange Box will get three separate Steam product codes: One for the three new games, one for HL2, and one for Episode One. This way a PC Orange Box owner can give away their Half-Life 2 or Episode One unused Steam product codes if they don't need a copy of those games.

Lombardi didn't provide explanation for the decision, but I'm going to chalk it up to avoiding customer confusion. Shipping and marketing a single product across three platforms is going to make this much easier for the general public to wrap their noodles 'round. Michael McWhertor

Black Box in a Pine Box [IGN]

Attention Counter-Strike players, your game is about to become infested with in-game advertising courtesy of Valve and IGA. In an interview with Valve's Doug Lombardi, CS-Nation questioned the marketing director on how the ads would be implemented and the reasoning behind the commercial change to the seven-year old mod with a diehard community.

In-game advertisements aren't necessarily a new thing in certain maps, but it appears Valve will dedicate much more real estate to promotional space. According to Lombardi:

There will be some ads posted on walls in the game world, an ad on the scoreboard screen, and one in the letterboxed area of Spectator mode.

However, the company plans to keep it tasteful.

Counter-Strike levels aren't going to turn into Times Square or a Nextel Cup racecar. We have control over what ads show up in Counter-Strike and how they are presented.

You graphics whores out there who've moved on to the Source port of Counter-Strike should expect to see the same soon. Lombardi confirms that Valve considers the 1.6 implementation a test and will guage community response. I can only assume that more in-game ads from Valve and its partner are inevitable. Michael McWhertor

Advertisements Coming to CS [CS-Nation]

Look I hate to keep being the bearer of bad news, but here it comes again. Valve's Doug Lombardi confirmed the Half-Life 2 Episode Two delay to Computer & Video Games, offering up a heartbreakingly vague "summer 2007" release date. And that's the "target".

You know what this means. No Portal until summer. No Team Fortress 2 until summer. No happiness on Earth until summer.

I'm starting to think that "Best Action Game of E3 1999" Team Fortress 2 is again bogging down development, cursing all future Valve releases. This game must be destroyed to save us all! Michael McWhertor

HL2: Episode Two, Portal, TF2 all slip [C&VG]