July 20, 2008 12:00 AM | Simon Carless

[Our Editor At Large Chris Remo has returned from Los Angeles in one piece, and he posted something E3-related on his own blog that's a) informative to fans of GlaDOS and b) worth reprinting here, if you like . So I asked nicely, and here it is.]

There is much confusion over what exactly Portal: Still Alive, an upcoming Xbox Live Arcade release of Valve’s excellent platformer-thing, is. After all, it was announced amazingly vaguely during Microsoft’s E3 press conference, and there was little followup. So I asked Valve’s Doug Lombardi, and he explained it to me.

Portal: Still Alive is a standalone version of the original Portal that can be purchased through Xbox Live Marketplace. In addition to Portal itself, it will include a number of levels that are not part of the game’s story, and do not feature story-related elements such as GLaDOS voiceover.

The game is exclusive to Live Arcade, at least for a while, but PC players can get basically the same experience right now anyway. Here’s why.

You may have seen Portal: The Flash Version, a clever Flash-based tribute to Valve’s game. You are slightly less likely to have seen the Portal: The Flash Version MapPack, which recursively ports the Flash game’s levels to Portal itself.

Still Alive’s bonus content consists of 360-certified versions of the levels from that pack. So if you’re a PC Portal owner who, like me, was feeling excluded by Still Alive’s bonus content, fear not: you get to play that content first, and for free.