Portal: Real-life turret sings and senses intruders

Stop. It's time to face facts. Yes, your bedroom has a fairly powerful computer in it; and yes, those Batman figurines are pretty boss. However, a few hundred bucks' worth of consumer product does not a “secret lair” make – you need to stop calling it that. Also, don't try to acquire yourself one of Portal's delightfully friendly sentry bots to protect your not-a-lair... because while they DO exist in the real world, they've already been bought up – and if you're not Cliff Bleszinski, it probably wasn't by you.





This painstakingly recreated Portal sentry turret talks, sings, senses your presence and emits a suitably eerie red laser, but it's sadly incapable of pulverizing intruders with automatic weaponry. What kind of half-assery does DIY whiz Ryan Palser – whose Flickr log details the expertise that went into building the turret – call this anyway? Only two turrets have been built – the second having been snapped up by the Gears of War designer, who's cagey about how much he paid. He's probably just embarrassed to have paid more than $60 for a robot that can't even kill anyone.